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Comment by todfox | Hacker News Reader

For more of these daily annoyances: https://grumpy.website

The growing user hostility of UIs makes me want to stop developing software and even stop using computers. I started using computers because they made more sense to me than a lot of things. Now, I'm encountering these little moments of illogic and unreason every hour of the day.

It's not just beginners who need little cues. I'm deeply familiar with the APIs behind many of these monstrosities and yet I still find myself annoyed or momentarily confused by UIs that minimize, obscure, and hide in the name of Design.

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Thanks for that link. One related to this one just got me on DVD Netflix's payment settings site.

https://grumpy.website/post/0VkVVuQ6t

There is no button to remove your card info. It had my old ZIP code and updating it wasn't working (it would still fail address verification). So to update the value, you are somehow expected to know to clear the field and then save, then enter the correct value and save a second time.

Except it doesn't work.[0] What does work is entering a different credit card, saving it, then reentering your original card with the correct ZIP code.[1] So bad design with no affordances and a broken help function, lead to a long-time customer wanting to unsubscribe out of frustration.

[0] Neither did the chat function to ask for help. I had to talk to a support person who told me how this was supposed to work. A phone call to support is an expensive cost to a business based on volume.

[1] Which made me think they were storing extra info using my card number as a key. And that's not great.

I tried reading the footer to get the contact information for on https://grumpy.website but it keeps doom-scrolling and only visible for a fraction of a second. What an irony.

I dream of a day when we go back to pagination. No, not just pagination numbers on the bottom of the page to flip through pages, but also the URL should reflect that and be able to share the 7th page with someone using a link.

For some experiences, content needs to be updated in page 1 (google is a good example). How would you then share page 7? that requirement could only be met if content was static (no updates) or the ordering of results was old to new. Am I missing something?

That's true. Pagination makes sense when it is static and not chronological, thanks for pointing that out. But, the problem still exists that I cannot get to the footer where there seems to be some contact information of the author :-)

You're right, the behaviour of the footer clearly creates a major usability issue. I personally dislike infinite scrolling with a passion. I can't see any big advantages and there are a lot of cons. I keep my hopes high that one day I will see it die... like Adobe Flash :)

The classical solution is to have a "content before ID_OF_LAST_ITEM_ON_PREVIOUS_PAGE" url, though there isn't really a way to do that and also display page numbers on the bottom.

Many thanks for the insight. I am now going on a rabbit hole to discover what that solution implies, how it works, etc. :)

I hate it when people share page numbers like that with me, because many sites have things that are either "ranked" somehow, or in reverse-chronological order, which means that the contents of page 3 are constantly changing.

Still remember trying to browse fonts on Google Fonts and my browser crashing as I scrolled too far. Shame on me for wanting to look at too many! At the very least they need a way to unload the earlier entries and reclaim resources.

You can just turn the site over with the button on the top, and all the information will stay fixed (:

You can also just go to any post, there will be no scrolling, too

See https://grumpy.website/post/0Q8s2Zc3p

Or, if you have javascript off, you get no pagination and no scroll, making it look like there are only 6ish items

I can see how this one might be confusing- https://grumpy.website/post/0Vp0pSilq

but the site is misrepresenting the state. That user's state is still "muted," the red line indicates that it is a client side mute (so the user who checked the mute box can't hear them, but everyone else can) while the mute icon without a red line indicates that the other user has muted themselves; they're not transmitting audio.

There is a third state- Server Mutes turn the entire mute icon red and is a "far-end" mute. No one in the voice channel can hear that user and the user probably can't unmute themselves.

Looking more at the site I feel like the point it's trying to convey would be much stronger if it went for a quality over quantity approach and/or proposed solutions to some of these problems. A lot of them seem to almost intentionally miss the point of the UI.

For example, the airpods post[0] notes, "Want to listen to the podcast on your iPhone while playing a game on your iPad? Well tough luck using your AirPods for that," which is just completely false.

Sticking to posts like this[1][2] would lead to a much higher quality website imo.

[0]: https://grumpy.website/post/0VaJdRL-y

[1]: https://grumpy.website/post/0VlYhfUMg

[2]: https://grumpy.website/post/0VfEvLg0j

The Discord mute icon having three states is no excuse for it being bad.

Unmuted -> The mic, no diagonal line.

User muted -> Red diagonal line.

Server muted -> Could be the muted icon with a lock next to it; or the diagonal red line replaced by vertical bars like a jail cell; or even a cross instead of a diagonal, maybe within a circle for further distinction.

Those are still three states with just different shapes. If you hover the symbol it tells you what it is and if that changed it to your system tomorrow I’d still need to hover to figure out what everything means. Unless replaced by text, I don’t see how changing the icons that all mean some form of “muted” really does anything.

I post this everytime, but for the love of UX, even if your the most hardcore code/terminal junkie… and never see a user near your program…read the book called About Face : Essentials of Interaction Design!

This is hilarious, but I'm puzzled by his reaction to a hamburger menu:

> Oh-oh. Drag-n-drop icon used for a dropdown menu - May 8, 2021

https://grumpy.website/post/0V_dyk3EP

Horizontal lines (or sometimes an array of dots) are sometimes used as a "grip" icon to represent reorderable list rows.

I know, I've used them in my own designs. It just sounded like he saw a hamburger menu now for the first time 5 weeks ago! Or maybe it is some kind of joke?

This is the case for many people. Another explanation is that he was being empathetic.

As a designer himself, he probably tries to approach design examinations from many different perspectives (we do this at work with new designs: if I was an 70 year old woman, what would I see here?) to find edge cases where the design doesn't work.

Hamburger menu icons usually have a fixed position and are part of a header or something of that sort. Floating lines like that would always read as "drag grip" to me.

Everyone sees the hamburger icon for the first time. It certainly isn't obvious what it means. You need to decide what is more important, that your site look contemporary or that your users can find the information/product/service they are looking for.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/hamburger-menus/

We have found that people are afraid to mess things up, and don’t know what three lines means, so never click them. A lot more than you would think.

I don't think I'd seen a hamburger menu rendered on a list, for each item, before. Normally a "hamburger menu" appears once, probably at the top of the page, in some kind of navigation bar. In that context, that icon definitely reads "drag to re-order list item" to me.

You're only puzzled because of its ubiquity, and your accustom to it. Nothing about it inherently says 'opens a menu from the side'.

Late "edit": Turns out I'm the confused one! (Bit of sleep dep...) I thought this was the main menu for a page, just in a weird low position, but it's the menu that appears on hover for each item and in this context indeed would be interpreted as a drag handle. In this context perhaps something unambiguous like three vertical dots would have been better?

Also I agree with you -- perhaps the three lines represent a pictogram of a list (vertically stacked menu items?). And the triple dot version is either a compacted version of the same, or a vertical ellipsis?

Sure, but that's not an affordance. If it were vertical instead of horizontal lines for example, it'd be like a grip horizontal pulling.

There used to be a Hall of Shame for GUIs on the web that I used to read around 2002 or thereabouts. Very similar to this, only for native programs.

Is it one of these?

https://wiby.me/?q=hall+of+shame

Yup! Wasted an hour there just now :-)

There's also https://userinyerface.com/

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