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?
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.
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 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.
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.
- 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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
especially when you’re uber old like me and need to go back 4 decades to choose DOB
I’m from 1967 😭
My condolences, ancient one
Thanks. Now get off my lawn.
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.
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.
I take a moment to mildly rant about this, sometimes out loud, every time I have to set a timer on my phone.
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!
I like when they have both, like the roller thing you can click to input a number, best of both worlds.
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.
Masonry layout.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
GIVE ME HIGH CONTRAST COLOURED BORDERS
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Also don’t forget some androids cut toast text if too long with no way to see the full text.
Ah yeah, don’t you love f-droid’s impossible to read 5-line toasts that randomly appear when something in the background fails?
