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What's an unpopular UI opinion you have?

5mon 27d ago by mander.xyz/u/porcoesphino in asklemmy

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?

I like chunkier scrollbars. Fuck the tiny disappearing scrollbars where you need to mouse over... somewhere.. to maybe be graced with its presence, only for it to be 1px wide for some reason.
Also fuck the endless scroll, especially when you already know what you're looking for is on page 4 because you had to reload the page for some reason but the infinite scroll didn't save your position and you have to go down (without an actual scrollbar) only to "load more" 3 times until you're (maybe) on page 4.

A related peeve of mine is stateless URLs. When backend engineers built UIs they were terrible in a lot of ways but the URL would often reflect the state of the UI so you could refresh and get back to the same view. I think web frameworks and people specialising as frontend engineers helped kill this being something that was added as you developed

I am 100% with you on both of those!

One that gets me is the number of menus below infinite scrolls. I think this is a reflection on people doing responsive design for variable screen sizes but only as a checkbox / meeting some UX redlines / implementing once without basic testing. An example of this is Google Flights for some screen sizes where the currency selection is below the infinite scroll on some screen sizes (but its not an ideal example because on other screen sizes the currency select just disappears or at least it used to)

Ah yea that too!
Sometimes you can kinda get there by hitting the End key, sometimes you need to open the DevTools to get to their About page or change the language or whatever option they put below the endless scroll.

I just stopped using Libre Writer and switched to OnlyOffice because it was impossible to get a normal goddamn scroll bar in an application literally designed around scrolling text. Holding the scroll Arrow button to scan for something is impossible because there are no scroll Arrow buttons.

But OnlyOffice has a Header navigation tool, too, so fuck Libre Writer right in the face.

Auto hide bullshit scroll bars should be illegal on desktop. Who the fuck needs that 7 extra pixels on desktop?

I now have very strong opinions about scroll bars.

Scroll bars don't just let you scroll, they tell you where you are. If I'm reading and wonder how much I have left to go, I want to be able to just glance at the scroll bar, I don't want to have to wave the pointer around to make to scroll bar appear. Fuck people's anal-retentive fetish for "cleanness".

Why would you ever need that in a 10 chapter story? Sounds a little indulgent. Next you're gonna ask for fonts.

I JUST updated Raspberry Pi imager and the new UI is a huge step back… and it has the TINIEST scroll bars that don’t even exist until you try to mouse over everything! I hate it so much.

Maybe popular among users but somehow not popular among devs?

I absolutely hate those scrolling number pickers, like on alarm apps. Just pop up the numpad and I can enter a time in 2-4 taps, not 2-3 coarse scrolls of minutes, a fine scroll to the minute I actually want, then repeat that process on the hours.

I like when they have both, like the roller thing you can click to input a number, best of both worlds.

Samaung at least in their apps I canbtap on the number to type it instead of scrolling.

On the same vein, date pickers. Just let me type the damn date instead of having to choose on your virtual calendar.

I'm from 1967 😭

My condolences, ancient one

Thanks. Now get off my lawn.

I hate it when the numbers affect each other too, so if you roll back on the minutes, the hour changes too. It's awful.

I don't mind one way or the other, I just wish people would settle on one convention!

Even if iPhone did everything else better than android, you could still never convince me to switch over to their hell of every date and time being entered via scroll.

Give me the little clock or a numpad.

As an old guy with a Birthday in Late December, fuck scrolling for dates.

Bro why is it any other way, ever.

I despise setting alarms. Why do I have to scroll? Fucking let me type in the time on a numpad.

I have like 50 alarms that are 15 minutes apart and I toggle them on and off as needed.

It's a fucking mess, bro. Fuck.

I take a moment to mildly rant about this, sometimes out loud, every time I have to set a timer on my phone.

Unpopular because most people don't notice at all, not because they disagree:

Bring back ellipsis to signal a new dialog instead of a complete action. E.g., a button "Save..." opens a dialog where you want to save, whereas a button "Save" saves it immediately

I didn't know that was a standard until I started working in UIs. It's great when you know, but it's a clear sign that the standard isn't clear enough when everyday users don't realize.

Colorblind people exist and should be able to use the site. At least, based on my real experience, this must be an unpopular opinion amongst UI folks glares

That's something I appreciate about the WordPress "block editor"; it tells you when you've changed colors in a way that is hard to read for some people. I wish more design software did that automatically.

Modern browsers have tools for this built in. Lack of accessibility is a choice.

It's usually an oversight.
The designers are literally colorblind-blind.

Apologies beforehand for the soap-boxing, but this is something I'm rather passionate about.

So I work as a full-stack developer, with a penchant for UI/UX and front-end, and I have a particular passion for accessibility. The web is a fantastic place for connecting and empowering people, but I believe it can't be truly open and democratised without everyone having equal access to it.

The way I see it, it's your job as a designer to make your design accessible. There's obviously more to it, someone working purely with design can't do all the heavy lifting when optimising for screen readers and such, but I view it rather like an architect ignoring accessibility in their buildings, or a chef ignoring allergies. Can you do it? Absolutely. Are there good excuses for it? I don't think so.

Personally I only have an auditory processing disorder, and the only accessibility tool I really use is subtitles. The thing is being able-bodied is not necessarily a permanent state, and anyone could go from able to disabled in the blink of an eye. Thus we all benefit from having accessible design in our day to day lives.

Sadly, there's not enough focus on accessible design in schools today, thus learning about it becomes more of a personal responsibility. If you work with web, then the browser accessibility tools are literally just two keystrokes away. They're not that hard to learn to use. Setting up a screen reader and working with that is a bit more work, but I'd encourage everyone who work with this kind of thing to do so because even if our education properly covered these things, nothing beats first-hand experience.

This is UI design basics but I guess there are a lot of bad designers / rushed projects etc

Quick question and I'm very happy with a RTFM type response: Any chance you're red-green colour blind and can share some with what that's like because the good-bad representation seems pretty pervasive in society?

I've actually got some level of all three types. My wife was trying to get me to play Puyopuyo tetris and it was driving me crazy that no combination in their colorblind menu worked for me.

The biggest downsides are graphs and stuff like that. Things just look like the same color to me. In my case, blue and purple, yellow and green, and red and green, just depending upon the hues involved. Most modern traffic signals, especially here in Japan, use a combination that is fine for me and not confusing at all.

I can't really describe much better since I don't know what it's like not to be like this.

Edit to add: MMOs (and websites about them) often sucked because I could not tell the difference between gold and copper. The whole loot system color thing was also bad since blue/purple and other difficulties. There were some games I probably trashed epic gear thinking it was common.

That reminds me that the traffic lights in Japan are blue for green / go. So that's better for you? Do you know if that's historic, or because of colourblindness?

I have no idea the history/reasoning behind it, honestly. A "green light" is "ao shingo" in Japanese which would mean "blue signal". Historically (I'm not sure until which year), Japanese just lumped everything under blue with words to describe the shade as necessary.

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.

Especially when you want to click something but those pop-ups are clickable too.

Cough cough... gmail

I posted just now about this to someone else but I just updated my Raspberry Pi imager and the new UI is horrible, convoluted, and had scroll bars hidden by default with no way to show their MINUSCULE TINY ASSES without hovering over their one-pixel-wide bullshit bars ughhh

  • Stop removing the underline styling for links. It's not cool or sleek that you made things unintuitive to navigate by having the only indication be a slightly different text color, or a hover effect.
  • I don't like emoji in text interface output. I don't need cute little sparkle graphics and yellow smiley faces and lightning bolts and rocket ships to tell me the operation was successful, to say nothing of environments where emoji aren't supported and it's just broken.
  • Please stop trying to be cute or hip with your basic interface messaging. "We got you, we'll find those results you need. Just hang tight, OK?" "Oops, our bad, there was a little hiccup in the process..." It's unnecessary padding just like all the rounded corners everywhere. Exception if the entire app/site/whatever is specifically designed around being cute and friendly, but I see this all the time where it just feels out of place, disingenuous, and obnoxious.
  • Custom fonts and nonstandard characters in usernames are an abomination. Show your personality and creativity in your graphical avatar and your profile, I'm happy to see it there!

Back when I was a kid on MSN Messenger, a bunch of my friends had names like this:

☆꧁✬◦°˚°◦. ǟɮɮɨɛ .◦°˚°◦✬꧂☆

I disliked it even then, because it's not really about personal expression or style, it's more about wanting to stand out in other people's contact lists and look the most special and get the most attention.

It's an arms race that leads to a user list that's impossible to find anyone in, and when everyone is special then nobody is.

I ca̴n'̸t rea̵d wha̴͌t ̸̈́y̶o̵u̷͆'r̴̚e̸ ̷s̴à̴y̵i̵͛n̴̓g̴͑ ̵f̶ró̵m̸̜̎ ̴̊ơ̴v̵e̴͂r ̵͎̽h̷̛̺̀͑̃er̵̆e̴..̴. But not sure what thé solutïon would be. Forbiddíng non-english text would be even worse UI.

For me back in the day, the solution was a third-party add-on which patched the Messenger client with a bunch of improvements - one of which was the ability to set a custom alias for a contact. So you could set any name you like and for you, they'd show up as that.

Discord actually has it too, but ONLY for friends, which in my opinion is a massive oversight, but I guess they were worried about the possibility of abuse or something, so there we go.

Stop removing the underline styling for links. It's not cool or sleek that you made things unintuitive to navigate by having the only indication be a slightly different text color, or a hover effect.

Out of curiosity, how do you feel about sites that keep a colored underline on links, but have the text color be the same as the body text?

Less problematic, but still potentially confusing. Why break the standard and add another variable people need to consider in order to find the form and function they've already learned? Links are there as a functional element, not an aesthetic design.

I get people wanting to add their own touch or sense of style, but doing so at the cost of intuitive functionality, especially a kind that is long established and standardized, can be a slippery slope.

All that said: At the end of the day, it's up to the creator, of course. If someone really wants to indicate their links with upside down text and no underline, or a glowing CSS effect, or whatever, I'm not going to demand that they stop. Especially if it's a personal website. Your satisfaction with your work and self expression is more important than a guy yelling at a cloud about front end web design standards and whatever. I'll just reserve my right to gripe over some minor personal annoyances, and everyone will be just fine in the end!

If it doesn't need JavaScript, it shouldn't have JavaScript.

If it doesn't need dynamic styling, it shouldn't have dynamic styling (especially if it makes other elements move around or become occluded).

If it doesn't need images, it shouldn't have images. When it does need images, they should be in an appropriate format and minimum useful filesize.

It shouldn't have audio. It doesn't need audio, and should not have it.

This is the most boring movie I ever watched.

It was a very faithful adaptation of the book, though.

I develop JS for a living, but for my personal site I faced the burden of PHP to load it directly, and kept minimal JS. I’ve had people note to me how quickly it loads.

Mobile phones have caused a dark age of UI design

The hamburger button is an abomination, we need the proper menus back

Unpopular opinion: I like the hamburger button. Easy to find at a glance, and I don't have to guess which sub-menu the settings are in. Now, if you have a hamburger AND 3 dots... 🤬🤬🤬

Gmail is the best (worst) example of this. They literally have EVERY possible icon for "settings" on the page at once.

There's a hamburger button. There's a three dots button. There's a NINE DOTS BUTTON. There's a cog. There's a slider icon. And you click your profile picture for "manage your account."

Hamburger menus are fine if the developer has the restraint to truly limit the number of items, but it can quickly become an unsorted "junk drawer." And you sometimes still end up with submenus anyway!

Unfun fact: I taught computer literacy for about a year. The students struggled to see or find the hamburger menu on many pages. Understandably so, because it literally does not look like anything.

Here I was going to join this thread to share the controversial opinion of "The hamburger menu is fine," because I thought the general trend was shifting away from using them.

Admittedly the hamburger menu is often misused. It's like the junk drawer for developers who don't know how to logically streamline the navigation modes within their app, so they just throw everything in there. But when it's used well, to me at least, it's a better option than some of the alternatives. I prefer to have views that I almost never use just kept out of the way in a menu I can manifest at will instead of occupying permanent space on a navigation bar.

Modal dialogs. Making it impossible to move the window or reference something else in the same interface.

Toasts on android. No idea where the toasts came from and no way to look up what the toast said after it disappears.

Ah yeah, don't you love f-droid's impossible to read 5-line toasts that randomly appear when something in the background fails?

Internal to Google what you're calling toasts were made to need user input to dismiss as part of accessibility pushes to win government contracts. That really just highlighted their issues for me though, most of them should be behind a small element I think, like the notification bell. And I think a bunch should be more localised to the action / app

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.

Respectfully I'm on the other side of that, but I see what you're saying. I hate skeumorphism and (IMO) flat is a much more professional looking design motif. BUT...that flat has to come with just enough drop-shadow to be able to delineate the layers, otherwise yes, its too flat and indistinguishable.

GIVE ME HIGH CONTRAST COLOURED BORDERS

Any button that's grayed out should say why it's grayed out when you hover the cursor over it, or attempt to tap it.

  • If it can be done without a touch screen DO NOT use a touch screen. And if you use physical buttons, they should have tactile feedback
  • Toggles are just more ambiguous over-designed checkboxes

I also thought toggles were unnecessary, but then I read something that changed my mind.

Toggles have an immediate effect, whereas checkboxes don't.

For example, a light/dark mode setting. You could use a checkbox, but users have become used to the above behaviour, and so a toggle may be more appropriate.

Checkboxes, therefore, are more of a form element.

Personally, I'd still be fine with just checkboxes, but that design intention is something I hadn't known but makes sense after I heard it

Interesting idea, I'd never thought of that. It would almost change my mind if only different software respected that distinction. There are many forms using toggles and many option pages with checkboxes without a save button.

I do wonder whether the text next to the toggles changes depending on the state of the toggle. It seems to be arbitrary whether they do or not, leaving me unsure as to what the toggle actually does.

The colors too. It's pretty clear where ON is when it's between blue and grey but when it's between red and pink who knows which is which. The best would be a label that doesn't change and the words ON and OFF on either side of the toggle but that looks terrible so nobody does it.

I encountered a weird thing in my BIOS. I've got a graphics card and a CPU with integrated graphics, I could save power and free up some system RAM by turning the iGPU off. The option in the BIOS says "dGPU Only Mode" and you Enable it to turn the iGPU off.

dGPU Only Mode, turns the iGPU off. It makes more sense the less you think about it.

A further complaint: There's a setting in the BIOS called "Game Mode" and what that does is turn SMT and some other TLA off. SMT is AMD's name for hyperthreading. Learned this when I noticed KDE system monitor reporting 8 processor threads instead of 16. Apparently that is to increase single core performance on high end chips to wring a few more FPS out of single-threaded games, but meh.

Toggles are strange, now that I think about them. They're one of the few things that have skewed more skeuomorphic over time. Or, In the Win95 era were we thinking about paper, with documents in folders on the desktop, and a check box you'd check with a pen makes sense there, where now we think of the computer as a device with switches to flip?

Either way, this is the aviator in me speaking but an on/off toggle switch should be longitudinal or vertical, with forward or up ALWAYS being ON. Toggles in UIs are pretty much always horizontal with right being ON.

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.

I prefer light mode.

Just be in a properly lit room. Open your window curtains. Don’t blast your display on max brightness. It’s actually easier on the eyes.

Depends one's eyes condition, just worth keeping in mind.

and housing conditions: just open the curtains on your big well lit windows!

Not sure to understand the link, so just in case: I meant to say that anyone being suffering from any form of photophobia or light sensitivity, should appreciate having access to a dark theme even more so when they can't work in brightly lit room (because of their condition).

i was agreeing with you and listing another category of person for which their advice didn't fit

Oh, obviously, I did not get it. Thx for the clarification :)

Now there's an unpopular opinion!

I also prefer light mode, but I recently had an eye condition for a while and I needed dark mode to use any UI. Those few sites or apps that don't have dark mode suddenly stuck out like a sore thumb. And don't get me started on apps with a dark mode, that outright flashbanged me on startup while loading the UI!

Look how angry it makes people! I use light mode exclusively, dark mode hurts my eyes. Other geeks have an aneurysm when they look at my screen. I honestly think they lose respect for me (among other reasons).

I honestly think they lose respect for me

We do.

I know it's incorrect, and an unfair assumption, but whenever I see someone using light mode for anything, I assume it's because they don't know how to change it.

Even my terminal windows are light mode. You would think that would show that I know how to do things, but nope.

Hilariously, I’m the one who implemented dark mode for my company’s product, and am well known for that since it made so many people happy. When they see my UI they’re horrified, like learning about Santa Claus or Jesus.

That's like Hank Hill finding out that Bob Strickland uses an electric oven.

That’s fair. I live under the assumption that dark mode users don’t know how to change the brightness level.

We don't.

Why change perfection?

I’m the opposite, light mode hurts my eyes so I change to dark mode everywhere. I also love bright lights and open windows, I still have to use dark mode because the bright light backgrounds give me headaches.

My preference for dark modes is more about design choices than the actual dark/light divide.

Light modes tend to have way less separation between UI elements, with borders and differences in background colors barely visible. It results in them blending together and making it harder to identify different parts of the website than on dark mode. They're also much more likely to use actual white backgrounds, when dark modes usually use anything other than actual black. I really hate both white and black used as backgrounds, they're both bad imo.

I do use light modes on websites where it actually looks better than the dark mode design. But sadly those are too rare.

My window curtains stay CLOSED and my lamp stays on LOW because my partner and I are gremlins and night mode is made for us.

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.

While I do want the logs accessible, I don't know if I want it all on display.

Ever like, dig through Windows or Proton logs? Plain text files measurable in megabytes within seconds.

This used to be so common with installers in the past. Sometimes you had to click a button to show it. But I don't really see it anymore

Yeah, try telling that to my boss. Or any dev boss for that matter.

Running a program in terminal on Linux gives you a detailed output log that you can pipe into a txt file.

Overriding browser functionality because of designer preferences or shitty implementation of tracking or whatever.

Don't fuck with my scrolling.

Don't fuck with my ctrl clicking to open links in a new tab.

Don't capture window keyboard events unless you have a really excellent reason to and even then think about it really hard and decide not to.

And learn how to support basic keyboard navigation, damn it. It's just about marking up your html properly, no scripting required.

I think all of these opinions are popular on the user side.

Having ambiguous toggle labels should cause you to lose your job

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.

Samsung does this in the phone settings because they have way too many features and half of them are Feature™ that you can't even search for because it doesn't describe the function at all.

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.

My partner and I watch a fellow (Brutalmoose) play retro/vintage games. Mostly Windows 98/XP/DOS/older consoles. When he busted out his Windows 98 machine built by LGR on YouTube, I was astounded at how simple and professional 98 looks. Windows XP looks like a toy compared to 98.

I will never get over Windows 7 Start Menu/Explorer, though. I loved it. I use OpenShell to make all of my Windows 10 machines have Windows 7 start menus, with their good indexed search (no internet results) and excellent Explorer UI I’ve been used to forever.

I got a Windows 11 machine at work and I fucking hate everything about it. They won’t let me install OpenShell because they “don’t allow open-source software” (insane)

Yeah, I remember going from 98 to XP. My schoolmates and I used to joke that it looked like an OS made by playskool. But to be fair, iirc, that was kind of the trend then and not uniquely some MS bullshit. We were saying the same about the appearance of the GameCube controller (even though it's objectively great to use).

Not allowing open-source software as a blanket policy sounds pretty unhinged. I feel for you.

Always makes me laugh what people prioritize. Perfectly blended shadows underneath my windows that takes noticeable resources to render

"But computers are so powerful these days, clock cycles are basically free"

I see you are a fan of FVWM style of UI design.

I wish UI design had followed that kind of paradigm to be honest. My high school library had some Sun workstations running Solaris, instead of the shitty outdated Windows computers that would have been the norm then. I was in the minority enjoying it, but that's how I got to use my first Unix system.

I can understand the sentiment though I can't stand ugly as sin flat pixels unfortunately.

I don’t want rounded corners, transparency, shadows, animations, modern icons etc…

real

  • Rounded corners are ugly and a bit wasteful and it not being square sounds annoying for devs.
  • Transparency is ugly and less performant.
  • Shadows are sometimes nice (movable floating windows/popups, large boxes of any sort, and text on images) but otherwise not.
  • Animations are really annoying. The recent Firefox mobile UI update features even slower and more annoying animations. WHEN I OPEN A MENU IT SHOULD BE FULLY OPEN NEXT FRAME.
  • I don't really care about modern icons, but they should be coloured. Also old firefox logo better.

...win95 had the same minimize, maximize/restore and close buttons that modern ones do. _ □ x in the left upper corner...

You mean in the right upper corner.

Yes. It did. And?

Haha, mixed my directions up.

I just find it curious how modern minimalistic design harms users when we have had those in use from the very beginning of the visual operating systems.

Well, apart from the fact that Win95 is not the "very beginning of visual operating systems", and it's not even close (it's not even MS first, second or third OS with a GUI), I don't think this is necessarily relevant?

You've chosen pretty much the only windows element that has been left unchanged since windows 95, when MS has tried to "simplify" a bunch of other stuff as time went on. For instance, the whole settings situation in Windows 10 and 11 just shows the various iterations of trying to make the settings more and more minimal, but all it's managed to do is:

  • Hide away other options, or straight up not making them available anymore
  • Fragmenting the experience by having to keep other legacy settings and control panel...

Or, in windows 11, again in an effort to oversimplify things, by default the right click menu now has fewer options, symbols in lieu of text for common operations, and needs expanding to access other options. This is more work, and a hidden layer, instead of just laying out the options because it'd feel "cluttered" or something.

This is symptomatic of the issues I am arguing about: there is a trend of trying to lay out things flatly and "simply", but all it does is:

  • Reduce what is obvious to what the product people have decided is essential for the user;
  • Remove conceptual boundaries that should exists between subsets of tools (when flat design + no "ugly" separators);
  • Shove everything else in deep nested menus or a dump-all burger menu. It's fine, now the clutter is hidden away and you have a "clean" UI.

The funny thing is, it's still not successful at being user friendly. Phones and tablets are, but it makes the issues even worse. A lot of kids my partner teach only ever use phones and tablets so in IT lessons it's apparent they don't know what files are, and "where they go" for instance. Because on iPhone and Android, in an effort to keep the UI simple, the directory structure is pretty much hidden by default.

Computers are complex tools, users should be helped in learning them, not infantilised with a "we know best" attitude.

I chose win95 because it was the one you gave as an example. I wanna also point out that i remember time when floppy discs were still floppy, so im not completelly talking from my ass.

Also i mostly agree with you. But purely from argumentive perspective i wanna bring up few point.

Symbols are universal reducing the need of localization. This is usefull when lets say my mother who does not speak English that well is searching help with some setting. Its easier for her to press the button with a gear, than reading from the list and trying to find option that in her computer is "Järjestelmä asetukset" and on the website is "System settings."

Good place to notice how well visual symbols work are airports. No matter where in the world you are in international airports you can always wind bathrooms, exits, gates, shops and restaurants without knowing the local language bacause the symbols used at the airports are so universal. Similary now days i know to look for three dots or hamburger when im looking for more settings.

Thing to remember is that you and me arent the microsofts main customers. Most people using windows dont know anything about computers, and im willing a bet lot of money that MS have data of how many people use spesific menus and settings and that the now nested menus in win11 dont get that much of an use ie. Listing those are unneccessary clutter for most users.

Also i share your worry about kids gettkng used on mobile devices and having no understanging of basics of computers, BUT same argument could have been said when we jumped from text based operating systems to visuals, or when we jumped from punch cards to text based system, or when jumped from using cables to punch cards.

That makes us about the same age then.

Yeah, I am not arguing "all symbols bad", more than we are trying to push symbols where it could be questionable. Also these symbols still need to be learned: talking of my mother for instance, I absolutely remember having to teach her that the X was for closing the window, and having to do it multiple times. I don't argue the usefulness of the X over a "quit" or "close" button btw. Just that this has to be learned too. That's fine.

That's a bit of a chicken and egg situation though. Would some settings not be useful to almost anyone, even if they all knew about it? Absolutely, so it should be harder to access. Are there features that would be better for a lot of users but barely anyone knows about because of this? Certainly true too. And that's being charitable to companies, and assuming that they collect and present data as fairly as possible internally rather than use it in a way that makes a case for what they want to push... And yeah, we aren't Microsoft target, but I'd argue most companies share this trend. Even some open source projects buy into that when not necessary (imo).

And yeah, there is a good amount of subjectivity here of course. I think we (probably?) both agree with saying that making things simpler is not inherently bad, it's good even. I was trying to argue we are making a lot of things "simplistic" instead. As an aside, MS developing PowerShell is a form of admission that, for certain tasks, command line is better suited than graphical user interfaces. So yes, automatic jumps between paradigm could, and should, be argued on a case by case basis rather than blindly following it.

I absolutelly agree most people would benefit if they had the possibility and intrest to go trough all the settings. But most i also think most users would never go trough them. And for some reason some people just are against learning anything new.

Thinking about programs that show everything my mind goes straight to Blender. For first time user the amount of information is overwhelming, even if everything has pretty clear explanations and plenty of tutorial material online, for average person its borderline unusable program. Add the ability to customize the layout and thousands of possible plugins, if you mess with things there and you dont know what you are doing, you are going to have bad time with it.

Sorry i got stuck at the microsoft/windows thing.

Personally i hate win11 and if i were the king of the world, we would have stopped at win7 or xp. I also loathe how microsoft has started to force people in their enviroment, forcing people to have online account, in every turn trying to push their cloud service, trying to prohibit downloads outside of their store and generally trying to take personal out of personal computers.

But even after so i think their UI is pretty smartly designed for what is their core userbase. (Not that much for professional side)

Generally i agree with you and i see three kinds of UI designs: professional stuff like photoshop, ui that is trying to sell you something like most apps or websites and engaging uis like games or social media.

What i hate in modern times is when companies start to mix those things up. Like for example Canva is supposed to be tool for making graphics, but the sites design is allover the place.

I hate vertical tabs!

I think that's actually a popular opinion. I'd have to disagree, though! The amount of title I'm able to see on a tab, and the amount of space I have to interact with it, shouldn't be dependent on how many other tabs I have open.

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.

Window drag bars shouldn't be full of clutter.

Yeah, I'm looking at you especially Microsoft, with random toolbar buttons, search box (!), and lord knows what else crammed into the drag bar of your applications. So much so that there's very little actual drag bar to grab should I (gasp) actually want to move the window somewhere else.

Which brings me onto windows should not all be full screen. Especially with the size and resolution of modern monitors, there's no reason to have everything full screen all the time. But, from what I've seen, most people do. I think this is why drag bars are increasingly being filled with garbage. And probably why lots of apps seem to be designed to only run full screen size.

I miss the consistency you had in old GUIs. A window is a window, and it has a border, a title and some buttons to control it.

I despise client side decorations, like Gnome has. It makes all windows a special snowflake. Window decorations are the window manager's responsibility.

Designers: "Now you can put your most important feature or two right in the bar!"

Developers: "Eight. I will add eight."

I don't know how unpopular this is - I've never asked anybody:

Phone-optimised UIs suck, even on phones. One of the first things I do on setting up a new phone is tick 'request desktop website' in the browser.

Ooh, that one is probably pretty unpopular... Most desktop sites are absolute garbage on mobile.

Though I do hate when a mobile site won't let you zoom for some asinine reason.

Some things should be 100% outside of the control of developers. Zooming in/out and selecting/copying/pasting text are my main issues. You have no right to decide I am not allowed to copy the text from your site. Fuck you. It doesn't protect shit. You sent the text in a HTML file to my computer and then dare to tell me i am not allowed to copy it? I can read it on my screen. I can type it myself. I can use OCR to have a program read it for me. I can open the source code and copy it there. All it does is make your site awfull to use!

I hate round corners for my windows, give me crisp sharp edges and not some soft watered down UI

I really like round corners with a small radius. Just a handful of pixels so the corner isn't a perfect square, barely noticeable but feels smoother to me. When Windows start to look like app icons, that's too far.

Everybody's touting round corners like it's something people want. Cinnamon 6.1 features round corners! who cares?

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.

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.

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.

For the love of all that is holy, respect the light/dark theming

As someone who dœs shit with CSS userstyles quite often , disheartening how rare prefers-color-scheme is

Workbench (Amiga GUI from 1985) is still unmatched in features 40 years later. And it ran off a floppy disk.

I don't know when macOS gained the ability to change the colour of the cursor. Windows got it in 10 recently, or 11, I'm not sure which exactly (I'm a Mac user but we use Windows at work). But in Workbench, you could open a VERY basic pixel art tool and completely customise the cursor. In 1985! I was fond of making crosshairs.

More than that, something the major OSes haven't done since, is two-stage icons. Folders were called drawers in Workbench, but otherwise, same thing. One click would select the drawer (invert the colours), then the second click would open the drawer, and spawn its contents in another window. Applications had it, too. WordPerfect was an Amiga 1000 computer with monitor, and its idle state was off. When active, it would be turned on and running WordPerfect. Yes, in the damn icon. It wasn't animated, but it showed the program on the monitor. Icons could also be larger, and would remember their position on the screen, which meant you could hide files by placing them in the corner of the screen and resizing the drawer window. Thus, you'd have to position the window a certain way and drag it out to see those files. (You could also just use dir in a command line.)

Anyway, I thought it was awesome. I guess most people didn't.

The problem with customisable selected state icons, is the inconsistency in the select state. Means it isn't always immediately obvious whether something is selected or not. WB 2.04+ added borders around the icons to resolve this. Most of the time you don't need them though, especially if people stick to the more modern GlowIcons style.

But otherwise, Workbench/Intuition did nearly everything right in terms of UI design. Close gadget nowhere near anything else you're going to click on, menus at the top (pointer constrained by the screen, makes it easier to get to the menus), windows that don't come to the front as soon as you look at them (makes it easier to rearrange windows the way you want them). If you want something full screen it can go on its own screen, and if something is multi window they can all be grouped together on their own screen.

windows 3.1 supported coloured cursors

source: am old. used coloured cursors on 3.1

applications should all look the same. no custom theming.

there should not be a way to skirt the window manager theming system. i decide what my windows look like and that should be what all windows look like. that way it's all uniform and easily parseable at a glance, not to mention a lot easier for accessibility tools to hook into. and for that matter, stop inventing new ways to present your application without doing a user study. we have years of user studies available showing what ui elements work well and what shapes they should be to be easily understood. just throwing something together because it looks cool and then shipping it like that should be a punishable offence.

Fuck burger menus.

Agreed. Fuckburger is the worst place I've ever eaten, their entire menu is terrible.

The Donkey Punch is pretty good though...

The lube sauce just keeps making the bun slide off the burger.

Unpopular opinion: people like UIs.

OK, that one is only unpopular on specific, Linux-heavy parts of the internet. (Like... right here.) And even then, there aren't that many people who disagree with me. But there are definitely a few people who have this idea that we'd all be using super fast, powerful command line applications for all of our tasks, were it not for big tech pushing the graphical interface on us.

I get it; I'm a command-line person myself. And big tech has pushed a lot of anti-user changes. But the truth is that most users want to use a mouse, they want to have a GUI, and the shift from keyboard to mouse wasn't simply because Microsoft wanted to limit the users' capability.

I don't think that's an unpopular opinion. I've basically lived in the command line for more than two decades, and even I prefer UIs for certain tasks:

  • Graphical things like web browsing
  • Things I rarely do, and a UI is readily available

If I'm cropping a single image, I'm firing up Gimp, Preview, Paint or whatever tool is already installed. If I'm cropping 30 images in the same way, I rediscover how imagemagick works and script it.

It's all about what's faster and easier to get the job done, and whether a UI or the command line is preferable depends on how often I do the task (which determines if I remember how the CLI works) and how repetitive the task is (which determines if I want to script it).

What really grinds my gears, though, is how many people prefer a pretty UI over a functioning UI.

If all you want is to read 5000 words of something you were looking for .... just display those 5000 words and nothing else.

We don't need graphics, pictures, images, blocking, ads, pop-ups, videos or any other suggestions .... just give us the content, it's all we want sometimes.

Reader mode in the browser is a godsend.

There are still plenty of websites and even news websites that either avoid this or break reader mode to prevent people from using it.

Seems to work almost every time for me in safari / Orion? Best part is in lots of paywalled sites, reader mode shows all content.

I mean, Firefox Reader View is probably the closest you will get...

Really big mouse cursor.

I don't have sight issues at all, but you spend more time tracking the mouse than you think. And after less than a day the real estate it takes up doesn't bother me.

I love KDE's "Wiggle the mouse a bunch and it temporarily grows massive" feature.

Just on wayland, but yes, like that too

The more you wiggle, the bigger it gets. Not like on Mac where the max size is capped. The cursor might be capped on KDE, but it freaking huge at that point

Yeah, sometimes I get bored and just wiggle the mouse to make it all huge just for fun.

Your app / website is most likely not big enough to rely on icons instead of text for buttons. Same applies to most other unique UI choices.

Android's modern gesture navigation is awful. I like gesture navigation on ubuntu touch, sailfish, webos, just about everywhere I've used it except android, but I cannot stand android's. Why does swiping from both sides do the same thing? Why does swiping from the bottom do multiple different things depending on how you swipe? Why does swiping along the bottom to switch apps rearrange them so going back and forth is unpredictable? The old two button semi-gesture navigation was so much better.

Swipe from the side to go back can be really annoying, if you're trying to highlight text from the side or do some other operation that Android decides is a swipe from the side. I'm forever going back when I don't want to.

My god, the rearranging on swipe is the most annoying feature I've ever experienced. The feature would be a godsend but it's rendered useless by the godawful rearrangement. People might say it has a pattern that can be learned(never heard that btw), but whatever it is, it's so unituitive that I'd rather just pull up all the minimized app. Shame that it's implemented right on browsers but not an os.

Why does swiping along the bottom to switch apps rearrange them so going back and forth is unpredictable?

This has been driving me crazy in MacOS where the three finger swipe up gesture from the trackpad rearranges everything. Add some other weird ux choices and you can't switch between two windows without looking at the screen.

I'm not familiar with swipe on Android but I know that:

  • swipe to go back one level in an app, or
  • swipe to either side for next item in the parent list

both get really frustrating if you do a lot of text selection since they will fire for the wrong thing and you'll have to restart. Especially on text fields where you've typed before the swipe triggered.

I disabled swipe for back in the web browser on a mac too. When you're scrolling up and down so much it doesn't take too much for that to misfire and for you to lose work, or on a slow internet connection need to wait for the page to load again

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.

While I think a lot of people agree with you, this is a real unpopular opinion to me. I love capsule shapes and large radii. I like my ui to feel soft, not pointy. shrug

Rounded corners do create a lot of opportunity to implement it poorly, though. I see a lot of rounded corners that aren't concentric, or worse, are inconsistently rounded (For example, I'm extremely irritated by some US highway road signs where the border is rounded but the square corners are left on)

The worst is circular avatars. Great, now I have to make the focus of the image smaller so it'll fit into this unnecessarily reduced space with dead air surrounding it for no reason

Google cranks this up to stupid level by changing the corner radii of active or enabled elements within the same set (e.g. pull-down quick actions on Android)

TUI is better than GUI

I really only prefer TUI because it bypasses most of the worst aspects of modern GUI design

I'm gonna guess... the one in the middle?

Yup!

There's a some TUI libraries that are borderline GUI, but actually have such a nice default UI design that you'd have to go out of your way to mess it up lol.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • WORDS. Stop using symbols. Use words.

  • Remove all the little icons and give me a menu bar.

  • Stop using CSS for desktop software. CSS belongs on the web.

  • Windows 95 has the best UI. Just go back to that. It's better than everything that came after.

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.

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

These are both UI features that suck for dodgey rdp connections. The kind where you click and wait 10-30 seconds for the update. Windows has gotten egregious about these kinds of UI decisions making it very hard to make changes over a lousy RDP connection

I think I agree with most of the comments in this thread, but I feel like your #2 is actually an unpopular opinion! I don't think I've interacted with a scrollbar in the past decade, and the only purpose is to see where on the page I am, which doesn't feel very important. (something like a pdf viewer where that matters should have a proper page preview anyway)

So I don't really need scrollbars at all, and I'm glad they aren't adding visual clutter.

(although I'm pretty sure you should be able to force scrollbars to be visble, at least on browsers)

Stuff can be functional and not look like shit.

UIs should strive to always be as customizable as possible.

Colors should be able to all be manually set by the user if they want to, rounded corners should be configurable, and the user should be able to overwrite icons and some UI elements if possible, but it shouldn't have to be on a per-app basis.

Instead, apps should ready system settings configured by the user and apply their theming unless the app is configured to do otherwise, again, by the user. Consistency by default unless you don't want it.

I can see why this opinion would be unpopular (maybe designers want to make their UI a very specific way idk)... but I like theming!!

Also, there should be a mode between dark and light mode that has black text but doesn't have a blindingly white background.

I can see why this opinion would be unpopular

The reason that it's unpopular is that it's hard enough to design a nice app and when you add theming it gets way harder. I still think it should be supported, but I can see why it isn't.

I thin it should be like this: the system defines something like 10-15 main colors (text, text background, foreground, main accent, highlight bright, highlight dark ....). All programs are designed in terms of those colors. Designers don't put "green here, black there" but "main color here, highlight there".

But they also have the option to recommend the user a app specific color set that can either be applied to that app only or system wide.

By default every app uses their own recommended theme unless the user has set the option to override app themes with the system theme.

Also, there should be a mode between dark and light mode that has black text but doesn’t have a blindingly white background.

While I would still use dark mode if this existed, this would be a lot nicer than the blinding pure-white themes. There should, instead of light and dark themes, be white, light gray, medium gray, dark gray, and black themes everywhere.

I don't have unpopular UI opinions, but I do have opinions that I don't see people echo much, yet.

One of the worst things about UI in 2025 is that almost everything most people use on a computer relies on it, more than ever, and yet it's also at its worst point since the days before mouse driven interfaces. Companies used to be much stricter about their interfaces, how they worked and looked. Now there are tons of bespoke interfaces where everyone decides for themselves how they work, and assumptions made by one program work the opposite way in a different one.

Switches have become way to obvious to what "on" and "off" is. Even when they state something like an option is enabled or not in text, it often isn't clear whether it's saying this is what the state is now, or this is what it will be when clicked.

Icons have become way too vague and arbitrary as to what they mean. The Hamburger menu was bad enough, but some of the icons have gotten way too abstract. At least the floppy disk for saving was a convention.

Web pages likewise could use a lot more consistency and visibility. The new Digg, for instance, hides its user block function behind a light-gray three-dots button on a white background. The only options on that menu are to Report or Block that user! Why is it three dots, and why is it so hard to see?

Microsoft's "Ribbon" interface remains a terrible idea. At least with menu bars you know all the functions are there, somewhere, all represented by text. With the Ribbon, everything's a toolbar button, and with many of them being different sizes it's harder to scan through them to find the option you're looking for.

The Gnome UI is great, without any extensions. An absolute game changer for laptops.
You can navigate it quickly with just the meta key, arrow keys and a touchpad or scroll wheel.
No memorizing key combos or aiming for small icons with the mouse.
Everything is hidden when you don't need it and prominently visible when you do.

What exactly do new releases break, apart from the extensions you installed from a different source than your distro's repos?
If you don't like constant changes, that's not a Gnome issue, that's you choosing a bleeding edge distro when you actually wanted stability.

GNOME 40 came out 4 years ago, 3.0 came out a decade before that. Wouldn't call that constant

Read the second part of the sentence.
Extensions break when you install Gnome from your distro repos and the extensions from somewhere else (like extensions.gnome.org).
If you mix sources, YOU take on the job of keeping everything compatible.

Since this thread is really about complaining about UI, I'll add that when the developer arbitrarily limits input ranges because "Why would anyone what that?"

I've come across this several times, but the one instance that pops to mind is a desktop background changer being limited to no less than one minute between changes. I wanted to use it to show a stop-motion animation slide show and set it to one second, not the intended use, but still viable IF I could set the rate to one second. I wrote the developer, and they admitted it could be allowed, but "Why would anyone want it to be that fast?" I get that there are technical reasons why this might not be ideal, and maybe it would somehow tax the system for "just a background changer", etc. But, assuming a value wouldn't crash the application, or somehow physically destroy the computer, I think the input should be allowed. If prudent, put some warning about the less-than-catastrophic consequences, and let the user confirm before continuing.

This is one of the worst things about Apple OS's in my opinion! And windows does it pretty often too.

A lot of so called "dark mode" should be called "medium mode" or "gray mode". In my opinion "dark mode" is where the main colour of backgrounds looks more black than gray. Also all borders should be high-contrast, preferably brightly coloured lines, or medium-contrast for low-importance borders, but never low-contrast borders or borders without a line where it's just a change in background colours.

I see the dark convention to mean that the background is darker than the foreground.

Light mode means dark text on lightt background.

I see it to mean how dark the page actually is

  • nordic theme is not a real dark theme
  • fuck every curved edge
  • the icons should never look the same, i dont care about your brandbuilding
  • i hate minimalistic phones and launchers so much. how do you have the audicity to limit customisation? get out of my way, son.

Quick, someone coin the term "crepuscular theme/mode"

Brimg back double-clicking on the top left corner of a program to close it. Actually, bring back the top bar and the file menu while you're at it. And for software that opens tabs, allow the user to position the tabs bar on the bottom or side of the screen.

Omg i want a top bar soo much. I hate no bar on browsers filled with tabs, and here i am trying to position my mousr in a tiny bit of non tab apce so i can grab the window and move it.

One of my only non-minor complaints about KDE Plasma is that I can't have the options that appear on the Global Menu panel widget (They're like macOS top bar app options) appear as part of the window decorations on each window instead. There is a button on the window decorations to access these options as a dropdown, but that's slower to use.

Brimg back double-clicking on the top left corner of a program to close it.

What OS was this on? Not sure it's ever been a feature of Windows as far as I know. What's the benefit of doing this vs just single clicking on the X button?

That was actually Windows. I think I first encountered it in Win 3.1, but I started really using it in 95. It's not actually Windows that controlled it, but software. Application windows used yo have a top bar, and on the very left they had a small version of their shortcut icon. Clicking on it would roll out a short menu for minimizing, closing, etc, and double-clicking would exit out of the program. I think Chrome was the first popular software to remove it.

Using this method for closing programs is just a matter of preference and muscle memory. I guess it made sense when the last thing you did was File -> Save, so your cursor was already near the top left. Nowadays it's not as obvious, but some of us are too rigid to easily change.

Chrome peaked when it was all angular. Why does everything have to be all rounded now?

Windows 98SE was peak design

I have a right to a page with all configurable options. A simplified interface is great but I shouldn't need to hunt for ages in a terminal or read source to find a config option.

Right, sure. But the time is takes to add each option is large and usually underestimated so they really add up. But yeah, I got tired of arguing with UX designers that we should expose options to users since it enables usecases that didn't happen to be in the small sample of interviews they've done

I need keyboard shortcuts that actually work, and I hate large padding/whitespaces/circled borders that do nothing.. I like having grey-ish background instead of white. Seems like many people consider this "old fashioned" and hate it.

For desktop things should just fit well enough on 1280x1024. For mobile 720x1280 or some similar resolution.

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

People don't think enough of contrast and colour choices.

For example, icons.

I kept launching the wrong popular streaming video app. One was red and white, the other was white and red.

I have pinned some app icons but I really need to squint sometimes. So many blue icons.

Modern UI trend in graphics apps is to use monochrome hieroglyphs for tool icons. Fuck that, give me colour icons. Can't tell the tools apart. It's not even visually appealing. What.

Games use really creative colour schemes. Then in the first dialog they show in the game, they have two choices, and I guess I just have to guess which button is which because it's impossible to tell which is the "active" colour.

Ooh, fancy scroll bar you have there. Really blends to the background. Can barely see it.

A lot of lectures and presentations are silly when people show a web page and I can barely make out the domain because the rest of the URL is grey mush. And I'm sitting in the front. (I can barely make sense of it the address bars on my monitor. Firefox at least lets you disable this nonsense)

Another big beef I have with modern UIs, especially mobile ones: If you put something on the screen, would it be possible to not randomly move the stuff around? (For example: I tried to click the latest conversation in Signal desktop. In the time between my decision and the mouse click, Signal noticed that it has been several femtoseconds since the last software update, and popped an update notice right where the top of the conversation list is. Guess what I clicked.)

Another thing: Overreliance on scroll wheel. In case you haven't noticed, scroll wheels aren't very reliable. They get gunky and are hard to clean. Give me the bloody scrollbar. In games, let me rebind zoom.

Scrolling also gets very annoying with a trackball. I haven't found a trackball with a scroll wheel yet.

Get rid of the tool bars. All of them. Menu, navigation, window decoration, cookie consent, status, tab and start.

They suck. We live in a 16:9-21:9 world, where it's bad enough in landscape. When it's in portrait, where half of the real estate is taken up by a keyboard, and that space really matters, it's almost worse. Letterboxing is dumb when it's black bars on a movie, I don't need its cluttered cousin on every application and webpage I'm on.

Vertical overlays or context menus can be enabled by default if you must, but give me shortcuts to do the even the most esoteric operation and I'll gladly learn them.

I don't know how this is an unpopular opinion after a half centuary of dealing with increasingly multileveled toolbars, but it must be because toolbars are not going anywhere.

If you have to have a toolbar, at least make it go away when you scroll.

Idk I'm on two minds with this.

On the one hand, I agree that there's too many clutter in modern UI design and it takes away precious screen real estate. Especially more so when it's for ads (external), ads (internal), and more ads.

On the other hand, there seems to be a chronic minimalist UI movement to hide even essential controls and info into menus upon menus. The worse part is that there's tons of whitespace so you'll still won't get good information density.

I think you mean that there is tonnes of white space when the website is opened on a desktop in a single window. I'm often on a laptop with multiple windows and the way a lot of websites are implemented then are often frustrated.

But agreed with you on the minimalist movement. I think I'd reframe it as some people in UI see simple as elegant and beautiful though. There is a push beyond minimalist into not giving options that a lot of users would want, but they're not primary user journeys

Remember early 2000s malware infested internet explorer on grandma's computer? I swear the window was half bullshit toolbars.

As someone who worked in tech support starting in 2000, AHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

HHHHhsk Jeeves!

Unpopular indeed. Letterboxing counterintuitively lets you see more of the movie, just smaller.

If you have to have a toolbar, at least make it go away when you scroll.

This is one of my least favorite modern trends — UI shouldn't go away.

First, even if you're not actively using the bar, if it contains access to a menu, buttons or title/context of any kind, it should remain glanceable. If you're going to tap it, you first need to see it, and having to unhide it adds extra effort to every interaction. What's more, less experienced users may not even remember that the hidden functionality exists. And if I'm scrolling a feed of some kind, in an application with multiple feeds, being able to instantly glance at where I am is useful.

But also, the idea that scrolling the content down a little to make the UI appear makes no sense. I have the content scrolled to where I want it, and scrolling it a little in a particular direction to make more features show up is absurd. The content and UI have nothing to do with each other.

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.

Also hate it, also on the spectrum.
For me:
Either the taskbar is bottom or bottom.
Any side bar is (if possible) disabled.
If theres unecessary white space: Fuck that. Delete that right now (looking at you firefox)

Oddly enough, I liked sidebars because they left more vertical real estate available for endless scrolling in browsers and auto-hide on some taskbars can get flaky.

But then again I go out of my way to find 16:10 monitors, so maybe take that with a grain of salt.

Sidebars are awesome when you are using the trackpad.

I also like when you have to click on the page to scroll down but virtually the whole page clicks through to somewhere else. Nice.

I'm being sarcastic btw

I prefer a start/taskbar on the right side of the screen. I'm right handed and it just feels natural since square monitors became widescreen. I can't think of 1 os or desktop manager that defaults to this, and windows 11 requires 3rd party software to even move it there.

Pretty much the only reason this is unpopular is because we're conditioned to expect it at the top or bottom. Having it on the side is a huge advantage for real estate, especially now that we don't really have text on window tab thingies anymore.

we don’t really have text on window tab thingies anymore

I prefer text on those (I use KDE Plasma)

Here's my reply to what you're replying to:

I find that vertical panels are inconvenient because text is horizontal so less text gets shown and font sizes get smaller.

I find that vertical panels are inconvenient because text is horizontal so less text gets shown and font sizes get smaller.

Another solution is to simply switch to using the Mongolian script.

I'll +1 your gripe with my old man yelling at clouds thing. Windows XP gave you the option of creating arbitrary taskbars/toolbars to locations on the desktop that could be floating or docked. I have always kept my data on a separate drive or array from the one my OS lives on. In Windows XP I would create a toolbar that contained the root of my data drive, dock it to the right side of my monitor, and then set it to autohide the same way you can set the taskbar to auto hide.

That in conjunction with the way that Windows XP allowed you to remap "My Documents" to a different location made for the cleanest workflow I have ever had.

They removed the toolbar functionality after XP and changed the way remapping system folders works slightly since then. I haven't really found an application that gives the exact same functionality as the arbitrary toolbar from XP, but even if I did I still spend over half my day at work on a computer that is locked down by corporate IT where I can't install whatever I want, and I like to try and mirror workflows between home and work because of muscle memory.

I'm in my mid 30s, lol.

I find that vertical panels are inconvenient because text is horizontal so less text gets shown and font sizes get smaller.

Some apps will have the search icon at the bottom of the screen. Then the search bar pops up at the top. Then you tap that for the keyboard to come up at the bottom. I think a search button should automatically pop up a keyboard.

I really like minimalism. These new simplified logos for things look much better in my opinion. Shame pretty much everything has become enshittified along with the logo changes.

Windows edges windows or whatever they call it. I can’t tell where one window top edge ends if it’s overlapped with another.

I quit playing Death Stranding nearly entirely because the UI was driving me crazy. It's been a while, so I don't remember what it was, exactly, but there is a lot of menu navigation and reading. I'll probably try again at some point.

No way to skip the animations maybe? There was like a 3 second animation for everything, it really interrupted the flow for me.

Partly maybe, but it was more a graphic design text heirarchy thing, I think. I think I just found it stupidly difficult to read, and for some reason it really angered me--kind of like my recently developed deep hatred of minimalist scroll bars.

I think the default styling of browsers is pretty neat in a lot of cases and I hate animations. Layouts, spacing and grouping are the things that actually provide value.

Instead of a fancy popup with a cart contents the button should just say "Adding 1 item..." and "Added" for 2 seconds.

I hate infinite scrolls, especially when there's stuff like opening hours at the bottom of the page. Just give me a "Show more" button and preload the content.

My dream world would be that styling would only be about layout and the rest is up to the user's theme.

I, on the contrary, hate non-infinite scrolling

I figured there has to be someone that likes it.

Don't put the Recompute Base Encryption Key Hash next to the apply button

Force computer literacy test on every boot/wake of computer. Then we can finally stop wasting eons on buttons forms, positions and colours

Huh. I wonder why we don't already do that. We accept UI tutorials for individual apps but somehow the OS for desktop and mobile gets a pass.

C and V are too close on the keyboard for CTRL-C to be copy & CTRL-V paste. I fuck this up at least a couple times a week.

Thats a bit of a long burn but I feel you. I think also some OSes that are modified by companies, or IDEs have a delay that's needed after copy before paste. I started cuting, pasting then pasting

Windows 11's UI is fine.

I have so many issues with Windows: the privacy invasion, the ads, the upselling of MS's services, the need for an online Microsoft account, that I haven't used Windows in over 2 years. But I see so many people saying it has an ugly UI - it's UI is literally fine, I would have no problems using it if a Linux DE happened to come up with that design before Microsoft did.

Rotary (Pie) menus rock and should be everywhere, not just controller games. I like Kando. I like keyboards too, but when I'm mousing around it lets me do so much without bothering to touch a keyboard.

Infinite scroll pages are inherently worse than a set number of pages you can jump between at will. The fact almost everything has swapped to that is a nightmare and makes looking for old things on a blog or hell even a YouTube Playlist a nightmare.

I miss frames

Dark mode, apparently.

As in you want it available more or you don't like using it?

I want it and some things either poorly implement or outright refuse to implement.

Elements should not even be clickable for at least 0.5 seconds after first appearing.

Oh, to avoid things like when there is a list that updates just before you click? Or something else?

Yeah that's exactly it. It drives me nuts when I try to click on something just as a dialog with a button shows up, and I maybe don't even get to know what I did. Or clicking on something that moves because of some sloppy infinite scrolling or slow loading images or something.

I joined World of Warcraft during the Legion expansion at the behest of my friend. I'd known about WoW for a long time and how popular it was. So I was very, very surprised to find that it's UI was, frankly, utter fucking dogshit, that most all of the community modded it, and ony just fucking now is WoW finally trying to make some actual attempt to fix the shit themselves. And all of this pretty much fed into my opinion on WoW and many MMOs in general prior to true action MMOs: they are overrated, clunky crap, and I am astounded so many people put up with the shit rather than let it fall through the cracks and be left to rot, as it should. But then again, people still won't stop preordering games after so many turn out dogshit, so... people are just gonna be people I guess.

single page apps. I fucking HATE all these apps that straight refuse to allow you to open multiple tabs.

the links are JS action hooked to redirect you instead of just linking you to the page.

it's fucking bullshit.

also, fuck webp.

Flat Minimalism is fine, but the buttons should still look like and animate like buttons. How the fuck is one supposed to know that text is clickable if it isn't blue or raised like a button?

I like Lemmy's Mobile Web UI, and I don't really see a need for apps

and yes I use light mode, dark mode make me feel like I'm doing something illegal on the "dark web" lol, dark mode feels depressing to me for some reason

Yeah, I also use the Lemmy webpage on my phone. In particular, I want to be able to come back to posts later, when more of a discussion has unfolded, which is where browser tabs work really well.

Tooltips that open immediately when a mouse hovers over it.

Tooltips should require being clicked. Eve Online annoys the shit out of me whenever I do a fresh install because tooltips load too fast they get in the way of actually doing things. Want to right click? Nahhhh your mouse is in the tooltip now.

Unpopular? Well it's more of a design fundamental that has been completely shit upon by the new crop of people who think they're designers. I say it over and again and people hate me for it thus I think it qualifies:

If a visual design doesn't work in 1 bit it doesn't work. I don't care if MS or Goog or some other popular thing has gradients in their design; it's wrong.

I don't like it when websites don't allow me to enter emojis in text boxes (like when naming or tagging things in browser games). It's not even that I do it a lot, I just don't like arbitrary restrictions like that. I know my fellow web devs always get nervous about them causing technical issues, but realistically that really doesn't happen with any modern tech stacks. I've been including emoji input in the test cases for any text input components I program and there's never been any real issue that would warrant not allowing them at all. Even the notorious 10-character 👨🏻‍❤️‍💋‍👨🏻 really doesn't cause problems, you just have to account for the length of it.

Every action should be accessible from the keyboard. Stretch goal: The OS should be able to describe all UI events in prose.

Using window managers that have shortcuts for tiles improves both the UX and general productivity. I'm not quite so elitist as to say the point and click GUIs are objectively worse but power users are missing out if they don't invest some time in learning keyboard based window management.

Masonry layout.

UIs don't need to stay same all damn time . If peops had their way we'd stuck using gas stoves for all eternity

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.

Can't disagree more.

For linux users: Anything in the system (be it devices, interfaces, com-ports) is a file. So why may I only use the desktop for shortcuts?
For windows users: Why shouldn't I be able to place a file in there? It's just a pretty folder.

I think you should be able to do whatever you want, maybe by changing a setting or placing a convenient symlink to a more obscure directory or whatever.

But I also think the way desktop functionality has been implemented in various operating systems has prevented a whole lot of people from learning how to use a hierarchical filesystem.

It's a user-education issue, and a lot of PC users still have no concept of storing files anywhere else but their desktop.

On that we can agree.