You must log in or register to comment.
Modern UI designers don’t have a fucking clue.
You’d think the first principle would be “don’t break the existing fucking UI”, but no.
Infinite scroll. Windows without toolbars. Replacing context menu with useless site-specific one. Forcing links to open in new or same tab, depriving the user of choice. Blocking text select. Blocking copy, as if that’s somehow going to stop people from stealing your shitty content. Fucking with the browser history.
And then there’s the constant reinventing of the wheel. How many times do we need to implement a fucking checkbox?
No lie, I’ve actually had designers come to me with a concept for “a visual indicator that shows the user how they are progressing through the page”.
No lie, I’ve actually had designers come to me with a concept for “a visual indicator that shows the user how they are progressing through the page”.
What the actual fuck, do these people actually use computers.
My biggest gripe is websites that take control of the browser
C-f.I mean, over the years the scroll bar has got less and less visible. Maybe these people don’t even realise it exists.
MacOS by default hides scroll bars. They’re big on form over function which I hate.
Some people are just like that.
I knew a couple that mounted their TV in a way that all the ports (eg: HDMI) were inaccessible. They just didn’t care that a big chunk of the TV’s functionality was now blocked. They didn’t want to see wires.
I hate how tiny it often is now. What the fuck. Not to mention the ever decreasing contrast.
forcing new tabs drives me crazy. like how dare you. i even tried to disable it in firefox, but when i do it makes all ‘open in browser’ things overwrite the current tab :(
I hate the opposite even more - sites that block you from opening new tabs when you need to, as if you somehow don’t ever need to be able to access multiple pieces of information concurrently, or return directly to your current context.
“Oh, we’re following the single-page app paradigm.” No, you’re a fucking website. Follow the fucking website paradigm.
You can just tell these idiots have never actually done any real work.
Text that doesn’t wrap and goes off screen. Scrollbars that shrink to a single pixel. Universal undo (open multiple Excel Windows and do stuff in all of them. When you undo it will follow your activity instead of being local to the window). Excels crappy copy.
One of the many extremely basic issues with Excel. Absolutely disgusting.
Excel does all those things it does because it’s always done those things it does, and if Microsoft changes it everyone will pitch a fit and probably sue because now they have to retrain their entire accounting department.
I disagree. There are louts of things that would not change old behavior but add so much convenience. Like cell reference for diagram ranges. But nope, we are stuck in 199…4?
I love some of the newer things like LET and LAMBDA. But I’d kill for structured references to be properly implemented everywhere. I’m a bit over using INDIRECT to get around it (when I can).
Yes. I have build dynamic diagrams with indirect, I feel ashamed.
Let us use Python instead of cancerous VBA. You can not even add comments to your variable definitions. Or named vars in functions. Why do I even need macros at all to simply define a function?
You don’t, any more. At least not for relatively simple functions.
LAMBDA combined with the name manager lets you do custom functions even in a regular .xlsx workbook.
You don’t get the full control flow and extended functionality you do in VBA, and Python would be amazing of course, but I find LAMBDA covers about 90% of use cases.
The undo and copy behavior for Excel started with office 365. Also the repeat after hitting the end of the redo stack.
I’ve actually had designers come to me with a concept for “a visual indicator that shows the user how they are progressing through the page”
I have seen those on blog and news sites, a thin horizontal bar (sometimes under the floating title) that fills as you scroll to the bottom. I don’t get it either.
That was it. So it wasn’t even original stupidity. Sad.
How many times do we need to implement a fucking checkbox?
The vibe coding “paradigm” says: once or twice for every checkbox that appears on the page 😂
This is a complete misnomer. Modern UI designers that are forced to do what corporate wants are competent. It is large scale marketing that doesn’t have a clue as to what people want in a UX.
What’s wrong with infinite scroll?
When you’re dragging the scrollbar down, the page suddenly loads new content and you’re lost.
When you’re going through a long page and you want to come back to it later, you can’t come back to where you left.
Plus if you want to find older content, you can’t just skip to a page, you need to scroll through every goddamn item until you find what you’re looking for.
As it’s most often seen on news sites - where scrolling too far gives you another article - a handful of reasons.
One: there are frequently still links (think “about us” / “contact us” kind of pages) in the footer that you might need to access, which you can invariably now never reach, because as soon as they’re in view they’re replaced by more content.
Two: as the parent poster so accurately put it, “fucking with the browser history”. It becomes entirely indeterminate whether the back button now returns to the previous site, or just goes back by one piece of content.
Three: the new content is almost certainly unrelated to the page I started on, and not of any interest to me.
This was just happening to me with Amazon. I wanted to get to the support link in the footer but they always loaded new stuff before I could click on it
- You want to navigate somewhere then navigate back? Haha, no.
- If it’s not implemented properly, resources (images, videos, ads) don’t get unloaded when they’re no longer visible.
- Some fuckwit wannabe designers actually put the footer UNDER infinite scrolling pages.
If it’s not implemented properly, resources (images, videos, ads) don’t get unloaded when they’re no longer visible.
Doing this causes it’s own problems. Try searching on a page that unloads everything out of view. Or saving it
Breaks the scroll bar, for starters.
Y’know, my mom studied human factors psychology back around 2000. I remember all kinds of stuff she’d talk about that could make UIs easier to use, understand, and learn from.
I remember around the time Windows 7 came out, all that type of thinking started being ignored. It seemed like at first it was because it was trendy to look different, and then because the next generation of designers forgot that there was actual science on how to make your stuff usable.
A lot of people making decisions are idiots, or are following the whims of idiots above them.
Back in like 2017 a company I worked for made a mouse tunnel on their web UI. That’s where like you mouse over a menu, and that opens a sub menu. You mouse into that sub menu, and another menu opens. If at any point your mouse leaves this area, the whole thing closes. It’s shit. It’s been a known bad pattern since like the 90s.
Product guy wouldn’t listen. Not sure if he didn’t care or didn’t understand. Either is bad.
This happens all over. People don’t care. They don’t understand. They don’t listen to people that do. They have their own metrics and goals that are disjoint from actual value.
Got any details on the type of stuff your mom shared for improved UIs?
Not much anymore, sorry to say - this was a few decades ago! I remember her showing us some mockups on index cards and other paper-based models, showing what different user actions might display (I was studying computer science at the same time, so it was a bit of a common interest). I also remember her talking about watching groups of users trying to use a piece of software, and using eye tracking along with mouse tracking and other devices to see where their focus tended to be drawn, where they spent their time, etc. as they tried to accomplish certain tasks; studying different aspects of discoverability.
I also remember she was a big fan of Saturn’s cars - apparently they were big into usability, and as a consequence were easy to maintain and tended to avoid things like problematic blind spots. I do remember changing the headlight was extremely easy - you pulled two pins and the whole headlight assembly popped out!
Pretty much spot on. Late 90s and early 2000s was there height of platforms being very careful and strict about things like HIG (or on the other extreme, “skins”).
Now UI is barely constrained by those sensibilities and it’s about marketing and showing novelty more than usable.
Come to Japan where they like to make everything images instead. Can’t select it, can’t copy it, can’t translate it without a camera, can’t preview the text of something, is bad for accessibility, etc.
Do you want to copy text into a translator app? Fuck you!
Isn’t it amazing when text is also not selectable? Like its rendered behind some other shit?
I fucking hate websites ❤️
Like when someone makes an image of text? At least OP set alt text & linked to the source with real text: rare at lemmy.
The reddit mobile app has broken text selection. I did same thing as OP but with my stylus.
Or when you try and select a letter and it auto selects the whole fucking work or sentence, jumping all over the place?
I HATE that. I like to save things i read or find interesting in Joplin (open source notebook software) and it always has to be this giant fucking undertaking to copy some text off a website. I am annoyed just thinking about it… So i always end up just copying everything on the page instead. Don’t have time for that shit…
Hard agree. I’m not dyslexic, but I also occasionally mark text to keep progress. And if I really want to copy that text, I will, sometimes just out of spite that you’re trying to outsmart me, and I’m more likely to leave your site sooner too.
Also, while we’re at it, can you please leave scrolling behaviour alone and not override it? I have a nice mouse that lets me scroll as fast or as slow as I want to. In some rare cases with a fancy UI where one wheel notch scrolls a whole page where I agree overriding the behaviour is warranted. In all other cases just FUCKING LEAVE SCROLLING AS IS (as handled by the OS and the browser) and don’t try to be fancy; if you try to be fancy for no particular reason, I’m more likely to leave your site ASAP rather than prefer it over other sites.
I have a deep hatred for modern designs. Especially Material and Adwaita. There’s SO. FUCKING. MUCH. WASTED. SPACE. Early 2000s Winamp on my 1024x768 monitor had more concise and legible information than Tidal and Spotify do on 1440p fullscreen. It legitimately pisses me off.
fucking YES! just give me information dense uis please!!! The new intellij ui sucks and windows 11 too, for this reason
Win 11 is so bad. Right click sucks so bad now.
Win 10 start menu is the same. No I don’t want to search the Internet for apps I would open a browser for that, I would like to use the apps on my PC.Just FYI if it every gets to be too much: Linux has gotten extremely easy to install, and KDE has gotten astonishingly polished.
Just convince my jackass boomer boss please.
Are the tools you need available on Linux? You could ask. Sometimes it works.
I have a 4k monitor, and some sites I still have to zoom out. I’ve gone through and set all my settings to small text, no UI scaling. But shit is fucking huge.
I think part of it is tablets and phones. Big areas for people’s fingers to touch.
Tbh I love material design and adwaita, it looks great
You’re not wrong, as it’s your personal subjective experience, which can’t be wrong.
But the fact that it pisses you off implies that you don’t understand the reason behind it.
We used to have information-dense UIs before because:- devices used to have only large screens with lower resolution.
- devices were used primarily be specialists for productivity.
Which means programs had to fit a lot of stuff in very few pixels. Nowadays, vast majority of users are casual, the people of the land, fatfingering their tiny displays. They don’t need a ton of buttons and sliders. In fact, a common user would get overwhelmed by all that, even on the desktop. And while a small amount of people would benefit from a denser UI for the same casual apps, it’s usually not with the effort designing and implementing them.
If that is the stated goal, then they have failed. Completely.
My father, who is a “man of the land”, has issues navigating most apps that don’t implement a bespoke, application-oriented UI. Most of them use Material UI, and all of them have big controls, huge margins and padding, unnecessary rounded corners, actions hidden in unlabelled menus, stuff that you have to swipe at to navigate (without showing any hint of it), and so much wasted space that the entire screen is occupied by two or three rows of controls. I use some of the same apps and even I feel that the design is hostile.
Is he also into discipline, with a Bible in his hand and a beard on his chin?
[…] the people of the land
👌
I think most people, including me, appreciate how it looks cleaner though. On Android I get you, they should allow custom themes, but for Linux you can easily swap to a more information dense one.
The problem with “cleanness” is that individual elements of a data structure more complex than a tiered list blend together without visual separation. It very quickly becomes illegible.
Well, you can switch to non-GTK applications but beyond that you can’t really get more information density into apps that follow the Adwaita design language. You can’t even really theme them.
You can absolutely use custom GTK themes. I used WhiteSur theme for a while before switching back to default
Doesn’t that require extensions, which are only semi-supported?
No, just the GNOME Tweaks app. And extensions are fully supported in my experience, by the way
When I am on a phone, let me zoom on whatever the fuck I want. Unconditionally. Period. I won’t purchase shit off of your shitty site if I can’t see it. And you obviously have no clue how shitty my vision has gotten over the years. And for the love of anything good in the world, don’t wait till I’m zoomed in to pop a fucking model asking me if I want to join your list for 10% off. If I buy something, you’re gonna put me on your list, whether I like it or not. And I can’t stop you if I actually want a receipt. So just give me the discount. Or don’t. I don’t even fucking care anymore. Just fuck off. Fuck.
Firefox for Android. Settings -> Accessibility -> Enable zoom on all websites
Extensions -> uBlock Origin -> check “Annoyances”. Handles almost all of the random bullshit modals
I really need to switch to android. I don’t love google but the popups are killing my soul
When I am on a phone, let me zoom on whatever the fuck I want. Unconditionally.
The worst is when the zoom affects the surrounding UI elements, but the part you want gets unzoomed by the same amount.
a fucking model
I wouldn’t be so mad about that, unless it was a modal.
Touché
Every time I get a newsletter pop-up I enter something like “fuckyou@dontfuckingannoyme.withyourfucking.popup.fuckingstep.on.a.lego.fuck” in the hopes that whoever manages the list sees it when cleaning out the bounces
We went from using no punctuation to using too much. I struggled while reading this.
The no capitalization makes it hard for me. I think just re-writing with capitalization makes it a lot easier to read:
Note to UI designers. When reading a long piece of text. I select the text while I read it. I select the text while I read it!. I select the text using my mouse. While I read the text I often select the text. I don’t want to perform actions on the text. I don’t want to accidentally click share link. I want to select the text while I read it.
Here’s how I would mildly edit the punctuation in order to make it easier to read:
Note to UI designers; when reading a long piece of text, I select the text while I read it. I select the text while I read it! I select the text using my mouse. While I read the text, I often select the text. I don’t want to perform actions on the text. I don’t want to accidentally click share link. I want to select the text while I read it.
Here’s how I would conveyed the thought in a JIRA comment:
UI designers could you please, for the love of all mankind, stop fucking putting fucking shitty ass popups in the god damn non-mobile website! There is no one, and I mean no-fucking-body, that still using a desktop computer in 2025 that does not know about ctrl-c and ctrl-v. There is not sane reason for you to ever assume a user wants to visit some shitty twitter/reddit/digg/blog when they select text on a desktop computer. If I see a single one of you motherfuckers putting fucking text inside an action I swear to god I will come down there and beat you to death with your fucking your own fucking keyboard.
I’d avoid Last Exit From Brooklyn if I were you.
My absolute biggest gripe about the failings of proper UI design is icons with no text attached.
Floppy, okay surely the save button. Some book looking thing, no fucking clue. An eye in the middle of a square, what the fuck are you people doing???
Having to hover over a weird looking icon to MAYBE gleam some sort of information on it takes so much longer than just having the fucking text below the God damn icon. Sometimes they don’t even have hover text! Thats GREAT UI skills there, Junior! Maybe you’ll get there eventually!
Fucking idiots.
Massive +1. I can easily imagine complex 3D shapes in my head and freely manipulate them, but my brain works horrible when it comes to icons for some reason. I can’t intuitively find what I need, not even after months or years. Even after using something for a long time I will constantly hover over all icons to read the tooltips until I find what I need.
The software I work on at work has a navigation at the top of just icons. I see it every day and I just can’t seem to associate the icons with the functionality.
The fucking Oblivion Remaster does this all over the UI!! So many vague icons with no text, especially in the magic UI.
My favorite with Oblivion and similar games is, that’s a neat spell name, but what do the effects DO?!
I’ve played the old silver box DnD games from 1988 and 1989. The magic effects were listed in the clue book instead of the manual. Talk about purposefully asshole design
The Wizardry series of games were very DnD like, but they kind of made up a language for the spell names. You don’t get a fireball, you get Halito. A big fireball is Mahalito. So you need the manual spread across your legs just to know whether you need to cast porfic or calfo on the locked chest in front of you.
They had more of a tolerance for bullshit back in the 80’s.
Morrowind’s Xbox manual was literally wrong about multiple spell effects lol
I use a system at work that is 100% web based. I have 2 4k monitors in my desk. Why are the apps formatted for viewing on a phone? I’ve gotten to the point of hacking the CSS on every page just to make things usable.
At the last version upgrade, the developers made some changes to the interface. They couldn’t be bothered to change the existing CSS, so they just put !important on all the new stuff.
It’s kind of screwed to say. But a lot of people entering the work force grew up with phones and tablets as their main computer. It’s the mind set they have that everything uses touch interfaces.
I’m not saying everyone or even most, but for a good portion it’s their default computer experience.
80% population have access to mobile phones.
The first generation was just that bad ignoring that some people wanted to browse the web through their mobile.
Multiple windows. Most people dislike 2 meter long text blocks.
May I ask how old you are? And what was the first OS you used?
Most people people dislike 10x10 cm text windows when programming/editing HTML/reading SQL dumps.
Code and logs don’t count, that’s not normal text. That’s cheating.
Most people dislike
[citation needed]
Most people
Mobile first rule.
And then lazy port to desktop.
“it’s mobile first!”
“And desktop second, right?”
“What’s desktop?”
“What’s a desktop?”
At the start of Covid, we had to start working from home. Our Chief Security Idiot thought that was a good time to impose measures that made it impossible to reboot a computer without physical access. When I questioned how that would work with my desktop, which stayed in the office building that I couldn’t legally access, he kept saying I had to take the “laptop” with me. I told him several times that it was a desktop, but he just couldn’t understand until my boss got involved.
That was my first run-in with our idiot-in-charge-of-security, and it only got worse after that.
For PC, extra functions should be in the context menu in my opinion. For mobile, that’s a little tougher, but maybe tapping on the selected text should bring up the options? Selecting on mobile is a tough thing anyway, and any solution is probably going to be a problem for someone else.
Actually, that’s probably true for any UI design choices. There are some that are generally a good idea (like defining a reasonable navigation order for your elements or making design respond to viewport sizes to ensure that everything actually fits), but interaction options can get really muddy.
To anyone who does this, I’ve found browser extensions for both Chrome and Firefox called reading ruler or something like that, that will basically create a highlighted horizontal column wherever your mouse cursor is at, making it much easier to read text without having to manually select it
The point is not to make it easier to read, the point is to click on and select the text.
finally someone who gets it
I think the reading ruler effect is a big part of the accessibility being discussed here. If you want to separate the issues out, consider if browsers didn’t show selected text by inverting the background color, but by e.g. underlining the selected text - you’re right that it’s still important to be able to do that, but the reading ruler is also important.
The use of text selection as a nearly ubiquitous reading ruler is a neat cultural thing that shouldn’t be broken lightly, but it’s not necessarily the only way browsers and websites could implement it.
Totally do this. Thought it was just me.
I do this because I do work on my computer and sometimes that work involves citing sources, copying and pasting sections of instructions, ensuring I’m using correct spelling of foreign names and words. And most importantly, copying and pasting wingdings and symbols that I can’t be bothered to memorize the numkey codes for. ™ 🄮℠
I HATE UNSELECTABLE TEXT WITH A BURNING PASSION (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
skill issue
I love this comment, I see it everywhere and it fills me with fuzzies
So today I learned there is an internet equivalent of reading with your finger while mouthing the words.
It’s very rare that holding alt while selecting text doesn’t resolve this issue. Assuming you’re on a computer. If you’re not, good luck. Selecting text on phones and tables can be impossible in too many circumstances.
It’s very rare that holding alt while selecting text doesn’t resolve this issue.
But I’m not actually looking to select the text when I do this, I’m just stimming and the extra visual noise is annoying.
I don’t think I understand the issue then.
I’m complaining about pop-up widgets appearing when you select text, like the email icon here:
Edge is the absolute worst for this. Infuriating
TL;DR: OP could try using your finger on your phone to keep your place?
Oh boy. I design UI (games, not software) and OP’s very specific need would stomp on a very common need for why people select text… which is to copy/paste.
While on a computer, text selection doesn’t typically summon a pop up, it’s needed in mobile because how else would you easily get to copy and paste? Everyone else would rage at the loss of the tooltip and any other interaction would be painfully hidden if it was delegated to a combo of pressing your lock buttons or volume buttons while highlighting text.
Quick edit: didn’t see the screenshot of the widget, might be the site you’re using, or browser? Also any adblocker add on should be able to hide those elements.
While on a computer, text selection doesn’t typically summon a pop up, it’s needed in mobile because how else would you easily get to copy and paste? Everyone else would rage at the loss of the tooltip and any other interaction would be painfully hidden if it was delegated to a combo of pressing your lock buttons or volume buttons while highlighting text.
The complaint is specifically about desktop text selection though, the screenshot above says “i select text using my mouse”. I agree that removing the pop-up UI from mobile would suck, well suck more than mobile text selection already does.
Quick edit: didn’t see the screenshot of the widget, might be the site you’re using, or browser? Also any adblocker add on should be able to hide those elements.
You’re right, putting
#.quote-share-buttonsin my uBlock filter list got rid of it. Still, blocking all these elements myself is really laborious.Oh yeah, I’m a terrible text block skimmer and desperately need line breaks, punctuation, etc. (Also, not to mention the repetition really triggered my need to skim, lol). That many repeated phrases turned some words into white noise. So that was my bad.
Good to hear the element blocker works!
It def sounds tedious to manually block things, but like some comments have mentioned, there are probably some browser add ons that may have the functionality you seek.
I have a protocol for this.
- go to website
- if UX is offensive exit website
- add website to pihole blacklist and description of why
- never visit website again
I know it doesn’t mean much to them, but I refuse to accept a shitty online experience when a product team actively circumvents standard internet experiences like highlighting, copy/paste, or browser jacking (looking at you Microsoft).
