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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Every action should be accessible from the keyboard. Stretch goal: The OS should be able to describe all UI events in prose.
Chrome peaked when it was all angular. Why does everything have to be all rounded now?
Windows 98SE was peak design
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
Mobile phones have caused a dark age of UI design
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
