I just accidentally clicked the “clear all” on the browser URL and wished that it was a bit harder to click but was still there. If it took three clicks to make happen, its still useful in most circumstances but would drastically drop the mistaken clicks
Anyway, what are your unpopular UI opinions?
For every UI app that runs commands in the background, Instead of a “Doing XYZ. Please Wait”, I want the logs of the commands being run. Not just the commands themselves, but their verbose outputs too. I want it ALL on display.
I want to know what the software I am using is doing to my computer. I dont want black box software on my PC.
Side bars on anything throw me off because they break the horizontal symmetry of whatever they’re a part of.
Old Ubuntu when the taskbar was vertical on the left, browsers that have the default bookmark bar on the left or the right. Apps where all of the dialogues are bunched to one side, offsetting the main workspace.
Maybe I’m just Slightly on the spectrum, I don’t know, never been diagnosed. But not having my workspace centred and symettrical kind of breaks my brain a bit.
Every modern design trend sucks. Overly minimalistic/simplistic UI harms usability and actively makes users dumber and helpless.
I don’t want rounded corners, transparency, shadows, animations, modern icons etc…
Give me boring panels with clear boundaries between conceptual sections, explicit text on buttons, and no theming. I don’t care if it’s a fugly Win95 grey, I’d rather it be usable than flashy.
Having ambiguous toggle labels.
Don’t have a window named something like “Disable Features” and then the options be a toggle for “Cookies” or “Carry weight”
Does turning the toggle ON turn the feature OFF? Or do I need to turn the toggle to OFF to turn the feature OFF? Even worse when some are already in the off position.
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There’s way too much “pop-up ui” infecting PC from mobile. I want a solid-state UI. Don’t make me hover over anything to show a pop up, or swipe, or stupid shit like that.
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Stop making these shitty disappearing scrollbars that are way too thin! Scrollbars are the single most important UI element on the screen. They need to be LARGE and they need to STAY VISIBLE AT ALL TIMES
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WORDS. Stop using symbols. Use words.
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Remove all the little icons and give me a menu bar.
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Stop using CSS for desktop software. CSS belongs on the web.
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Windows 95 has the best UI. Just go back to that. It’s better than everything that came after.
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You shouldn’t be able to save documents, or files of any kind, to your desktop. It should be a special place that allows application launchers and shortcuts to files, but not as an easy-to-find regular folder.
Computer UI has been made to follow mobile UI when the two have very different sets of constraints. It is ok for a computer program to look cluttered; that’s how you can access everything easily.
Mouse over is a bad interaction, except for maybe showing tooltips. You can’t do it on a phone. You’re going to create mouse tunnels (where the user accidentally mouses out and closes the menu). And yet I see them all the time.
Double click is kind of a bad interaction, too. A naive user looking at the device isn’t going to Intuit “if I push this button twice rapidly something different will happen”. There’s no double right click or double dual click. Nor is there a triple click. It never should have become a standard interaction.
The way I see it, double-clicks are optional — if you already know what you want to do, they’re a quick way to do the default interaction. The “real” way to interact with such an element is to single-click to select it, and then further interact with it via menus, which reveal everything you can do with it, including opening it. Right-click context menus are also optional, providing a subset of functionality pulled from the full menus.
Except no one is ever taught that, and Windows 95’s desktop made sure of it.
When I switched to KDE plasma after decades of using windows, I almost immediately liked the single click to open things better. No need for the double click.
I feel like there are places where double click is the only way to do a thing, but you’re probably largely correct. Apparently on the Mac you can do window->zoom to accomplish the same as double clicking on the window’s top bar. Never knew that. Also don’t think I would have naturally decided to double click on the window to change its size.
Scroll bars are way too fucking thin now. When I have an app on one monitor, and try to scroll it, I’m battling the move to the next monitor with the teensy tiny scrollbar.
I’m even someone that knows how to use the mouse wheel and page down keys. It still has its place and so many refuse to acknowledge that. Sometimes I can’t even tell where on the page I am because the scrollbar activated its Octocamo.
Even worse are the scrollbars that are hidden until your mouse is over to of it.
Mouse over for anything needs to die.
What’s even worse is when everytime you happen to move the mouse you get popups you didn’t want blocking what you are trying to see.
The modern trend for “flat” UIs absolutely sucks. There is no separation between element layers, so you can’t tell where one windows starts and another begins when they are overlapping.
Rounded corners everywhere. I mean, subtle rounded corners can look nice here and there, but they are not subtle and there are too much of them. Also, those capsule shaped buttons and text boxes. I hate them, they look so stupid.
TUI is better than GUI
I don’t know if it’s unpopular but I think the cookies should have a white list policy instead of a black list.
And in general I think that a UI has to take into account people with visual problems. “Everything is gray” is a shitty idea.
The right answer would be to mandate an architecture for cookies to properly label their purpose and origin. This would allow you to set policy on the browser level and never have to think of it again.
Instead they just prop 65’d the whole Internet.
For the love of all that is holy, respect the light/dark theming
Having to hold every interactable/menu item for a second as opposed to just tapping in videogames absolutely drives me up a wall. It’s fine to me in situations where looting is delayed to create risk or something like that, but why in the hell do I need to hold a button just to start the game
