7d ago

Please, UI designers

Toot

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Modern UI designers don’t have a fucking clue.
You’d think the first principle would be “don’t break the existing fucking UI”, but no.
Infinite scroll. Windows without toolbars. Replacing context menu with useless site-specific one. Forcing links to open in new or same tab, depriving the user of choice. Blocking text select. Blocking copy, as if that’s somehow going to stop people from stealing your shitty content. Fucking with the browser history.
And then there’s the constant reinventing of the wheel. How many times do we need to implement a fucking checkbox?
No lie, I’ve actually had designers come to me with a concept for “a visual indicator that shows the user how they are progressing through the page”.
- No lie, I’ve actually had designers come to me with a concept for “a visual indicator that shows the user how they are progressing through the page”.
  What the actual fuck, do these people actually use computers.
  My biggest gripe is websites that take control of the browser C-f.
  
  I mean, over the years the scroll bar has got less and less visible. Maybe these people don't even realise it exists.
  
  I hate how tiny it often is now. What the fuck. Not to mention the ever decreasing contrast.
  
  MacOS by default hides scroll bars. They're big on form over function which I hate.
  Some people are just like that.
  I knew a couple that mounted their TV in a way that all the ports (eg: HDMI) were inaccessible. They just didn't care that a big chunk of the TV's functionality was now blocked. They didn't want to see wires.
  
  Web designer/ devs needed to add back visual indicators to long articles when OS designers started hiding scroll bars.
  It’s also helpful when the article ends, but has a bunch of shit below it (like required advertiser garbage or huge footers). If the up dev is smart, they’ll calculate the length of the article so that the progress indicator is accurate.
- Text that doesn't wrap and goes off screen. Scrollbars that shrink to a single pixel. Universal undo (open multiple Excel Windows and do stuff in all of them. When you undo it will follow your activity instead of being local to the window). Excels crappy copy.
  
  One of the many extremely basic issues with Excel. Absolutely disgusting.
  
  Excel does all those things it does because it's always done those things it does, and if Microsoft changes it everyone will pitch a fit and probably sue because now they have to retrain their entire accounting department.
  
  The undo and copy behavior for Excel started with office 365. Also the repeat after hitting the end of the redo stack.
  
  I disagree. There are louts of things that would not change old behavior but add so much convenience. Like cell reference for diagram ranges. But nope, we are stuck in 199...4?
  
  I love some of the newer things like LET and LAMBDA. But I'd kill for structured references to be properly implemented everywhere. I'm a bit over using INDIRECT to get around it (when I can).
  
  Yes. I have build dynamic diagrams with indirect, I feel ashamed.
  Let us use Python instead of cancerous VBA. You can not even add comments to your variable definitions. Or named vars in functions. Why do I even need macros at all to simply define a function?
  
  You don’t, any more. At least not for relatively simple functions.
  LAMBDA combined with the name manager lets you do custom functions even in a regular .xlsx workbook.
  You don’t get the full control flow and extended functionality you do in VBA, and Python would be amazing of course, but I find LAMBDA covers about 90% of use cases.
- Y'know, my mom studied human factors psychology back around 2000. I remember all kinds of stuff she'd talk about that could make UIs easier to use, understand, and learn from.
  I remember around the time Windows 7 came out, all that type of thinking started being ignored. It seemed like at first it was because it was trendy to look different, and then because the next generation of designers forgot that there was actual science on how to make your stuff usable.
  
  A lot of people making decisions are idiots, or are following the whims of idiots above them.
  Back in like 2017 a company I worked for made a mouse tunnel on their web UI. That's where like you mouse over a menu, and that opens a sub menu. You mouse into that sub menu, and another menu opens. If at any point your mouse leaves this area, the whole thing closes. It's shit. It's been a known bad pattern since like the 90s.
  Product guy wouldn't listen. Not sure if he didn't care or didn't understand. Either is bad.
  This happens all over. People don't care. They don't understand. They don't listen to people that do. They have their own metrics and goals that are disjoint from actual value.
  
  Pretty much spot on. Late 90s and early 2000s was there height of platforms being very careful and strict about things like HIG (or on the other extreme, "skins").
  Now UI is barely constrained by those sensibilities and it's about marketing and showing novelty more than usable.
  
  Got any details on the type of stuff your mom shared for improved UIs?
  
  Not much anymore, sorry to say - this was a few decades ago! I remember her showing us some mockups on index cards and other paper-based models, showing what different user actions might display (I was studying computer science at the same time, so it was a bit of a common interest). I also remember her talking about watching groups of users trying to use a piece of software, and using eye tracking along with mouse tracking and other devices to see where their focus tended to be drawn, where they spent their time, etc. as they tried to accomplish certain tasks; studying different aspects of discoverability.
  I also remember she was a big fan of Saturn's cars - apparently they were big into usability, and as a consequence were easy to maintain and tended to avoid things like problematic blind spots. I do remember changing the headlight was extremely easy - you pulled two pins and the whole headlight assembly popped out!
- How many times do we need to implement a fucking checkbox?
  The vibe coding "paradigm" says: once or twice for every checkbox that appears on the page 😂
- What's wrong with infinite scroll?
  
  As it's most often seen on news sites - where scrolling too far gives you another article - a handful of reasons.
  One: there are frequently still links (think "about us" / "contact us" kind of pages) in the footer that you might need to access, which you can invariably now never reach, because as soon as they're in view they're replaced by more content.
  Two: as the parent poster so accurately put it, "fucking with the browser history". It becomes entirely indeterminate whether the back button now returns to the previous site, or just goes back by one piece of content.
  Three: the new content is almost certainly unrelated to the page I started on, and not of any interest to me.
  
  This was just happening to me with Amazon. I wanted to get to the support link in the footer but they always loaded new stuff before I could click on it
  
  You want to navigate somewhere then navigate back? Haha, no.
  If it's not implemented properly, resources (images, videos, ads) don't get unloaded when they're no longer visible.
  Some fuckwit wannabe designers actually put the footer UNDER infinite scrolling pages.
  
  If it’s not implemented properly, resources (images, videos, ads) don’t get unloaded when they’re no longer visible.
  Doing this causes it's own problems. Try searching on a page that unloads everything out of view. Or saving it
  
  Breaks the scroll bar, for starters.
  
  When you're dragging the scrollbar down, the page suddenly loads new content and you're lost.
  When you're going through a long page and you want to come back to it later, you can't come back to where you left.
  
  Plus if you want to find older content, you can't just skip to a page, you need to scroll through every goddamn item until you find what you're looking for.
- I’ve actually had designers come to me with a concept for “a visual indicator that shows the user how they are progressing through the page”
  I have seen those on blog and news sites, a thin horizontal bar (sometimes under the floating title) that fills as you scroll to the bottom. I don't get it either.
  
  That was it. So it wasn't even original stupidity. Sad.
- forcing new tabs drives me crazy. like how dare you. i even tried to disable it in firefox, but when i do it makes all 'open in browser' things overwrite the current tab :(
  
  I hate the opposite even more - sites that block you from opening new tabs when you need to, as if you somehow don't ever need to be able to access multiple pieces of information concurrently, or return directly to your current context.
  "Oh, we're following the single-page app paradigm." No, you're a fucking website. Follow the fucking website paradigm.
  You can just tell these idiots have never actually done any real work.
- This is a complete misnomer. Modern UI designers that are forced to do what corporate wants are competent. It is large scale marketing that doesn't have a clue as to what people want in a UX.

193 comments