12 ms·

It's not just scrollbars. It's the elimination of window borders. Aside from not being able to differentiate one window from another similarly colored window i

It's not just scrollbars. It's the elimination of window borders. Aside from not being able to differentiate one window from another similarly colored window in the background, it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window. It's the overloading of the title bar with so much shit like search boxes and extraneous buttons that a user has almost no place to grip to move the window. It's the way that tabbing between text boxes either doesn't behave the way you'd expect, or doesn't work at all. It's all the tooltips that interrupt and litter the interface and, at times, block out things that you are looking at. And 95% of the time, the information provided in these tooltips are redundant or useless. It's amazing how much damage these cargo-cult UI/UX morons have done in the past ten years. They threw out several decades of usability pioneered by real HID experts for something that looks pretty but doesn't fucking work for a lot of people. Applications like Postman, Teams (and pretty much all of MSFT's applications these days), Chrome, and Insomnia should be case studies on how to not design user interfaces. They are about as bad as desktop software gets. The biggest sin is that this would be a non-issue if these things were configurable at the windowing system level and could not be overriden by app developers. But the trend has gone in the opposite direction; instead of providing more configurability, Windows and Gnome/GTK are actually taking away options that have existed before.

skylanh 3y ago
> Aside from not being able to differentiate one window from another similarly colored window in the background I thought this was my slowly acquired technical debt: "what option have I missed? Is this like Aero and I have to turn it off?" The "where the eff is the scrollbar thumb? ffs" situation has occurred more times then I care for.
masswerk 3y ago
> it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window. This is what the resize box is/was for. (It's actually draggable edges with no "meat" to them, which introduce the conflict by overloading an element, which is also just a pixel wide.) *) The resize box used to sit below the very bottom of the vertical scrollbar, just below the down arrow button, as a distinct and dedicated handle for resizing windows. Mind how this is in the direct vicinity of any scroll buttons which may be used to see more than what is exposed by the initial view. It's the quasi "natural" origin and anchor of any basic interactions with the viewport. (Somewhat ironically, while the resize box has mostly vanished from application UIs, it is still rendered by web browsers in certain circumstances. E.g., with textarea elements with scrollbars and resize enabled. With most UIs, there will be no related scroll buttons anymore, though.)
- etrautmann 3y ago
  Man it was maddening when the window was taller than the screen and you couldn’t access the one box in the bottom corner to resize it.
  - masswerk 3y ago
    Ah, Win98 installation dialogs… :-)
  - Izkata 3y ago
    IIRC in that era, the leftmost part of the title bar could be clicked to get a menu of options that contained Minimize, Maximize, Move, Resize, Close, and maybe one or two others. If you chose Move or Resize, the mouse would change cursors and just moving the mouse would change the window, then you'd click to get out of it. I'm pretty sure this had a button there in like Windows 3.11 or 98, that I think was later hidden so you'd just click the title bar to get it? Edit: https://www.functionx.com/windows/Lesson06.htm https://www.functionx.com/windows/Lesson06.htm You'd click the application icon in the title bar, then in WinXP you could reach it by right-clicking anywhere in the title bar. And in the Windows 3 era, it was an actual button (IIRC the minus on the left wasn't minimize, it was this menu, and the down arrow on the right was minimize): https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/w/win3x.htm https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/w/win3x.htm
    - xtracto 3y ago
      You brought back a muscle memory I forgot I had: ALT+Space would activate the Control Menu [1] and then pressed down twice and enter to resize the window using the keyboard arrow keys. [1] http://the_messenger3.tripod.com/refwine1.html#ControlMenu http://the_messenger3.tripod.com/refwine1.html#ControlMenu Behold Ye Olde Intrrnet haha
      - t_mahmood 3y ago
        I think you can use ALT + F6 to start resizing (On GNOME at least)
callalex 3y ago
Doesn’t a heavy drop shadow solve the window border problem? Although these days those seem to be fading or disappearing as well.
- pseudalopex 3y ago
  Not when the windows are dark.
  - Findecanor 3y ago
    I used to have that problem when using xterm: white text on black background. I worked around it by writing a script that gave each new xterm instance a different dark background colour. Each window by its own felt like it was still black but when you put two next to each other you'd notice the difference in hue. Then I switched to mate-terminal which put a nice big scrollbar in the right-side border of each window, so I didn't need that script any more.
- codalan 3y ago
  Yes
- syldarion 3y ago
  I'm sure it's negligible these days, but there's also the concern of an increased graphics load since you'll have to do an extra pass for the transparency. But I don't want to dive too far into the mindset of "everything must be optimized to the max".
  - callalex 3y ago
    My 0.3GHz iMac in 1996 could draw and resize window drop shadows at 60fps while simultaneously encoding an MP3 without a hitch. It’s seriously inexpensive computationally.
    - sreekotay 3y ago
      What OS do you think you were running in 1996?
marcus_holmes 3y ago
I am coming to the opinion that Windows XP was the maximum usable interface, and we should have stopped there [0]. But then, I might just be old and telling the kids to get off my lawn. [0] this is definitely true for Windows. All subsequent versions of Windows have had worse UX.
- jchw 3y ago
  I absolutely agree. For at least 10 years now, my dream has been to essentially recreate the Windows 2000/XP UX as a Linux desktop environment. That said, doing so would basically require creating everything from the ground up, because merely theming some existing toolkit and window manager to look like XP is not at all the point. And frankly, there HAVE been SOME useful UI/UX improvements in the past couple decades, like, FTA, minimaps. But can you imagine a much more conservative desktop, with highly integrated apps, based on the "good old days" of desktop design with just a touch of modern elements when they improve on things? ... Truth told, the closest thing in existence is probably SerenityOS... but it really would be more practical if there was a Linux desktop for this. Every so often I fantasize about how I might start such a project. It's been like that forever now.
  - cwillu 3y ago
    If you haven't already, look at xfce.
    - jchw 3y ago
      I did like XFCE at one point, but it never really did quite nail the UX for me. A lot of the problem is more on GTK+2 than it was anything else. (Obligatory mention of no thumbnails in file dialog; I used to patch GTK by hand for this!) Now with newer versions of GTK, this problem has unfortunately gotten worse for me, and I don't really prefer XFCE very much. Worseyet, I've gotten used to wlroots giving me good support for things that never really worked well in X11, and XFCE's plan regarding X11 and Wayland going into the future is still somewhat unclear. I also tried LXDE and LXQt as well. I actually thought LXQt might be the one for me, but it was a bit buggy and lacked a lot of much-needed maintenance. Also, although I'm glad Linux developers don't always make a habit of just simply throwing out ideas and code that works fine, it does bother me how antiquated some things have gotten. DBus is the best desktop IPC option on Linux, and that's not really a great thing in my opinion. Likewise, it sucks that most file archivers still work by popening some command and parsing its output, occasionally breaking on edge cases, usually having limited support for the kinds of advanced functionality you'd get in Windows archive tools. I do understand that making actually-good applications takes time, but over the course of the past couple decades it doesn't feel like much progress has been made here. I mean hell, speaking of archive tools... FreeBSD has been working on libarchive for ages and it'll likely be integrated with fucking Windows before it's integrated with common Linux desktops, which will probably mostly farm out to CLI tools like unar and zip directly. This is the same approach, with the same exact problems, that I remember being used as far back as when I started using Linux, in programs like Xfe. Needless to say... my feelings are complicated.
vidarh 3y ago
I love not having window borders waste screen estate, and solve the grabbing issue by having the windows key + left mouse button bound to moving windows and windows key + right mouse button to resize. I can "grab" the window anywhere, with no need to hit borders or a title bar (which I also don't have...)
- foresto 3y ago
  The point is not to deny your preferences, but rather that they shouldn't be forced upon everyone else, especially when they break decades of proven usability design and practice.
  - 6510 3y ago
    I disagree, we should force him to use scrollbars until he gets it. Kids these days!
  - vidarh 3y ago
    My point is that the "proven" usability design and practice isn't all that proven. There is a whole lot of unexplored or underexplored design space, and when people are complaining about having space to grab a window border away from them due to a tension between competing needs it's worth considering that there are alternatives where that tension just goes away: You only need wider window borders because you've already decided that you need to grab the border, rather than decided you just want an efficient way of moving or resizing the window. Maybe that genuinely is the only option that works for you, but most people haven't tried alternatives. I'll note that lots of user interfaces has this kind of modal mechanism to indicate which class of action you want to take on an object so you don't need to target some tiny visual area, which is always going to be too small for some people nearly no matter how big you make it. We're used to doing that. Most people just don't do it with windows.
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  That’s nice as a pro feature, but completely undiscoverable for a regular user.
graycat 3y ago
Along these lines, recently happened to see at the Web site "Big Red Car" https://themusingsofthebigredcar.com/returns-driving-retail/#comment-6294665157 https://themusingsofthebigredcar.com/returns-driving-retail/... Edit: Somehow this URL leads to some spot on the Web page of the URL but does not always lead to the actual post. To find the post on that Web page, the post starts with "To me, all of retailing has one"
- 6510 3y ago
  I've figured it out! You have to open their disquss profile, ctrl+f search for "to me, a" then click on the "7 comments" part of "Discussion on Littlefield Advisors 7 comments" then ctrl+f search for "to me, a" again and there you click on the ".. days ago" link under the username. https://disqus.com/home/discussion/littlefieldadvisors/returns_driving_retail/#comment-6294665157 https://disqus.com/home/discussion/littlefieldadvisors/retur... Now everyone can bookmark it, or print it and glue it to the wall. edit: You should really be using firefox, click "view" > "page style" > "no style" to read that page. The anchor doesn't work anymore if you disable the style. They could have just <a name="comment-6294665157"></a> ?
  - graycat 3y ago
    Thanks! Uh, in this thread here at Hacker News we were, uh, considering, uh, "user interface"???? Yup!
barrysteve 3y ago
It's more, there's no attempt to structure information anymore. All the settings menus are a nightmare of lists upon lists and each app has a completely random layout for it's menu-ing, often with links to external sites, for what could be set locally. It is geniunely confusing to try and understand the designers intent. I can never tell if I missed a setting, or if it was never meant to exist in this menu at all. The amount of times I've had to Google how to change basic settings is way too high, even for Games where the experience is half the ticket value. CS2 has a settings menu with text buttons at the top (like a tab) that drag you down to an arbitrary point in a long list of settings. There is no tabs, it's impossible to mentally separate what the text button represents mentally, from every other option, because they all point to the same page anyway. Why bother with the buttons? The semantic meaning of concepts don't relate to each other and are not structured accordingly. It is waaay too unnecessarily difficult to navigate around computing. I miss Macromedia Flash's UI. I didn't use the program much, but it was so simple and easy to use. One my biggest drives for privacy and self made solutions, is to get away from the experience and knowledge pollution we've been seeing lately.
- jorvi 3y ago
  This was one of the biggest powers of Mac OS X, before Electron became big. Not many companies and people developed for Mac OS X, but the ones that did pretty strongly adhered to Apple’s design guidelines, partially because it just made dev live easier and partially because your application would stick out like a sore thumb if you didn’t. At least the global menu still lives on macOS. I’m sad Gnome 3 didn’t pilfer it from Unity.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    >your application would stick out like a sore thumb if you didn’t. Anybody else remember the UI from the Photoshop plugins from Kai[0]? You clicked the plugin, and then you were looking at some alien organic texture full screen with a few adjustment sliders. That was someone that said, "I see your UI suggestions, but I have other ideas" [0] https://mprove.de/script/99/kai/ https://mprove.de/script/99/kai/
rayiner 3y ago
“Morons” is the right word. I don’t like to gratuitously shit on people doing their jobs. But what the hell? I can’t move a window anymore without clicking around like an idiot to figure out what’s part of the title bar and what’s a button. Every time I start “New Teams,” it asks me if I want to go back to Old Teams. If I open a PDF in New Teams from the file browser, it’s not obvious how to close the PDF without losing your place in the file system. And on top of that, everything is grindingly slow. A lot of people working at Microsoft/Apple/Google are bad their jobs and should feel bad.
- 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
  > “Morons” is the right word never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice if they don't break things how can they fix them next year and add it as "new look UI"
- fingerlocks 3y ago
  Oh wow I thought the New Teams menu was an internal dog food thing for Microsoft employees. I’m so sorry, it’s absolutely maddening. Nobody likes Teams at Microsoft either, and many hours a week are wasted complaining about it.
  - david422 3y ago
    I used to use Teams, and it had this feature where if you clicked on the app icon (macOs) enough times a debug menu appeared. It was clearly aimed for internal testing. But there was no timer attached to it, so if, over the course of your day, you clicked on it in the dock, eventually the menu appeared. It seemed pretty half baked to have a debug menu available to your users in the wild.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > Nobody likes Teams at Microsoft either Then why can't they make Teams not terrible?
    - fingerlocks 3y ago
colordrops 3y ago
Some of those things you mention are configurable at the windowing system level depending on your system. Using SwayWM with xdg-desktop-portal gives control of some of the things you mention, and with keystrokes and tiling so that there is never a need to grab windows by the edge, or almost ever use the mouse for that matter.
EGreg 3y ago
Is it just me or is Discord super unintuitive? And Slack is becoming that way too. Telegram by contrast is a pleasure!
- batiudrami 3y ago
  Discord’s interface is extremely busy but if you ever used IRC I think it’s fairly intuitive. It’s a much more complicated app than Telegram with a lot more functionality.
  - kalikrates 3y ago
    As a long-time IRC user who never had problems with various IRC clients, I find Discord's interface quite counter-intuitive. First example that comes to my head: I click on a channel that I haven't visited for some time, the view focuses on old messages (from the last time I visited it) rather than on the newest ones (which is typically what I want). And going to the newest ones isn't even trivial, I don't know a way other than scrolling down all the way, which may be quite annoying if the channel is very active and there is a lot of material to scroll past.
- jabroni_salad 3y ago
  I wish telegram didn't have so much shady stuff under it. It's by far the nicest chat experience.
  - fodkodrasz 3y ago
    I don't know if I think it has more shady stuff than whatsapp or other mainstream platforms (so sad we have to write this as there is no open federated standard *in widespread use* as with email), which are backed by megacorps famous for spying on users and selling it to whoever, and being digital goons of governments when it comes to privacy and freedom of speech. All are the same from my perspective, with UX being a main differentiator.
    - CRConrad 3y ago
bsder 3y ago
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the bane that is "progressive scrolling". "No, we won't actually load the text at the bottom of the scollbar until you scroll down to it--and we'll only load it in a dribble." @#$%^&*()_+!
- bentcorner 3y ago
  I recall a site that had progressive scrolling and some content in a footer I was trying to get to...
  - BLKNSLVR 3y ago
    Been there done that. You have to scroll faster than the combination of bandwidth size and JS computation. Turn it into a game: visit the site progressively working backwards through your old phones until you can 'win'. Then see if you've got time to take a screenshot. If you actually need to click a link in the footer the only way to win is not to play.
    - aembleton 3y ago
      Or turn off js
- a_e_k 3y ago
  I hate this about the New Outlook, especially since I like to sort new messages to the bottom. And if I go to a different folder and back I have to deal with it all over again.
- kps 3y ago
  Breaks searching, too.
- Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
  Some sites do this and it's broken in that you have to scroll past it before it displays.
- toyg 3y ago
3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
It's a basic evolutionary principle. When there's no selective pressure, species breed for superficial beauty at the expense of other traits. So to get rid of that problem, we need to allow users to apply selective pressure. But the question is how. Individually our voices are lost, and when you need to log into app X to use the service within, you get no choice of app Y with a different UI.
- BLKNSLVR 3y ago
  "Influencers" as that particular 'apex predator'.
refcherry 3y ago
seems like what all these issues have in common is when apps just go "fuck your configs, we want our app to look like/do this instead" that last paragraph would really solve things, but also not being able to have that level of control does sorta suck for when you might really need it (and not just want to piss of the user lol)
parasti 3y ago
Glad to see Postman mentioned. It has probably the most counterintuitive UI I've ever used. Sometimes I procrastinate by counting how many hamburger menus I can see simultaneously in Postman.
NL807 3y ago
> Applications like Postman, Teams (and pretty much all of MSFT's applications these days), Chrome, and Insomnia should be case studies on how to not design user interfaces. They are about as bad as desktop software gets. Sadly Tunderbird devs drank their coolaid, as evident in the latest release.
- kaba0 3y ago
  The border between UI churn and “I am old and dislike any changes” is very blurry. I have only tried it for a short time and I think they did a good job. The same for Jetbrains’ new UI. If you put every UI change in the same bucket, how can the situation improve?
  - NL807 3y ago
    The UI is not terrible, but it feels very unpolished. The font line spacing seems off and too narrow, the toolbar and other UI components drift and shift when you switch tabs, the main window menu is in the wrong location, etc.
thiht 3y ago
I honestly don’t relate to anything you say. It’s like for every UI evolution you find everything that could theoretically go wrong, and say that it’s definitely a problem. Like: > Aside from not being able to differentiate one window from another similarly colored window What? When has that ever happened to anyone? I use Postman and Chrome daily and I have no idea what you think is so unusable about them?
- david422 3y ago
  Open up two black terminal windows on Ubuntu that overlap and there is literally zero differentiation between the two.
  - thiht 3y ago
    Ok, but how is that an actual problem? You can use visual context to differentiate both windows, you’re not a visual AI. Also when does that happen that you have 2 terminals that overlap? I’d rather have my UIs be optimized for the 99% of usage, I don’t care if they lack affordances for cases that never happen in practice
    - david422 3y ago
      You must be the UI designer then? Works for me, don't care if anyone else has issues?
alanbernstein 3y ago
Not that you're wrong, but IMO the moving and resizing complaints are resolved by the Ubuntu behavior of (IIRC) alt-leftclick-drag and alt-middleclick-drag. It completely eliminates the need to find any special target within the window: just click anywhere inside it.
- Propelloni 3y ago
  This X11 (probably also in Wayland) feature Meta+mousebutton for resize, move, etc. has been there for the last 30 years or something. Yet it is not widely known, so let's be honest, it IS hard to discover. It can't be a justificiation for destroying the UI, esp. window borders.
- idoubtit 3y ago
  That's just the top of another iceberg: features are increasingly harder to discover. I use i3wm, which is a tiling WM. There's no window borders, so this resizing feature (W-leftclick and W-rightclick) has been there for many years, alongside a keyboard-only way to move or resize. That's hard to find unless you read the documentation, but that's alright, because the target user is supposed to be a power user. But how are casual users of Windows or Gnome supposed to resize a no-tile window? Or to find a feature with no visual clue? I've had this problem myself on web sites where I can't guess where the links/buttons are, or with phone apps where I have to try several gestures until one of them does what I wanted.
- Findecanor 3y ago
  I have used that on my Linux PC running Window Maker, for decades. I learned about the shortcut in its config app. But that is also yet another thing that wouldn't work with touch/pen-based interfaces, when your only keyboard is an on-screen keyboard.
- iefbr14 3y ago
  Not very useful for people that can only use one hand.
mackrevinack 3y ago
that really bugs me any time i have to use a Windows computer. on linux (on pop os or zorin os at least) you just hold down the super/windows key and then left click and drag anywhere on the window to move it. pop os also puts a thick border around that active window which makes it much easier to see where you are
- Propelloni 3y ago
  There is a Powertoy to introduce this behaviour in MS Windows, I think it is Fancy Zones. OTOH, there is always Open Source Software to the rescue, in this case AltDrag and/or AltSnap.
zorrolovsky 3y ago
> It's amazing how much damage these cargo-cult UI/UX morons have done in the past ten years. They threw out several decades of usability pioneered by real HID experts for something that looks pretty but doesn't fucking work for a lot of people. No need to throw insults. I love HN because it's one of the few places where civil debate trumps the hateful tone of all other platforms. I fundamentally agree with usability being more important than aesthetics. But I don't know what you mean by UX/UI cargo-cult morons. I'm a UX/UI leader with 20+ years of experience. To me, the main culprits of crimes against usability are business leaders and marketers, not designers (although these do bear some of the blame). Yes, there are designers who think form is more important than function and push for small scrollbars. However, when you explain the issues they often back down and create usable designs. I wish the same was true for C-level leaders, marketing leaders and managers. In UI terms they're both ignorant and opinionated. A dangerous combination. Their demands are typically "I like the scrollbar of this website", " the design doesn't look modern" and similar. The amount of fighting that takes to push for usability and accessibility is excruciating. We need some roles and ranks to act more professionally, and trust the experts. And yes, we also need some designers to think usability first.
- watwut 3y ago
  > To me, the main culprits of crimes against usability are business leaders and marketers, not designers (although these do bear some of the blame). [...] However, when you explain the issues they often back down and create usable designs. Honestly, my experience is the opposite. It is almost always designers who push for what they consider aesthetically pleasing with very little regard to usability. Yes, when you push back a lot, you sometimes win. But it takes too much fighting, you need to be at powerful position to have the chance to win and they simply do not seem to care about usability.
  - eschaton 3y ago
    This is what happens when you confuse graphic designers with human interface designers.
- magicalhippo 3y ago
fodkodrasz 3y ago
I blame designers/devs cargo-culting on fancy new stuff (webdevs on new css features, 2000s custom bitmapped UIs), and especially widescreen monitors on desktop, and pushing too much complexity to too small screen real estate on mobile as drivers of these processes. Actually I found Windows Phone Metro UI as very well designed and clean UX for the small/touch-only screens, always showing a single view, but they backed out of that and made the current monstrous hybrids, with some worst of both words. (I was never really fond of the skeuomorph stuff on computers, and mobile UIs with lots of hidden interactions.)
albertzeyer 3y ago
On Linux (e.g. KDE), you can simply Ctrl + mouse drag the window, and then click anywhere you want. This makes it even much simpler than the need of clicking on the border, even with larger borders. You actually don't need any window border at all then, or it can be full of other utilities. There is also some software for Windows to do the same.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > You actually don't need any window border at all then Even if that was a great solution for everybody, you still need a window border. Or at least I do. I need that visual separation from all of the other windows on my desktop, and I need it to be thicker than one or two damned pixels.
  - vonjuice 3y ago
    My window borders are actually 2px by choice, but it's a nice pink that's fairly noticeable.
  - albertzeyer 3y ago
    I use a window shadow for that. The shadow is maybe 10-20 pixels or so.
    - pseudalopex 3y ago
      Some windows are dark.
DanielHB 3y ago
Resizable windows are an outdated concept, full-screen applications with tiling capability (think emacs) are much better. Add multiple workspaces just as they are today and it is perfect. Unfortunately Windows and MacOS don't really support this kind of environment very well. Sure you can tile windows, but they are still windows. When you open an application it is not immediately tiled or opened in another workspace etc.
- bayindirh 3y ago
  Everybody says "floating windows are dead", but I fail to get sold on the tiling concept. For people working on 3 windows, that may be acceptable, but if one's juggling 10 windows on a couple of desktops, things get hairy fast. Window resizing also helps a lot of things in terminal. Sometimes programs write log lines so long, I have to resize the terminal wider than the screen itself to make sure that every log is written in single line to be able debug things with some efficiency. Also, not everyone uses GNOME. KDE has very nice features for floating windows like "dim inactive" which makes working with many windows a breeze, while effectively cutting eye strain, because your average screen brightness is lower, without turning down your lighting. Also, enabling window shadowing convincingly raises active windows over others, so brain's depth perception can isolate said window pretty easily. Both ways (floating and tiling) have advantages over each other in some use cases. I use an hybrid approach (manual tiling of floating windows with snapping), but the scenarios I prefer tiling is really rare, I may say.
  - DanielHB 3y ago
    I am thinking that most of the time you want your applications full screen with tiling been an advanced user kind of thing I myself mostly use MacOS without tilling, I just keep all my applications full screen and use multiple workspaces. I prefer to have a single big (32'' at the moment) monitor and just switch workspaces instead But if MacOS had better tilling support I would probably use it more.
    - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
      > I just keep all my applications full screen and use multiple workspaces I also like this setup, but do you have a workaround for the godawful animation that MacOS uses when switching apps? I can disable the panning effect, but not the fading one.
taskforcegemini 3y ago
at least on linux you usually have the option to drag windows by holding down ALT-key and left mousebutton
chankstein38 3y ago
This is common on sites like YouTube as well. Try to scroll through your front page without your mouse accidentally hitting random videos and causing them to auto play. It drives me insane. The best spot for the mouse that I've found is a small maybe 20px area between the menu bar and the leftmost video. Other than that, you're autoplaying something. I agree with everything you said as well. Huge complaints from me over time. What if a Chrome window has fallen to the background behind another window and I want to grab it? Oops switched tabs because I can't get my mouse to stop in that little 10px area up top. Oof.
- willi59549879 3y ago
  The YouTube autoplay annoys me too. Would be nice if it could be turned off in the settings
  - wpm 3y ago
    Oh, it can be, but it loves to just turn itself on. And I doubt anyone in charge of allocating FTE-time at YouTube gives a crap, because autoplay drives "engagement" and "views". Just actively user-hostile and safe to assume purposeful. My subscriptions don't randomly disappear, so why does this setting on my account? The "autoplay on hover" thing can also be turned off, but get this, it's seemingly stored client-side so you have to turn it off on every computer you use, and if you reset your browser or clear the cache, it turns itself back on. I'm sure YT couldn't find the space to store a boolean.
vonjuice 3y ago
I know it's not for everyone but my mostly keyboard workflow is actually grateful that not much real estate is sacrificed for places to drag.
m3047 3y ago
I responded to something UI-related recently and closed with "if the cloud made shoes there'd be different ones for grass and concrete, but they'd all be the same size so you'd have to stuff them with prosthetics if your feet were too small or cut off toes if they were to large" and some kind stranger gifted me with a word: Procrustean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes I re-gift it to you, hopefully you will find it useful as well.
nirvdrum 3y ago
For years I thought it was odd that GitHub didn't let you do basic tasks in their mobile site. You couldn't browse releases. You couldn't look at the files in a PR. Then one day I accidentally hit my thumb over the middle of the screen and it scrolled. I had no idea all this info was there but required horizontal scrolling because there was no scrollbar. Moreover, the tabs all perfectly fit on the screen so there was no indication that anything existed beyond them. It's still somewhat of a problem, but now I see GitHub doesn't perfectly align its tabs. It's obvious that some text is cut off and you need to scroll to read it all. Other UI elements are now placed behind a menu button and that's nice, too. But, it's amazing just how poor the mobile UX is everywhere overall.
neodymiumphish 3y ago
The only solution I've found for addressing this in any meaningful way is AltSnap[0], which lets me avoid needing to find window borders for any resizing or moving operations. [0]: https://github.com/RamonUnch/AltSnap/releases https://github.com/RamonUnch/AltSnap/releases
- physicles 3y ago
  I don’t understand why a power user wouldn’t use a tool like this. IIRC I used AutoHotKey for this when I was on windows. Most Linux window managers have this built-in. I mostly stopped grabbing window borders and title bars about 15 years ago.
eternityforest 3y ago
"Pretty" is subjective. I think a lot of it just looks like an experiment in minimalism, by people who forgot that there are colors besides jewel tones. It almost seems like the people who make this stuff don't actually care about usability. They probably have top notch motor skills and can click tiny stuff instantly, or they're not actually using the GUI much, they do everything in CLI and have no idea what a GUI is even for. We need better input tools to deal with this. AI smart mouse assist that makes the stuff you want "grab" the mouse, combined with algorithms that can cancel out stiction-related jumps. Maybe even eye tracking that knows what you want to click and pulls the mouse towards it. A zoomed view for when you're trying to highlight some text that auto pops up on click and drag.
- kaba0 3y ago
  > AI smart mouse assist that makes the stuff you want "grab" the mouse I recommend trying out an iPad with a mouse — there the cursor sort of locks into the closest clickable element, and has to have a sort of “escape velocity” before it will leave the given button, only living as a free-form cursor in-between. Apple has here a unique way ahead - due to those UIs being designed for touch-first, they have surplus information compared to desktop-only software (e.g. certain apps understand touchpad gestures as well, simply from the appropriate swipe gesture on mobile).
dajt 3y ago
Yep, this stuff is maddening.
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
The irony is that there's more available screen real estate now than there was in the 640x480 era of early graphic UIs.
continuational 3y ago
I find the whole concept of "windows" a pretty strange analogy. Windows? That's not how people at an office used to work, looking through windows all day, resizing them (what?) and moving them around. The "desktop" feels nothing like a real physical desktop. A desktop used to be an extended working memory, where you had all the papers, books and tools that you currently needed for your task. The only thing they've managed to replicate from the physical world is that pile of stuff you've been meaning to get rid off for a while. Give me an operating system that's designed for thinking and working please.
3seashells 3y ago
The problem is also waste of real estate, empty space for aestetics. Reading a conversation in teams etc. is outright painful. My suspicion is that it's some company internal engagement metric gambling ala every click on the scrollbar is a "use", much "use",less time spend in other apps equals promotion.
kzhe 3y ago
That's the point of stuff like alt dragging or super dragging
saturn_vk 3y ago
I don't know what windows has, but in gnome, you can grab anything in the title bar to drag the windrow. You don't have to search for some empty pixel there. The edges of the window also easily work for resizing as well
eviks 3y ago
> it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window. That might be the proper nudge to get rid of yet another old&persistent UI mistake - why do you need to hunt for a tiny border when you could, e.g., have some tap/hold key(combo) and have the resize border become as wide as ~1/3 of the window width? (same thing with the title bar, a wide and tall box in the center should be more than enough) > They threw out several decades of usability pioneered by real HID experts Yeah, no, those experts were just as smart as the current "UI/UX morons", with tiny borders and tiny buttons highlighted in the post being the testament of their expertise
motoxpro 3y ago
Contrary opinion apparently, but I almost NEVER nned to resize windows OR use the title bar. I'm glad I have the extra real estate to do things that I do most frequently. If I need to switch window, I am on a mac so I can easily just use the content of the window to choose my program. Much faster than reading for me.

skylanh 3y ago

> Aside from not being able to differentiate one window from another similarly colored window in the background I thought this was my slowly acquired technical debt: "what option have I missed? Is this like Aero and I have to turn it off?" The "where the eff is the scrollbar thumb? ffs" situation has occurred more times then I care for.

masswerk 3y ago

> it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window. This is what the resize box is/was for. (It's actually draggable edges with no "meat" to them, which introduce the conflict by overloading an element, which is also just a pixel wide.) *) The resize box used to sit below the very bottom of the vertical scrollbar, just below the down arrow button, as a distinct and dedicated handle for resizing windows. Mind how this is in the direct vicinity of any scroll buttons which may be used to see more than what is exposed by the initial view. It's the quasi "natural" origin and anchor of any basic interactions with the viewport. (Somewhat ironically, while the resize box has mostly vanished from application UIs, it is still rendered by web browsers in certain circumstances. E.g., with textarea elements with scrollbars and resize enabled. With most UIs, there will be no related scroll buttons anymore, though.)

etrautmann 3y ago
Man it was maddening when the window was taller than the screen and you couldn’t access the one box in the bottom corner to resize it.
- masswerk 3y ago
  Ah, Win98 installation dialogs… :-)
- Izkata 3y ago
  IIRC in that era, the leftmost part of the title bar could be clicked to get a menu of options that contained Minimize, Maximize, Move, Resize, Close, and maybe one or two others. If you chose Move or Resize, the mouse would change cursors and just moving the mouse would change the window, then you'd click to get out of it. I'm pretty sure this had a button there in like Windows 3.11 or 98, that I think was later hidden so you'd just click the title bar to get it? Edit: https://www.functionx.com/windows/Lesson06.htm https://www.functionx.com/windows/Lesson06.htm You'd click the application icon in the title bar, then in WinXP you could reach it by right-clicking anywhere in the title bar. And in the Windows 3 era, it was an actual button (IIRC the minus on the left wasn't minimize, it was this menu, and the down arrow on the right was minimize): https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/w/win3x.htm https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/w/win3x.htm
  - xtracto 3y ago
    You brought back a muscle memory I forgot I had: ALT+Space would activate the Control Menu [1] and then pressed down twice and enter to resize the window using the keyboard arrow keys. [1] http://the_messenger3.tripod.com/refwine1.html#ControlMenu http://the_messenger3.tripod.com/refwine1.html#ControlMenu Behold Ye Olde Intrrnet haha
    - t_mahmood 3y ago
      I think you can use ALT + F6 to start resizing (On GNOME at least)

callalex 3y ago

Doesn’t a heavy drop shadow solve the window border problem? Although these days those seem to be fading or disappearing as well.

pseudalopex 3y ago
Not when the windows are dark.
- Findecanor 3y ago
  I used to have that problem when using xterm: white text on black background. I worked around it by writing a script that gave each new xterm instance a different dark background colour. Each window by its own felt like it was still black but when you put two next to each other you'd notice the difference in hue. Then I switched to mate-terminal which put a nice big scrollbar in the right-side border of each window, so I didn't need that script any more.
codalan 3y ago
Yes
syldarion 3y ago
I'm sure it's negligible these days, but there's also the concern of an increased graphics load since you'll have to do an extra pass for the transparency. But I don't want to dive too far into the mindset of "everything must be optimized to the max".
- callalex 3y ago
  My 0.3GHz iMac in 1996 could draw and resize window drop shadows at 60fps while simultaneously encoding an MP3 without a hitch. It’s seriously inexpensive computationally.
  - sreekotay 3y ago
    What OS do you think you were running in 1996?

marcus_holmes 3y ago

I am coming to the opinion that Windows XP was the maximum usable interface, and we should have stopped there [0]. But then, I might just be old and telling the kids to get off my lawn. [0] this is definitely true for Windows. All subsequent versions of Windows have had worse UX.

jchw 3y ago
I absolutely agree. For at least 10 years now, my dream has been to essentially recreate the Windows 2000/XP UX as a Linux desktop environment. That said, doing so would basically require creating everything from the ground up, because merely theming some existing toolkit and window manager to look like XP is not at all the point. And frankly, there HAVE been SOME useful UI/UX improvements in the past couple decades, like, FTA, minimaps. But can you imagine a much more conservative desktop, with highly integrated apps, based on the "good old days" of desktop design with just a touch of modern elements when they improve on things? ... Truth told, the closest thing in existence is probably SerenityOS... but it really would be more practical if there was a Linux desktop for this. Every so often I fantasize about how I might start such a project. It's been like that forever now.
- cwillu 3y ago
  If you haven't already, look at xfce.
  - jchw 3y ago
    I did like XFCE at one point, but it never really did quite nail the UX for me. A lot of the problem is more on GTK+2 than it was anything else. (Obligatory mention of no thumbnails in file dialog; I used to patch GTK by hand for this!) Now with newer versions of GTK, this problem has unfortunately gotten worse for me, and I don't really prefer XFCE very much. Worseyet, I've gotten used to wlroots giving me good support for things that never really worked well in X11, and XFCE's plan regarding X11 and Wayland going into the future is still somewhat unclear. I also tried LXDE and LXQt as well. I actually thought LXQt might be the one for me, but it was a bit buggy and lacked a lot of much-needed maintenance. Also, although I'm glad Linux developers don't always make a habit of just simply throwing out ideas and code that works fine, it does bother me how antiquated some things have gotten. DBus is the best desktop IPC option on Linux, and that's not really a great thing in my opinion. Likewise, it sucks that most file archivers still work by popening some command and parsing its output, occasionally breaking on edge cases, usually having limited support for the kinds of advanced functionality you'd get in Windows archive tools. I do understand that making actually-good applications takes time, but over the course of the past couple decades it doesn't feel like much progress has been made here. I mean hell, speaking of archive tools... FreeBSD has been working on libarchive for ages and it'll likely be integrated with fucking Windows before it's integrated with common Linux desktops, which will probably mostly farm out to CLI tools like unar and zip directly. This is the same approach, with the same exact problems, that I remember being used as far back as when I started using Linux, in programs like Xfe. Needless to say... my feelings are complicated.

vidarh 3y ago

I love not having window borders waste screen estate, and solve the grabbing issue by having the windows key + left mouse button bound to moving windows and windows key + right mouse button to resize. I can "grab" the window anywhere, with no need to hit borders or a title bar (which I also don't have...)

foresto 3y ago
The point is not to deny your preferences, but rather that they shouldn't be forced upon everyone else, especially when they break decades of proven usability design and practice.
- 6510 3y ago
  I disagree, we should force him to use scrollbars until he gets it. Kids these days!
- vidarh 3y ago
  My point is that the "proven" usability design and practice isn't all that proven. There is a whole lot of unexplored or underexplored design space, and when people are complaining about having space to grab a window border away from them due to a tension between competing needs it's worth considering that there are alternatives where that tension just goes away: You only need wider window borders because you've already decided that you need to grab the border, rather than decided you just want an efficient way of moving or resizing the window. Maybe that genuinely is the only option that works for you, but most people haven't tried alternatives. I'll note that lots of user interfaces has this kind of modal mechanism to indicate which class of action you want to take on an object so you don't need to target some tiny visual area, which is always going to be too small for some people nearly no matter how big you make it. We're used to doing that. Most people just don't do it with windows.
tambourine_man 3y ago
That’s nice as a pro feature, but completely undiscoverable for a regular user.

graycat 3y ago

Along these lines, recently happened to see at the Web site "Big Red Car" https://themusingsofthebigredcar.com/returns-driving-retail/#comment-6294665157 https://themusingsofthebigredcar.com/returns-driving-retail/... Edit: Somehow this URL leads to some spot on the Web page of the URL but does not always lead to the actual post. To find the post on that Web page, the post starts with "To me, all of retailing has one"

6510 3y ago
I've figured it out! You have to open their disquss profile, ctrl+f search for "to me, a" then click on the "7 comments" part of "Discussion on Littlefield Advisors 7 comments" then ctrl+f search for "to me, a" again and there you click on the ".. days ago" link under the username. https://disqus.com/home/discussion/littlefieldadvisors/returns_driving_retail/#comment-6294665157 https://disqus.com/home/discussion/littlefieldadvisors/retur... Now everyone can bookmark it, or print it and glue it to the wall. edit: You should really be using firefox, click "view" > "page style" > "no style" to read that page. The anchor doesn't work anymore if you disable the style. They could have just <a name="comment-6294665157"></a> ?
- graycat 3y ago
  Thanks! Uh, in this thread here at Hacker News we were, uh, considering, uh, "user interface"???? Yup!

barrysteve 3y ago

It's more, there's no attempt to structure information anymore. All the settings menus are a nightmare of lists upon lists and each app has a completely random layout for it's menu-ing, often with links to external sites, for what could be set locally. It is geniunely confusing to try and understand the designers intent. I can never tell if I missed a setting, or if it was never meant to exist in this menu at all. The amount of times I've had to Google how to change basic settings is way too high, even for Games where the experience is half the ticket value. CS2 has a settings menu with text buttons at the top (like a tab) that drag you down to an arbitrary point in a long list of settings. There is no tabs, it's impossible to mentally separate what the text button represents mentally, from every other option, because they all point to the same page anyway. Why bother with the buttons? The semantic meaning of concepts don't relate to each other and are not structured accordingly. It is waaay too unnecessarily difficult to navigate around computing. I miss Macromedia Flash's UI. I didn't use the program much, but it was so simple and easy to use. One my biggest drives for privacy and self made solutions, is to get away from the experience and knowledge pollution we've been seeing lately.

jorvi 3y ago
This was one of the biggest powers of Mac OS X, before Electron became big. Not many companies and people developed for Mac OS X, but the ones that did pretty strongly adhered to Apple’s design guidelines, partially because it just made dev live easier and partially because your application would stick out like a sore thumb if you didn’t. At least the global menu still lives on macOS. I’m sad Gnome 3 didn’t pilfer it from Unity.
- dylan604 3y ago
  >your application would stick out like a sore thumb if you didn’t. Anybody else remember the UI from the Photoshop plugins from Kai[0]? You clicked the plugin, and then you were looking at some alien organic texture full screen with a few adjustment sliders. That was someone that said, "I see your UI suggestions, but I have other ideas" [0] https://mprove.de/script/99/kai/ https://mprove.de/script/99/kai/

rayiner 3y ago

“Morons” is the right word. I don’t like to gratuitously shit on people doing their jobs. But what the hell? I can’t move a window anymore without clicking around like an idiot to figure out what’s part of the title bar and what’s a button. Every time I start “New Teams,” it asks me if I want to go back to Old Teams. If I open a PDF in New Teams from the file browser, it’s not obvious how to close the PDF without losing your place in the file system. And on top of that, everything is grindingly slow. A lot of people working at Microsoft/Apple/Google are bad their jobs and should feel bad.

5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
> “Morons” is the right word never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice if they don't break things how can they fix them next year and add it as "new look UI"
fingerlocks 3y ago
Oh wow I thought the New Teams menu was an internal dog food thing for Microsoft employees. I’m so sorry, it’s absolutely maddening. Nobody likes Teams at Microsoft either, and many hours a week are wasted complaining about it.
- david422 3y ago
  I used to use Teams, and it had this feature where if you clicked on the app icon (macOs) enough times a debug menu appeared. It was clearly aimed for internal testing. But there was no timer attached to it, so if, over the course of your day, you clicked on it in the dock, eventually the menu appeared. It seemed pretty half baked to have a debug menu available to your users in the wild.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Nobody likes Teams at Microsoft either Then why can't they make Teams not terrible?
  - fingerlocks 3y ago

colordrops 3y ago

Some of those things you mention are configurable at the windowing system level depending on your system. Using SwayWM with xdg-desktop-portal gives control of some of the things you mention, and with keystrokes and tiling so that there is never a need to grab windows by the edge, or almost ever use the mouse for that matter.

EGreg 3y ago

Is it just me or is Discord super unintuitive? And Slack is becoming that way too. Telegram by contrast is a pleasure!

batiudrami 3y ago
Discord’s interface is extremely busy but if you ever used IRC I think it’s fairly intuitive. It’s a much more complicated app than Telegram with a lot more functionality.
- kalikrates 3y ago
  As a long-time IRC user who never had problems with various IRC clients, I find Discord's interface quite counter-intuitive. First example that comes to my head: I click on a channel that I haven't visited for some time, the view focuses on old messages (from the last time I visited it) rather than on the newest ones (which is typically what I want). And going to the newest ones isn't even trivial, I don't know a way other than scrolling down all the way, which may be quite annoying if the channel is very active and there is a lot of material to scroll past.
jabroni_salad 3y ago
I wish telegram didn't have so much shady stuff under it. It's by far the nicest chat experience.
- fodkodrasz 3y ago
  I don't know if I think it has more shady stuff than whatsapp or other mainstream platforms (so sad we have to write this as there is no open federated standard *in widespread use* as with email), which are backed by megacorps famous for spying on users and selling it to whoever, and being digital goons of governments when it comes to privacy and freedom of speech. All are the same from my perspective, with UX being a main differentiator.
  - CRConrad 3y ago

bsder 3y ago

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the bane that is "progressive scrolling". "No, we won't actually load the text at the bottom of the scollbar until you scroll down to it--and we'll only load it in a dribble." @#$%^&*()_+!

bentcorner 3y ago
I recall a site that had progressive scrolling and some content in a footer I was trying to get to...
- BLKNSLVR 3y ago
  Been there done that. You have to scroll faster than the combination of bandwidth size and JS computation. Turn it into a game: visit the site progressively working backwards through your old phones until you can 'win'. Then see if you've got time to take a screenshot. If you actually need to click a link in the footer the only way to win is not to play.
  - aembleton 3y ago
    Or turn off js
a_e_k 3y ago
I hate this about the New Outlook, especially since I like to sort new messages to the bottom. And if I go to a different folder and back I have to deal with it all over again.
kps 3y ago
Breaks searching, too.
Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
Some sites do this and it's broken in that you have to scroll past it before it displays.
toyg 3y ago

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago

It's a basic evolutionary principle. When there's no selective pressure, species breed for superficial beauty at the expense of other traits. So to get rid of that problem, we need to allow users to apply selective pressure. But the question is how. Individually our voices are lost, and when you need to log into app X to use the service within, you get no choice of app Y with a different UI.

BLKNSLVR 3y ago
"Influencers" as that particular 'apex predator'.

refcherry 3y ago

seems like what all these issues have in common is when apps just go "fuck your configs, we want our app to look like/do this instead" that last paragraph would really solve things, but also not being able to have that level of control does sorta suck for when you might really need it (and not just want to piss of the user lol)

parasti 3y ago

Glad to see Postman mentioned. It has probably the most counterintuitive UI I've ever used. Sometimes I procrastinate by counting how many hamburger menus I can see simultaneously in Postman.

NL807 3y ago

> Applications like Postman, Teams (and pretty much all of MSFT's applications these days), Chrome, and Insomnia should be case studies on how to not design user interfaces. They are about as bad as desktop software gets. Sadly Tunderbird devs drank their coolaid, as evident in the latest release.

kaba0 3y ago
The border between UI churn and “I am old and dislike any changes” is very blurry. I have only tried it for a short time and I think they did a good job. The same for Jetbrains’ new UI. If you put every UI change in the same bucket, how can the situation improve?
- NL807 3y ago
  The UI is not terrible, but it feels very unpolished. The font line spacing seems off and too narrow, the toolbar and other UI components drift and shift when you switch tabs, the main window menu is in the wrong location, etc.

thiht 3y ago

I honestly don’t relate to anything you say. It’s like for every UI evolution you find everything that could theoretically go wrong, and say that it’s definitely a problem. Like: > Aside from not being able to differentiate one window from another similarly colored window What? When has that ever happened to anyone? I use Postman and Chrome daily and I have no idea what you think is so unusable about them?

david422 3y ago
Open up two black terminal windows on Ubuntu that overlap and there is literally zero differentiation between the two.
- thiht 3y ago
  Ok, but how is that an actual problem? You can use visual context to differentiate both windows, you’re not a visual AI. Also when does that happen that you have 2 terminals that overlap? I’d rather have my UIs be optimized for the 99% of usage, I don’t care if they lack affordances for cases that never happen in practice
  - david422 3y ago
    You must be the UI designer then? Works for me, don't care if anyone else has issues?

alanbernstein 3y ago

Not that you're wrong, but IMO the moving and resizing complaints are resolved by the Ubuntu behavior of (IIRC) alt-leftclick-drag and alt-middleclick-drag. It completely eliminates the need to find any special target within the window: just click anywhere inside it.

Propelloni 3y ago
This X11 (probably also in Wayland) feature Meta+mousebutton for resize, move, etc. has been there for the last 30 years or something. Yet it is not widely known, so let's be honest, it IS hard to discover. It can't be a justificiation for destroying the UI, esp. window borders.
idoubtit 3y ago
That's just the top of another iceberg: features are increasingly harder to discover. I use i3wm, which is a tiling WM. There's no window borders, so this resizing feature (W-leftclick and W-rightclick) has been there for many years, alongside a keyboard-only way to move or resize. That's hard to find unless you read the documentation, but that's alright, because the target user is supposed to be a power user. But how are casual users of Windows or Gnome supposed to resize a no-tile window? Or to find a feature with no visual clue? I've had this problem myself on web sites where I can't guess where the links/buttons are, or with phone apps where I have to try several gestures until one of them does what I wanted.
Findecanor 3y ago
I have used that on my Linux PC running Window Maker, for decades. I learned about the shortcut in its config app. But that is also yet another thing that wouldn't work with touch/pen-based interfaces, when your only keyboard is an on-screen keyboard.
iefbr14 3y ago
Not very useful for people that can only use one hand.

mackrevinack 3y ago

that really bugs me any time i have to use a Windows computer. on linux (on pop os or zorin os at least) you just hold down the super/windows key and then left click and drag anywhere on the window to move it. pop os also puts a thick border around that active window which makes it much easier to see where you are

Propelloni 3y ago
There is a Powertoy to introduce this behaviour in MS Windows, I think it is Fancy Zones. OTOH, there is always Open Source Software to the rescue, in this case AltDrag and/or AltSnap.

zorrolovsky 3y ago

> It's amazing how much damage these cargo-cult UI/UX morons have done in the past ten years. They threw out several decades of usability pioneered by real HID experts for something that looks pretty but doesn't fucking work for a lot of people. No need to throw insults. I love HN because it's one of the few places where civil debate trumps the hateful tone of all other platforms. I fundamentally agree with usability being more important than aesthetics. But I don't know what you mean by UX/UI cargo-cult morons. I'm a UX/UI leader with 20+ years of experience. To me, the main culprits of crimes against usability are business leaders and marketers, not designers (although these do bear some of the blame). Yes, there are designers who think form is more important than function and push for small scrollbars. However, when you explain the issues they often back down and create usable designs. I wish the same was true for C-level leaders, marketing leaders and managers. In UI terms they're both ignorant and opinionated. A dangerous combination. Their demands are typically "I like the scrollbar of this website", " the design doesn't look modern" and similar. The amount of fighting that takes to push for usability and accessibility is excruciating. We need some roles and ranks to act more professionally, and trust the experts. And yes, we also need some designers to think usability first.

watwut 3y ago
> To me, the main culprits of crimes against usability are business leaders and marketers, not designers (although these do bear some of the blame). [...] However, when you explain the issues they often back down and create usable designs. Honestly, my experience is the opposite. It is almost always designers who push for what they consider aesthetically pleasing with very little regard to usability. Yes, when you push back a lot, you sometimes win. But it takes too much fighting, you need to be at powerful position to have the chance to win and they simply do not seem to care about usability.
- eschaton 3y ago
  This is what happens when you confuse graphic designers with human interface designers.
magicalhippo 3y ago

fodkodrasz 3y ago

I blame designers/devs cargo-culting on fancy new stuff (webdevs on new css features, 2000s custom bitmapped UIs), and especially widescreen monitors on desktop, and pushing too much complexity to too small screen real estate on mobile as drivers of these processes. Actually I found Windows Phone Metro UI as very well designed and clean UX for the small/touch-only screens, always showing a single view, but they backed out of that and made the current monstrous hybrids, with some worst of both words. (I was never really fond of the skeuomorph stuff on computers, and mobile UIs with lots of hidden interactions.)

albertzeyer 3y ago

On Linux (e.g. KDE), you can simply Ctrl + mouse drag the window, and then click anywhere you want. This makes it even much simpler than the need of clicking on the border, even with larger borders. You actually don't need any window border at all then, or it can be full of other utilities. There is also some software for Windows to do the same.

JohnFen 3y ago
> You actually don't need any window border at all then Even if that was a great solution for everybody, you still need a window border. Or at least I do. I need that visual separation from all of the other windows on my desktop, and I need it to be thicker than one or two damned pixels.
- vonjuice 3y ago
  My window borders are actually 2px by choice, but it's a nice pink that's fairly noticeable.
- albertzeyer 3y ago
  I use a window shadow for that. The shadow is maybe 10-20 pixels or so.
  - pseudalopex 3y ago
    Some windows are dark.

DanielHB 3y ago

Resizable windows are an outdated concept, full-screen applications with tiling capability (think emacs) are much better. Add multiple workspaces just as they are today and it is perfect. Unfortunately Windows and MacOS don't really support this kind of environment very well. Sure you can tile windows, but they are still windows. When you open an application it is not immediately tiled or opened in another workspace etc.

bayindirh 3y ago
Everybody says "floating windows are dead", but I fail to get sold on the tiling concept. For people working on 3 windows, that may be acceptable, but if one's juggling 10 windows on a couple of desktops, things get hairy fast. Window resizing also helps a lot of things in terminal. Sometimes programs write log lines so long, I have to resize the terminal wider than the screen itself to make sure that every log is written in single line to be able debug things with some efficiency. Also, not everyone uses GNOME. KDE has very nice features for floating windows like "dim inactive" which makes working with many windows a breeze, while effectively cutting eye strain, because your average screen brightness is lower, without turning down your lighting. Also, enabling window shadowing convincingly raises active windows over others, so brain's depth perception can isolate said window pretty easily. Both ways (floating and tiling) have advantages over each other in some use cases. I use an hybrid approach (manual tiling of floating windows with snapping), but the scenarios I prefer tiling is really rare, I may say.
- DanielHB 3y ago
  I am thinking that most of the time you want your applications full screen with tiling been an advanced user kind of thing I myself mostly use MacOS without tilling, I just keep all my applications full screen and use multiple workspaces. I prefer to have a single big (32'' at the moment) monitor and just switch workspaces instead But if MacOS had better tilling support I would probably use it more.
  - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
    > I just keep all my applications full screen and use multiple workspaces I also like this setup, but do you have a workaround for the godawful animation that MacOS uses when switching apps? I can disable the panning effect, but not the fading one.

taskforcegemini 3y ago

at least on linux you usually have the option to drag windows by holding down ALT-key and left mousebutton

chankstein38 3y ago

This is common on sites like YouTube as well. Try to scroll through your front page without your mouse accidentally hitting random videos and causing them to auto play. It drives me insane. The best spot for the mouse that I've found is a small maybe 20px area between the menu bar and the leftmost video. Other than that, you're autoplaying something. I agree with everything you said as well. Huge complaints from me over time. What if a Chrome window has fallen to the background behind another window and I want to grab it? Oops switched tabs because I can't get my mouse to stop in that little 10px area up top. Oof.

willi59549879 3y ago
The YouTube autoplay annoys me too. Would be nice if it could be turned off in the settings
- wpm 3y ago
  Oh, it can be, but it loves to just turn itself on. And I doubt anyone in charge of allocating FTE-time at YouTube gives a crap, because autoplay drives "engagement" and "views". Just actively user-hostile and safe to assume purposeful. My subscriptions don't randomly disappear, so why does this setting on my account? The "autoplay on hover" thing can also be turned off, but get this, it's seemingly stored client-side so you have to turn it off on every computer you use, and if you reset your browser or clear the cache, it turns itself back on. I'm sure YT couldn't find the space to store a boolean.

vonjuice 3y ago

I know it's not for everyone but my mostly keyboard workflow is actually grateful that not much real estate is sacrificed for places to drag.

m3047 3y ago

I responded to something UI-related recently and closed with "if the cloud made shoes there'd be different ones for grass and concrete, but they'd all be the same size so you'd have to stuff them with prosthetics if your feet were too small or cut off toes if they were to large" and some kind stranger gifted me with a word: Procrustean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes I re-gift it to you, hopefully you will find it useful as well.

nirvdrum 3y ago

For years I thought it was odd that GitHub didn't let you do basic tasks in their mobile site. You couldn't browse releases. You couldn't look at the files in a PR. Then one day I accidentally hit my thumb over the middle of the screen and it scrolled. I had no idea all this info was there but required horizontal scrolling because there was no scrollbar. Moreover, the tabs all perfectly fit on the screen so there was no indication that anything existed beyond them. It's still somewhat of a problem, but now I see GitHub doesn't perfectly align its tabs. It's obvious that some text is cut off and you need to scroll to read it all. Other UI elements are now placed behind a menu button and that's nice, too. But, it's amazing just how poor the mobile UX is everywhere overall.

neodymiumphish 3y ago

The only solution I've found for addressing this in any meaningful way is AltSnap[0], which lets me avoid needing to find window borders for any resizing or moving operations. [0]: https://github.com/RamonUnch/AltSnap/releases https://github.com/RamonUnch/AltSnap/releases

physicles 3y ago
I don’t understand why a power user wouldn’t use a tool like this. IIRC I used AutoHotKey for this when I was on windows. Most Linux window managers have this built-in. I mostly stopped grabbing window borders and title bars about 15 years ago.

eternityforest 3y ago

"Pretty" is subjective. I think a lot of it just looks like an experiment in minimalism, by people who forgot that there are colors besides jewel tones. It almost seems like the people who make this stuff don't actually care about usability. They probably have top notch motor skills and can click tiny stuff instantly, or they're not actually using the GUI much, they do everything in CLI and have no idea what a GUI is even for. We need better input tools to deal with this. AI smart mouse assist that makes the stuff you want "grab" the mouse, combined with algorithms that can cancel out stiction-related jumps. Maybe even eye tracking that knows what you want to click and pulls the mouse towards it. A zoomed view for when you're trying to highlight some text that auto pops up on click and drag.

kaba0 3y ago
> AI smart mouse assist that makes the stuff you want "grab" the mouse I recommend trying out an iPad with a mouse — there the cursor sort of locks into the closest clickable element, and has to have a sort of “escape velocity” before it will leave the given button, only living as a free-form cursor in-between. Apple has here a unique way ahead - due to those UIs being designed for touch-first, they have surplus information compared to desktop-only software (e.g. certain apps understand touchpad gestures as well, simply from the appropriate swipe gesture on mobile).

dajt 3y ago

Yep, this stuff is maddening.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago

The irony is that there's more available screen real estate now than there was in the 640x480 era of early graphic UIs.

continuational 3y ago

I find the whole concept of "windows" a pretty strange analogy. Windows? That's not how people at an office used to work, looking through windows all day, resizing them (what?) and moving them around. The "desktop" feels nothing like a real physical desktop. A desktop used to be an extended working memory, where you had all the papers, books and tools that you currently needed for your task. The only thing they've managed to replicate from the physical world is that pile of stuff you've been meaning to get rid off for a while. Give me an operating system that's designed for thinking and working please.

3seashells 3y ago

The problem is also waste of real estate, empty space for aestetics. Reading a conversation in teams etc. is outright painful. My suspicion is that it's some company internal engagement metric gambling ala every click on the scrollbar is a "use", much "use",less time spend in other apps equals promotion.

kzhe 3y ago

That's the point of stuff like alt dragging or super dragging

saturn_vk 3y ago

I don't know what windows has, but in gnome, you can grab anything in the title bar to drag the windrow. You don't have to search for some empty pixel there. The edges of the window also easily work for resizing as well

eviks 3y ago

> it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window. That might be the proper nudge to get rid of yet another old&persistent UI mistake - why do you need to hunt for a tiny border when you could, e.g., have some tap/hold key(combo) and have the resize border become as wide as ~1/3 of the window width? (same thing with the title bar, a wide and tall box in the center should be more than enough) > They threw out several decades of usability pioneered by real HID experts Yeah, no, those experts were just as smart as the current "UI/UX morons", with tiny borders and tiny buttons highlighted in the post being the testament of their expertise

motoxpro 3y ago

Contrary opinion apparently, but I almost NEVER nned to resize windows OR use the title bar. I'm glad I have the extra real estate to do things that I do most frequently. If I need to switch window, I am on a mac so I can easily just use the content of the window to choose my program. Much faster than reading for me.