Ask Lemmy

I like chunkier scrollbars. Fuck the tiny disappearing scrollbars where you need to mouse over... somewhere.. to maybe be graced with its presence, only for it to be 1px wide for some reason.
Also fuck the endless scroll, especially when you already know what you're looking for is on page 4 because you had to reload the page for some reason but the infinite scroll didn't save your position and you have to go down (without an actual scrollbar) only to "load more" 3 times until you're (maybe) on page 4.

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.

Colorblind people exist and should be able to use the site. At least, based on my real experience, this must be an unpopular opinion amongst UI folks glares

If it doesn't need JavaScript, it shouldn't have JavaScript.

If it doesn't need dynamic styling, it shouldn't have dynamic styling (especially if it makes other elements move around or become occluded).

If it doesn't need images, it shouldn't have images. When it does need images, they should be in an appropriate format and minimum useful filesize.

It shouldn't have audio. It doesn't need audio, and should not have it.

• 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!

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

The hamburger button is an abomination, we need the proper menus back

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.

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.

Mobile phones have caused a dark age of UI design

• If it can be done without a touch screen DO NOT use a touch screen. And if you use physical buttons, they should have tactile feedback
• Toggles are just more ambiguous over-designed checkboxes

I hate round corners for my windows, give me crisp sharp edges and not some soft watered down UI

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.

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 prefer light mode.

Just be in a properly lit room. Open your window curtains. Don’t blast your display on max brightness. It’s actually easier on the eyes.

I hate vertical tabs!

Fuck burger menus.

Really big mouse cursor.

I don't have sight issues at all, but you spend more time tracking the mouse than you think. And after less than a day the real estate it takes up doesn't bother me.

The Gnome UI is great, without any extensions. An absolute game changer for laptops.
You can navigate it quickly with just the meta key, arrow keys and a touchpad or scroll wheel.
No memorizing key combos or aiming for small icons with the mouse.
Everything is hidden when you don't need it and prominently visible when you do.

Get rid of the tool bars. All of them. Menu, navigation, window decoration, cookie consent, status, tab and start.

They suck. We live in a 16:9-21:9 world, where it's bad enough in landscape. When it's in portrait, where half of the real estate is taken up by a keyboard, and that space really matters, it's almost worse. Letterboxing is dumb when it's black bars on a movie, I don't need its cluttered cousin on every application and webpage I'm on.

Vertical overlays or context menus can be enabled by default if you must, but give me shortcuts to do the even the most esoteric operation and I'll gladly learn them.

I don't know how this is an unpopular opinion after a half centuary of dealing with increasingly multileveled toolbars, but it must be because toolbars are not going anywhere.

If you have to have a toolbar, at least make it go away when you scroll.

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 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.

If all you want is to read 5000 words of something you were looking for .... just display those 5000 words and nothing else.

We don't need graphics, pictures, images, blocking, ads, pop-ups, videos or any other suggestions .... just give us the content, it's all we want sometimes.

I have a right to a page with all configurable options. A simplified interface is great but I shouldn't need to hunt for ages in a terminal or read source to find a config option.

Workbench (Amiga GUI from 1985) is still unmatched in features 40 years later. And it ran off a floppy disk.

I don't know when macOS gained the ability to change the colour of the cursor. Windows got it in 10 recently, or 11, I'm not sure which exactly (I'm a Mac user but we use Windows at work). But in Workbench, you could open a VERY basic pixel art tool and completely customise the cursor. In 1985! I was fond of making crosshairs.

More than that, something the major OSes haven't done since, is two-stage icons. Folders were called drawers in Workbench, but otherwise, same thing. One click would select the drawer (invert the colours), then the second click would open the drawer, and spawn its contents in another window. Applications had it, too. WordPerfect was an Amiga 1000 computer with monitor, and its idle state was off. When active, it would be turned on and running WordPerfect. Yes, in the damn icon. It wasn't animated, but it showed the program on the monitor. Icons could also be larger, and would remember their position on the screen, which meant you could hide files by placing them in the corner of the screen and resizing the drawer window. Thus, you'd have to position the window a certain way and drag it out to see those files. (You could also just use dir in a command line.)

Anyway, I thought it was awesome. I guess most people didn't.

Android's modern gesture navigation is awful. I like gesture navigation on ubuntu touch, sailfish, webos, just about everywhere I've used it except android, but I cannot stand android's. Why does swiping from both sides do the same thing? Why does swiping from the bottom do multiple different things depending on how you swipe? Why does swiping along the bottom to switch apps rearrange them so going back and forth is unpredictable? The old two button semi-gesture navigation was so much better.

Your app / website is most likely not big enough to rely on icons instead of text for buttons. Same applies to most other unique UI choices.

UI that isn't customizable is shit. I don't mean it needs to be Myspace level, but enough to make it comfortable to use.

Someone else said they hate infinite scroll. I love infinite scroll. Implement both.

I was interested in an open source fitness tracking app that didn't use a measurement system I'm familiar with. The dev basically said "fuck off" when someone asked about implementing it. Well, the dev has less exposure and their app has less users as a result.

Computer UI has been made to follow mobile UI when the two have very different sets of constraints. It is ok for a computer program to look cluttered; that's how you can access everything easily.