I just accidentally clicked the “clear all” on the browser URL and wished that it was a bit harder to click but was still there. If it took three clicks to make happen, its still useful in most circumstances but would drastically drop the mistaken clicks
Anyway, what are your unpopular UI opinions?
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.
This is one of my least favorite modern trends — UI shouldn’t go away.
First, even if you’re not actively using the bar, if it contains access to a menu, buttons or title/context of any kind, it should remain glanceable. If you’re going to tap it, you first need to see it, and having to unhide it adds extra effort to every interaction. What’s more, less experienced users may not even remember that the hidden functionality exists. And if I’m scrolling a feed of some kind, in an application with multiple feeds, being able to instantly glance at where I am is useful.
But also, the idea that scrolling the content down a little to make the UI appear makes no sense. I have the content scrolled to where I want it, and scrolling it a little in a particular direction to make more features show up is absurd. The content and UI have nothing to do with each other.
Idk I’m on two minds with this.
On the one hand, I agree that there’s too many clutter in modern UI design and it takes away precious screen real estate. Especially more so when it’s for ads (external), ads (internal), and more ads.
On the other hand, there seems to be a chronic minimalist UI movement to hide even essential controls and info into menus upon menus. The worse part is that there’s tons of whitespace so you’ll still won’t get good information density.
I think you mean that there is tonnes of white space when the website is opened on a desktop in a single window. I’m often on a laptop with multiple windows and the was a lot of websites are implemented then are often frustrated.
But agreed with you on the minimalist movement. I think I’d reframe it as some people in UI see simple as elegant and beautiful though. There is a push beyond minimalist into not giving options that a lot of users would want, but they’re not primary user journeys
Remember early 2000s malware infested internet explorer on grandma’s computer? I swear the window was half bullshit toolbars.
As someone who worked in tech support starting in 2000, AHHHHHHHHHHHHH.
HHHHhsk Jeeves!
Unpopular indeed. Letterboxing counterintuitively lets you see more of the movie, just smaller.