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?
Infinite scroll pages are inherently worse than a set number of pages you can jump between at will. The fact almost everything has swapped to that is a nightmare and makes looking for old things on a blog or hell even a YouTube Playlist a nightmare.
Any button that’s grayed out should say why it’s grayed out when you hover the cursor over it, or attempt to tap it.
Overriding browser functionality because of designer preferences or shitty implementation of tracking or whatever.
Don’t fuck with my scrolling.
Don’t fuck with my ctrl clicking to open links in a new tab.
Don’t capture window keyboard events unless you have a really excellent reason to and even then think about it really hard and decide not to.
And learn how to support basic keyboard navigation, damn it. It’s just about marking up your html properly, no scripting required.
I think all of these opinions are popular on the user side.
Elements should not even be clickable for at least 0.5 seconds after first appearing.
Oh, to avoid things like when there is a list that updates just before you click? Or something else?
Yeah that’s exactly it. It drives me nuts when I try to click on something just as a dialog with a button shows up, and I maybe don’t even get to know what I did. Or clicking on something that moves because of some sloppy infinite scrolling or slow loading images or something.
Windows 11’s UI is fine.
I have so many issues with Windows: the privacy invasion, the ads, the upselling of MS’s services, the need for an online Microsoft account, that I haven’t used Windows in over 2 years. But I see so many people saying it has an ugly UI - it’s UI is literally fine, I would have no problems using it if a Linux DE happened to come up with that design before Microsoft did.
Chrome peaked when it was all angular. Why does everything have to be all rounded now?
Windows 98SE was peak design
Some apps will have the search icon at the bottom of the screen. Then the search bar pops up at the top. Then you tap that for the keyboard to come up at the bottom. I think a search button should automatically pop up a keyboard.
I don’t have unpopular UI opinions, but I do have opinions that I don’t see people echo much, yet.
One of the worst things about UI in 2025 is that almost everything most people use on a computer relies on it, more than ever, and yet it’s also at its worst point since the days before mouse driven interfaces. Companies used to be much stricter about their interfaces, how they worked and looked. Now there are tons of bespoke interfaces where everyone decides for themselves how they work, and assumptions made by one program work the opposite way in a different one.
Switches have become way to obvious to what “on” and “off” is. Even when they state something like an option is enabled or not in text, it often isn’t clear whether it’s saying this is what the state is now, or this is what it will be when clicked.
Icons have become way too vague and arbitrary as to what they mean. The Hamburger menu was bad enough, but some of the icons have gotten way too abstract. At least the floppy disk for saving was a convention.
Web pages likewise could use a lot more consistency and visibility. The new Digg, for instance, hides its user block function behind a light-gray three-dots button on a white background. The only options on that menu are to Report or Block that user! Why is it three dots, and why is it so hard to see?
Microsoft’s “Ribbon” interface remains a terrible idea. At least with menu bars you know all the functions are there, somewhere, all represented by text. With the Ribbon, everything’s a toolbar button, and with many of them being different sizes it’s harder to scan through them to find the option you’re looking for.
Since this thread is really about complaining about UI, I’ll add that when the developer arbitrarily limits input ranges because “Why would anyone what that?”
I’ve come across this several times, but the one instance that pops to mind is a desktop background changer being limited to no less than one minute between changes. I wanted to use it to show a stop-motion animation slide show and set it to one second, not the intended use, but still viable IF I could set the rate to one second. I wrote the developer, and they admitted it could be allowed, but “Why would anyone want it to be that fast?” I get that there are technical reasons why this might not be ideal, and maybe it would somehow tax the system for “just a background changer”, etc. But, assuming a value wouldn’t crash the application, or somehow physically destroy the computer, I think the input should be allowed. If prudent, put some warning about the less-than-catastrophic consequences, and let the user confirm before continuing.
This is one of the worst things about Apple OS’s in my opinion! And windows does it pretty often too.
Every action should be accessible from the keyboard. Stretch goal: The OS should be able to describe all UI events in prose.
UIs should strive to always be as customizable as possible.
Colors should be able to all be manually set by the user if they want to, rounded corners should be configurable, and the user should be able to overwrite icons and some UI elements if possible, but it shouldn’t have to be on a per-app basis.
Instead, apps should ready system settings configured by the user and apply their theming unless the app is configured to do otherwise, again, by the user. Consistency by default unless you don’t want it.
I can see why this opinion would be unpopular (maybe designers want to make their UI a very specific way idk)… but I like theming!!
Also, there should be a mode between dark and light mode that has black text but doesn’t have a blindingly white background.
I can see why this opinion would be unpopular
The reason that it’s unpopular is that it’s hard enough to design a nice app and when you add theming it gets way harder. I still think it should be supported, but I can see why it isn’t.
I thin it should be like this: the system defines something like 10-15 main colors (text, text background, foreground, main accent, highlight bright, highlight dark …). All programs are designed in terms of those colors. Designers don’t put “green here, black there” but “main color here, highlight there”.
But they also have the option to recommend the user a app specific color set that can either be applied to that app only or system wide.
By default every app uses their own recommended theme unless the user has set the option to override app themes with the system theme.
Also, there should be a mode between dark and light mode that has black text but doesn’t have a blindingly white background.
While I would still use dark mode if this existed, this would be a lot nicer than the blinding pure-white themes. There should, instead of light and dark themes, be white, light gray, medium gray, dark gray, and black themes everywhere.
People don’t think enough of contrast and colour choices.
For example, icons.
I kept launching the wrong popular streaming video app. One was red and white, the other was white and red.
I have pinned some app icons but I really need to squint sometimes. So many blue icons.
Modern UI trend in graphics apps is to use monochrome hieroglyphs for tool icons. Fuck that, give me colour icons. Can’t tell the tools apart. It’s not even visually appealing. What.
Games use really creative colour schemes. Then in the first dialog they show in the game, they have two choices, and I guess I just have to guess which button is which because it’s impossible to tell which is the “active” colour.
Ooh, fancy scroll bar you have there. Really blends to the background. Can barely see it.
A lot of lectures and presentations are silly when people show a web page and I can barely make out the domain because the rest of the URL is grey mush. And I’m sitting in the front. (I can barely make sense of it the address bars on my monitor. Firefox at least lets you disable this nonsense)
Another big beef I have with modern UIs, especially mobile ones: If you put something on the screen, would it be possible to not randomly move the stuff around? (For example: I tried to click the latest conversation in Signal desktop. In the time between my decision and the mouse click, Signal noticed that it has been several femtoseconds since the last software update, and popped an update notice right where the top of the conversation list is. Guess what I clicked.)
Another thing: Overreliance on scroll wheel. In case you haven’t noticed, scroll wheels aren’t very reliable. They get gunky and are hard to clean. Give me the bloody scrollbar. In games, let me rebind zoom.
Scrolling also gets very annoying with a trackball. I haven’t found a trackball with a scroll wheel yet.
A lot of so called “dark mode” should be called “medium mode” or “gray mode”. In my opinion “dark mode” is where the main colour of backgrounds looks more black than gray. Also all borders should be high-contrast, preferably brightly coloured lines, or medium-contrast for low-importance borders, but never low-contrast borders or borders without a line where it’s just a change in background colours.
I see the dark convention to mean that the background is darker than the foreground.
Light mode means dark text on lightt background.
I see it to mean how dark the page actually is
Flat Minimalism is fine, but the buttons should still look like and animate like buttons. How the fuck is one supposed to know that text is clickable if it isn’t blue or raised like a button?
Brimg back double-clicking on the top left corner of a program to close it. Actually, bring back the top bar and the file menu while you’re at it. And for software that opens tabs, allow the user to position the tabs bar on the bottom or side of the screen.
Omg i want a top bar soo much. I hate no bar on browsers filled with tabs, and here i am trying to position my mousr in a tiny bit of non tab apce so i can grab the window and move it.
One of my only non-minor complaints about KDE Plasma is that I can’t have the options that appear on the Global Menu panel widget (They’re like macOS top bar app options) appear as part of the window decorations on each window instead. There is a button on the window decorations to access these options as a dropdown, but that’s slower to use.
Brimg back double-clicking on the top left corner of a program to close it.
What OS was this on? Not sure it’s ever been a feature of Windows as far as I know. What’s the benefit of doing this vs just single clicking on the X button?
That was actually Windows. I think I first encountered it in Win 3.1, but I started really using it in 95. It’s not actually Windows that controlled it, but software. Application windows used yo have a top bar, and on the very left they had a small version of their shortcut icon. Clicking on it would roll out a short menu for minimizing, closing, etc, and double-clicking would exit out of the program. I think Chrome was the first popular software to remove it.
Using this method for closing programs is just a matter of preference and muscle memory. I guess it made sense when the last thing you did was File -> Save, so your cursor was already near the top left. Nowadays it’s not as obvious, but some of us are too rigid to easily change.
