Ask HN: What UI/UX trends do you find most baffling and annoying?

3 pointsbarefootcoder2y ago6 comments

There are two things that almost every website does that just drive me nuts, and I don’t understand the reasoning that would lead to these designs.

1) Login link for existing users is tiny and hidden

Why?!? I get it, you want new users, but your existing users need to log in too!

2) auto play of video previews.

Netflix, YouTube, Etc… they all do it. I don’t want the movie to start because I clicked to read the full description, or worse on the main screen just because I stop navigating for a second to read the blurb. I don’t want videos in my suggested feed on YouTube to play silently and then start 20 or 30 seconds into the video once I do click them. Does ANYBODY find these useful? Why are they the default behaviors? Who do they benefit? Don’t they just end up costing unnecessary bandwidth? I know that I can usually turn them off, but having to search for the setting is frustrating.

…and don’t even get me started on form validators that are overly strict when they could just strip the unwanted delimiters or white space themselves, or password fields that cannot be pasted, or password rules that make it impossible to generate a random password.

6 comments

rzzzwilson2y ago

Maybe I'm getting old and slipping slowly into "get off my lawn" mode, but moving an entry widget when it gets focus was something that wasn't done back in the day since it can be jarring. Yet google.com on my tablet does it to this day: you touch the search text widget to give it focus and the whole damn screen changes and the widget relocates to the top of the screen. Most off-putting. I thought google would know better.

barefootcoderOP2y ago

That doesn’t bother me quite as much as when partial results are displayed and then change a few ms before you can tap the one you want such that you touch the wrong one.

Minor49er2y ago

One bad trend gave rise to a second bad trend: hiding the scrollbar only to replace it with a progress bar

Years ago, most browsers that had the ability to scroll a page would always show a scrollbar, regardless if scrolling was needed or not. Apple set a trend by hiding the scrollbar and would only show it when someone was actively trying to scroll a page. This means that there's more screen real estate to work with, but for a reader, they don't know where they are on a given page until they try to navigate. A lot of websites and interfaces have also adopted this trend

Some websites today include a progress bar at the top or bottom of a page so that you know how much of the page that you have read. The problem with this is that the progress bar is on a different axis than the content itself and is already made unnecessary by the option of simply showing the scroll bar. Some of these pages even have both

It's such a silly thing but I can't help by roll my eyes whenever I encounter it

tornato72y ago

Anecdotally, I have observed a lot more captchas on websites in the past year or so, and many are poorly implemented. Websites often don't validate your form until AFTER you've solved the captcha, so you spend 20s to fill out the captcha and submit the form just to learn that the username is taken - and you need to fill out ANOTHER captcha to try again.

vivegi2y ago

Its 2023 and still we have a zillion different ways

- of showing basic widgets like dropdowns, multi-select lists, toggle switches etc.

- of UI frameworks that require a lot of code and get obsolete at a rapid pace

- of dark patterns that are user un-friendly

hindsightbias2y ago

All of them? I wonder what trends people find to be good.

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