Ask HN: What are your UI pet peeves? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are your UI pet peeves?

4 pointsgjvnq9 comments

What elements of "modern" UIs drove you nuts, don't work, are stupid or you simply don't like? Also, do you have any suggestions for improvements?

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- In google maps the default colours blend in to each other, especially things like tracks that you are likely to try to look at in the outdoors in sunlight. Rediculous!

- Any time you break the visual/categorical heirarchy of a list of options. For instance, related items appearing in different categories due to a technical similarity to other features that are not known to the user. What?

- Animated slideouts that are too resource intensive/slow or that dont work at the desired zoom level. Come on!

- Uninformative lockups/freezouts when something is loading. It should tell you what is happening. Huh?

- Opaque screens that say things like "Updating..." with no way to know if things have stalled or any way to see whats really going on. Grrr.

- Frequently used option should be available in one click/tap, often times these arent able to be mapped to another option and are buried in contextual menus! Nooo!

Also: In web apps for thing like email much of the precious screen real estate is taken up with margins and titles (for aesthetic reasons?) and there is usually no way to change to single line mode, necessitating scrolling.

I don't know if this is modern UI or just plainly stupid UI, but recently I had to use the Riot messenger web app and I was looking for the page to show the device/encryption/fingerprint information. I tried to find it in the room-settings which is where it used to be, but no not there. Then I looked in the main settings, also not there. Looked over and over again. In their attempt to simplify the Riot UI, they placed that information inside the chat bubble's settings and only there. Right, the only way to get to it now is to right click any chat bubble in a room and access the page from its options. Nothing indicates it. I guess you are supposed to just know to right click the chat bubbles for that stuff. I'm not infallible though. Maybe there was some indication and I just missed it.

Don't ask me to re-enter the same thing again and again. For example, don't keep asking me to enter my address over and over again. I'm filling in a mortgage application and the fact that I need to type in my address for a 3rd time made me come back to this thread.

Just don't distract me from what I'm doing: popups, interruptions, making me do something unrelated. I opened a program to do X, not Y.

Don't prompt me to update when I open your program, especially if it's a long update process. (Visual studio on Mac is a big offender, Photoshop used to do this, but I haven't used it in years)

Don't move text while I'm reading it.

Almost all alerts, emails, and other ploys to increase engagement

Netflix tries to make you "engage" with it more than intended and hence it seems to be a feature that items go missing, everything takes a long time to navigate to and the appearance of thumbnails change. Its literally designed to get in your way so you have to run a gauntlet. Its like how they put junk food near the checkout in supermarkets... it's also trying to make it seem like there is more variety and choice than in actuality. Really looking forward to some 3rd party way to navigate Netflix that has less of these dark patterns.

Honestly, I'm starting to get tired of Netflix. There's some original content I like, but the quality keeps going down as the price goes up.

It's making me consider going back to getting disks in the mail.

oh my god, this tangent has a steep slope!

fresh in my mind are "mini players". i spend minutes trying to make them go away on youtube, twitter, and others. then, i give up and reload the page. so painful!!!

most websites don't care about readability. my zoom level is above 100% on all my browsers and all my devices due to bad eyesight. this breaks tons of websites. medium, for example, is unreadable! headers, accept cookies footers, ads, sidebar, and you are left with a tiny area for what you came for. and quickly leave too.

my phone has black and white turned on by default. i am tired of being triggered by bright notifications & colors. most websites have poorly chosen, undistinguishable colors.

it is 2020 and we have made it hard to edit text in a textbox on a smartphone. move one character left, right, delete one character. this is just so hard on a smartphone! we got rid of buttons for touch, but my nokia 3310 did it just fine!

etc...

I loathe the material design floating action button (little plus button) in the lower right of apps.

My eyes are just never drawn there it seems so unnatural to look for it.

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