Please, UI designers

Modern UI designers don’t have a fucking clue.

You’d think the first principle would be “don’t break the existing fucking UI”, but no.

Infinite scroll. Windows without toolbars. Replacing context menu with useless site-specific one. Forcing links to open in new or same tab, depriving the user of choice. Blocking text select. Blocking copy, as if that’s somehow going to stop people from stealing your shitty content. Fucking with the browser history.

And then there’s the constant reinventing of the wheel. How many times do we need to implement a fucking checkbox?

No lie, I’ve actually had designers come to me with a concept for “a visual indicator that shows the user how they are progressing through the page”.

No lie, I’ve actually had designers come to me with a concept for “a visual indicator that shows the user how they are progressing through the page”.
What the actual fuck, do these people actually use computers.
My biggest gripe is websites that take control of the browser C-f.
- I mean, over the years the scroll bar has got less and less visible. Maybe these people don't even realise it exists.
- Web designer/ devs needed to add back visual indicators to long articles when OS designers started hiding scroll bars.
  It’s also helpful when the article ends, but has a bunch of shit below it (like required advertiser garbage or huge footers). If the up dev is smart, they’ll calculate the length of the article so that the progress indicator is accurate.
Text that doesn't wrap and goes off screen. Scrollbars that shrink to a single pixel. Universal undo (open multiple Excel Windows and do stuff in all of them. When you undo it will follow your activity instead of being local to the window). Excels crappy copy.
Y'know, my mom studied human factors psychology back around 2000. I remember all kinds of stuff she'd talk about that could make UIs easier to use, understand, and learn from.
I remember around the time Windows 7 came out, all that type of thinking started being ignored. It seemed like at first it was because it was trendy to look different, and then because the next generation of designers forgot that there was actual science on how to make your stuff usable.
- A lot of people making decisions are idiots, or are following the whims of idiots above them.
  Back in like 2017 a company I worked for made a mouse tunnel on their web UI. That's where like you mouse over a menu, and that opens a sub menu. You mouse into that sub menu, and another menu opens. If at any point your mouse leaves this area, the whole thing closes. It's shit. It's been a known bad pattern since like the 90s.
  Product guy wouldn't listen. Not sure if he didn't care or didn't understand. Either is bad.
  This happens all over. People don't care. They don't understand. They don't listen to people that do. They have their own metrics and goals that are disjoint from actual value.
- Pretty much spot on. Late 90s and early 2000s was there height of platforms being very careful and strict about things like HIG (or on the other extreme, "skins").
  Now UI is barely constrained by those sensibilities and it's about marketing and showing novelty more than usable.
- Got any details on the type of stuff your mom shared for improved UIs?
What's wrong with infinite scroll?
- As it's most often seen on news sites - where scrolling too far gives you another article - a handful of reasons.
  One: there are frequently still links (think "about us" / "contact us" kind of pages) in the footer that you might need to access, which you can invariably now never reach, because as soon as they're in view they're replaced by more content.
  Two: as the parent poster so accurately put it, "fucking with the browser history". It becomes entirely indeterminate whether the back button now returns to the previous site, or just goes back by one piece of content.
  Three: the new content is almost certainly unrelated to the page I started on, and not of any interest to me.
- You want to navigate somewhere then navigate back? Haha, no.
  If it's not implemented properly, resources (images, videos, ads) don't get unloaded when they're no longer visible.
  Some fuckwit wannabe designers actually put the footer UNDER infinite scrolling pages.
- Breaks the scroll bar, for starters.
- When you're dragging the scrollbar down, the page suddenly loads new content and you're lost.
  When you're going through a long page and you want to come back to it later, you can't come back to where you left.
How many times do we need to implement a fucking checkbox?
The vibe coding "paradigm" says: once or twice for every checkbox that appears on the page 😂
I’ve actually had designers come to me with a concept for “a visual indicator that shows the user how they are progressing through the page”
I have seen those on blog and news sites, a thin horizontal bar (sometimes under the floating title) that fills as you scroll to the bottom. I don't get it either.
- That was it. So it wasn't even original stupidity. Sad.
This is a complete misnomer. Modern UI designers that are forced to do what corporate wants are competent. It is large scale marketing that doesn't have a clue as to what people want in a UX.
forcing new tabs drives me crazy. like how dare you. i even tried to disable it in firefox, but when i do it makes all 'open in browser' things overwrite the current tab :(
- I hate the opposite even more - sites that block you from opening new tabs when you need to, as if you somehow don't ever need to be able to access multiple pieces of information concurrently, or return directly to your current context.
  "Oh, we're following the single-page app paradigm." No, you're a fucking website. Follow the fucking website paradigm.
  You can just tell these idiots have never actually done any real work.

I have a deep hatred for modern designs. Especially Material and Adwaita. There's SO. FUCKING. MUCH. WASTED. SPACE. Early 2000s Winamp on my 1024x768 monitor had more concise and legible information than Tidal and Spotify do on 1440p fullscreen. It legitimately pisses me off.

fucking YES! just give me information dense uis please!!!!!!! The new intellij ui sucks and windows 11 too, for this reason
- I have a 4k monitor, and some sites I still have to zoom out. I've gone through and set all my settings to small text, no UI scaling. But shit is fucking huge.
  I think part of it is tablets and phones. Big areas for people's fingers to touch.
You're not wrong, as it's your personal subjective experience, which can't be wrong.
But the fact that it pisses you off implies that you don't understand the reason behind it.
We used to have information-dense UIs before because:
devices used to have only large screens with lower resolution.
devices were used primarily be specialists for productivity.
Which means programs had to fit a lot of stuff in very few pixels. Nowadays, vast majority of users are casual, the people of the land, fatfingering their tiny displays. They don't need a ton of buttons and sliders. In fact, a common user would get overwhelmed by all that, even on the desktop. And while a small amount of people would benefit from a denser UI for the same casual apps, it's usually not with the effort designing and implementing them.
- If that is the stated goal, then they have failed. Completely.
  My father, who is a "man of the land", has issues navigating most apps that don't implement a bespoke, application-oriented UI. Most of them use Material UI, and all of them have big controls, huge margins and padding, unnecessary rounded corners, actions hidden in unlabelled menus, stuff that you have to swipe at to navigate (without showing any hint of it), and so much wasted space that the entire screen is occupied by two or three rows of controls. I use some of the same apps and even I feel that the design is hostile.
- [...] the people of the land
  👌
Tbh I love material design and adwaita, it looks great

When I am on a phone, let me zoom on whatever the fuck I want. Unconditionally. Period. I won’t purchase shit off of your shitty site if I can’t see it. And you obviously have no clue how shitty my vision has gotten over the years. And for the love of anything good in the world, don’t wait till I’m zoomed in to pop a fucking model asking me if I want to join your list for 10% off. If I buy something, you’re gonna put me on your list, whether I like it or not. And I can’t stop you if I actually want a receipt. So just give me the discount. Or don’t. I don’t even fucking care anymore. Just fuck off. Fuck.

a fucking model
I wouldn't be so mad about that, unless it was a modal.
- Touché
Firefox for Android. Settings -> Accessibility -> Enable zoom on all websites
Extensions -> uBlock Origin -> check "Annoyances". Handles almost all of the random bullshit modals
- I really need to switch to android. I don’t love google but the popups are killing my soul
Every time I get a newsletter pop-up I enter something like "fuckyou@dontfuckingannoyme.withyourfucking.popup.fuckingstep.on.a.lego.fuck" in the hopes that whoever manages the list sees it when cleaning out the bounces
When I am on a phone, let me zoom on whatever the fuck I want. Unconditionally.
The worst is when the zoom affects the surrounding UI elements, but the part you want gets unzoomed by the same amount.

Isn't it amazing when text is also not selectable? Like its rendered behind some other shit?

I fucking hate websites ❤️

Or when you try and select a letter and it auto selects the whole fucking work or sentence, jumping all over the place?
- I HATE that. I like to save things i read or find interesting in Joplin (open source notebook software) and it always has to be this giant fucking undertaking to copy some text off a website. I am annoyed just thinking about it... So i always end up just copying everything on the page instead. Don't have time for that shit...
The reddit mobile app has broken text selection. I did same thing as OP but with my stylus.

I get unreasonably (okay, reasonably) upset when the simplest way to share an image is to take a screenshot of the image.

F12 > Network > Images > (select image) > Save Response As...
Seems like a lot of steps, but you get the hang of it pretty quickly. And probably faster than cropping your screenshot, plus you get the original without any compression or other degradations.

I use a system at work that is 100% web based. I have 2 4k monitors in my desk. Why are the apps formatted for viewing on a phone? I've gotten to the point of hacking the CSS on every page just to make things usable.

At the last version upgrade, the developers made some changes to the interface. They couldn't be bothered to change the existing CSS, so they just put !important on all the new stuff.

It's kind of screwed to say. But a lot of people entering the work force grew up with phones and tablets as their main computer. It's the mind set they have that everything uses touch interfaces.
I'm not saying everyone or even most, but for a good portion it's their default computer experience.
- The first generation was just that bad ignoring that some people wanted to browse the web through their mobile.
Multiple windows. Most people dislike 2 meter wide text blocks.
- Most people people dislike 10x10 cm text windows when programming/editing HTML/reading SQL dumps.
- Most people dislike
  [citation needed]
- May I ask how old you are? And what was the first OS you used?

My absolute biggest gripe about the failings of proper UI design is icons with no text attached.

Floppy, okay surely the save button. Some book looking thing, no fucking clue. An eye in the middle of a square, what the fuck are you people doing???

Having to hover over a weird looking icon to MAYBE gleam some sort of information on it takes so much longer than just having the fucking text below the God damn icon. Sometimes they don’t even have hover text! Thats GREAT UI skills there, Junior! Maybe you’ll get there eventually!

Fucking idiots.

Massive +1. I can easily imagine complex 3D shapes in my head and freely manipulate them, but my brain works horrible when it comes to icons for some reason. I can't intuitively find what I need, not even after months or years. Even after using something for a long time I will constantly hover over all icons to read the tooltips until I find what I need.
The software I work on at work has a navigation at the top of just icons. I see it every day and I just can't seem to associate the icons with the functionality.
The fucking Oblivion Remaster does this all over the UI!! So many vague icons with no text, especially in the magic UI.
- My favorite with Oblivion and similar games is, that’s a neat spell name, but what do the effects DO?!
Mystery-Meat Navigation!

The irony of this post being an image which I can't select as I read 😢

Don't worry, I got you. Here's the alt-text:
@jk@mastodon.social on Mastodon: "note to ui designers. when i'm reading a long piece of text. i select text while i read it. I select text while i read it!. i select the text using my mouse. while i read the text i often select the text. when i select the text i just want to select the text. i don't want to perform actions on the text. i don't want a popup menu to appear when i select the text. i don't want to accidentally click on a Share link. i want to select text while i read it".
- Ironically, my mobile Lemmy client will still not let me select text until I reply.

UI designer/developer here. One who works on features that facilitate reading.

Based on their writing style and the text highlighting habit, this person is likely dyslexic. I've helped create functions that facilitate this behavior, which is better suited as a mode that can be enabled manually. There are browser extensions that can do this sort of thing for you. I've worked on a lot of assistive reading features.

If this was set as a default behavior, most users would fucking riot. Most of them are using text highlighting for what this person doesn't want to do.

Edit - I think I need to emphasize that this is based on real data. A shit ton of it. These decisions aren't made based on vibes. If the user base is performing a specific action repeatedly, we're going to facilitate it. We can see what you all are doing. UI's aren't built around a bunch of conflicting edge cases based on anecdotes. If something performs a certain way, at least major applications, it's usually because a lot of direct observations and metrics have strongly indicated that this is the preferred approach.

Admittedly, sometimes business goals get in the way of that. But if those business goals we have to push get in the way of conversions, they get abandoned pretty quickly.

lots of people do it, not just people with dyslexia. it helps keep track of where you are when there are large blocks of text. also it usually raises contrast so I'm sure that helps some people even more.
(Apologies for my tone below, but this affects me also, and I dislike the notion that messing with how you normally select text is a niche desire)
We don't need any new functionality or a custom mode, we just want unexpected popups to not get in the way of expected behaviour when selecting text.
As long as your options appear well above the text, and doesn't cancel the highlighting, I can't accept whatever you want to do. But as the OP writes, if it's easy to misclick, this is bad UI design because it does not conform to the expectation that nothing will pop up. (Google Docs is the first example that comes to mind as implementing popup options totally fine, from recollection)
If it's too close to the selected text and causes misclicks, then I'm gonna be annoyed about this since the vast, vast majority (luckily) of text on the internet you can highlight to your heart's content and nothing pops up.
Just keep options decently above the highlighted text (I dunno what the right number is, 2 lines above the start of your selection? hey I'm not a UI designer)
In conclusion, change is okay, but intuition is important.
Tantacrul makes some great UI videos if you haven't seen them before (not that I'm telling you how to suck eggs about your own profession, he's just genuinely funny and interesting to watch)
I disagree.
The mode for options is called the right mouse button and the mode for just highlighting is the left mouse button. One of the great pillars of UI design is conforming to expectations.
UI user here.
A good rule of thumb for interfaces is "one action, one function." Highlighting text and opening a context menu are two separate functions that should require separate actions (at least as default behavior, user configurability is also a good thing). If I highlight text, the only thing that should indicate is that I want the text highlighted. If I subsequently want a context menu, I will do the context menu action (right click, long press, etc). A UI should never be trying to predict what I want and it absolutely should not be doing things that I didn't explicitly direct.
You need sane defaults and having what is effectively a predefined macro is not a sane default.
I think I agree with you. I usually select the text to do an action and the choices are useful. I don't select for the better reading, if anything it's just to highlight the text.
We can see what you all are doing.
No, you are seeing what the people too clueless to install tracking protection are doing.
I can confirm the dyslexia thing and highlighting

The fact that I couldn't select text on this post because it's a completely unnecessary graphic kind of makes me hate you.

Come to Japan where they like to make everything images instead. Can't select it, can't copy it, can't translate it without a camera, can't preview the text of something, is bad for accessibility, etc.

Do you want to copy text into a translator app? Fuck you!

This is what you sound like: Xkcd Workflow

I do not want the program to react when I left click ordinary text. The program should not anticipate my needs. It should wait until I've told it I need something (with a right click) before doing anything.
- I’m gonna break your heart then. Until about 15 years ago it used to be that literally all interactable/clickable text was both blue AND UNDERLINED to indicate it was a clickable link. Then some self-important designers with no user experience testing decided that was just too ugly and stopped underlining links to give it a “clean” minimalist look. It was then a trend, so everyone copied it. Now we still live with those consequences :(
Kinda. Very specific edge case that can be solved with a custom feature like a browser extension.

I do this because I do work on my computer and sometimes that work involves citing sources, copying and pasting sections of instructions, ensuring I'm using correct spelling of foreign names and words. And most importantly, copying and pasting wingdings and symbols that I can't be bothered to memorize the numkey codes for. ™ 🄮℠
I HATE UNSELECTABLE TEXT WITH A BURNING PASSION (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
- Edit: replied to wrong comment, whoops.
How do you do that with images?
Not judging. Just curious.

I do this. It’s just a stimming thing while reading web articles and I hate being sent to Twitter or whatever for it.

Teams is the worst offender. It constantly wants me to call any number. Social? Phone? Whatever. I don't want to call anyone, and I sure as hell don't want to do it via Teams.

Teams and discord on mobile. No I don't want to copy the whole message dang it! Just let me select part of the text!
I don't understand what's the end goal of this other than being frustrating. If they want a menu attached to a message we had the burger menu icon available for the best part of the last two decades.

Number one thing I hate is html/css/js used for anything that is not a website. Fucking stop it.

I have a protocol for this.

go to website
if UX is offensive exit website
add website to pihole blacklist and description of why
never visit website again

I know it doesn't mean much to them, but I refuse to accept a shitty online experience when a product team actively circumvents standard internet experiences like highlighting, copy/paste, or browser jacking (looking at you Microsoft).

Nonsense. AI adds rich features like these that no one wanted so VCs can become rich. The only thing missing on modern computers is blindingly-bright nuclear explosion white LEDs that shine directly into your optic nerve, all the time.

You mean like the kind used on digital billboards, the ones bright enough to kill your night vision when you’re driving down an otherwise-dark highway?
- Are you some kind of Luddite? We need quasar-level lighting everywhere at all times for the safety of our children.

We went from using no punctuation to using too much. I struggled while reading this.

The no capitalization makes it hard for me. I think just re-writing with capitalization makes it a lot easier to read:
Note to UI designers. When reading a long piece of text. I select the text while I read it. I select the text while I read it!. I select the text using my mouse. While I read the text I often select the text. I don't want to perform actions on the text. I don't want to accidentally click share link. I want to select the text while I read it.
Here's how I would mildly edit the punctuation in order to make it easier to read:
Note to UI designers; when reading a long piece of text, I select the text while I read it. I select the text while I read it! I select the text using my mouse. While I read the text, I often select the text. I don't want to perform actions on the text. I don't want to accidentally click share link. I want to select the text while I read it.
Here's how I would have conveyed the thought in a JIRA comment:
UI designers could you please, for the love of all mankind, stop fucking putting fucking shitty ass popups in the god damn non-mobile website! There is no one, and I mean no-fucking-body, that is still using a desktop computer in 2025 that does not know about ctrl-c and ctrl-v. There is not sane reason for you to ever assume a user wants to visit some shitty twitter/reddit/digg/blog when they select text on a desktop computer. If I see a single one of you motherfuckers putting fucking text inside an action I swear to god I will come down there and beat you to death with your own fucking keyboard.
I’d avoid Last Exit From Brooklyn if I were you.

It's very rare that holding alt while selecting text doesn't resolve this issue. Assuming you're on a computer. If you're not, good luck. Selecting text on phones and tables can be impossible in too many circumstances.

It’s very rare that holding alt while selecting text doesn’t resolve this issue.
But I'm not actually looking to select the text when I do this, I'm just stimming and the extra visual noise is annoying.
- I don't think I understand the issue then.
TL;DR: OP could try using your finger on your phone to keep your place?
Oh boy. I design UI (games, not software) and OP’s very specific need would stomp on a very common need for why people select text… which is to copy/paste.
While on a computer, text selection doesn’t typically summon a pop up, it’s needed in mobile because how else would you easily get to copy and paste? Everyone else would rage at the loss of the tooltip and any other interaction would be painfully hidden if it was delegated to a combo of pressing your lock buttons or volume buttons while highlighting text.
Quick edit: didn’t see the screenshot of the widget, might be the site you’re using, or browser? Also any adblocker add on should be able to hide those elements.
- While on a computer, text selection doesn’t typically summon a pop up, it’s needed in mobile because how else would you easily get to copy and paste? Everyone else would rage at the loss of the tooltip and any other interaction would be painfully hidden if it was delegated to a combo of pressing your lock buttons or volume buttons while highlighting text.
  The complaint is specifically about desktop text selection though, the screenshot above says "i select text using my mouse". I agree that removing the pop-up UI from mobile would suck, well suck more than mobile text selection already does.
  Quick edit: didn’t see the screenshot of the widget, might be the site you’re using, or browser? Also any adblocker add on should be able to hide those elements.
  You're right, putting ##.quote-share-buttons in my uBlock filter list got rid of it. Still, blocking all these elements myself is really laborious.

I do it, too. I rarely read any text without subconsciously marking the text while reading it. Might be a tool for me (ADHD) to make it easier not to lose track - I don't know.

But regardless of why people do it and while I agree that it's probably something very specific not a lot of users do, I refuse to believe that anyone actually uses those select->popup-> share features, ever. Often the little pop-up even blocks the text above it which is just insanely bad UX imo.

Sites should never mess with core functionality without asking (scrolling, selection, tab/keyboard navigation, hijacking common shortcuts/right click, clipboard, history, etc).

I believe someone came up with that idea a decade+ ago and people just want it on their site to add value without actually checking if anyone uses it.

To anyone who does this, I've found browser extensions for both Chrome and Firefox called reading ruler or something like that, that will basically create a highlighted horizontal column wherever your mouse cursor is at, making it much easier to read text without having to manually select it

- finally someone who gets it
- I think the reading ruler effect is a big part of the accessibility being discussed here. If you want to separate the issues out, consider if browsers didn't show selected text by inverting the background color, but by e.g. underlining the selected text - you're right that it's still important to be able to do that, but the reading ruler is also important.
  The use of text selection as a nearly ubiquitous reading ruler is a neat cultural thing that shouldn't be broken lightly, but it's not necessarily the only way browsers and websites could implement it.

skill issue

So today I learned there is an internet equivalent of reading with your finger while mouthing the words.
I love this comment, I see it everywhere and it fills me with fuzzies

Hard agree. I'm not dyslexic, but I also occasionally mark text to keep progress, especially if it's a long piece. And if I really want to copy that text, I will, sometimes just out of spite that you're trying to outsmart me, and I'm more likely to leave your site sooner too.

Also, while we're at it, can you please leave scrolling behaviour alone and not override it? I have a nice mouse that lets me scroll as fast or as slow as I want to. In some rare cases with a fancy UI where one wheel notch scrolls a whole page I agree that overriding the behaviour is warranted. In all other cases just FUCKING LEAVE SCROLLING AS IS (as handled by the OS and the browser) and don't try to be fancy; if you try to be fancy for no particular reason, I'm more likely to leave your site ASAP rather than prefer it over other sites.

I hear you! It sounds like you want user-select: none on all text, because you want the site to feel more like a real newspaper, and having too many features like text selection is distracting you.

So true. Please hear us.

For PC, extra functions should be in the context menu in my opinion. For mobile, that's a little tougher, but maybe tapping on the selected text should bring up the options? Selecting on mobile is a tough thing anyway, and any solution is probably going to be a problem for someone else.

Actually, that's probably true for any UI design choices. There are some that are generally a good idea (like defining a reasonable navigation order for your elements or making design respond to viewport sizes to ensure that everything actually fits), but interaction options can get really muddy.

In linux land highlighting text can auto copy it and miuse wheel close ck auto pastes. Also i do love to highlight text for read ability

that reminds me of how scrolling would edit settings in GUI menus. Made me so mad because I don't know what I accidentally changed but I changed something that's gonna send me on a wild goose chase in 2 weeks
honestly i really hate that. i managed to get rid of it auto copying selected text (don't remember how) but seriously how do i disable pasting with the mouse wheel, it's never what i want to do
Relevant for SwayWM users:
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/4511
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/pull/7312
Relevant for Firefox (or similar) users:
Disable middlemouse.paste in about:config to remove this behavior, as Firefox handles this separately
- It so deep in old linux code that goes back to the origin of mice.
- What's your desktop environment? Because it's going to depend on that.

I select the whole text, then one word less from both ends, then one word less from both ends, then.... You get it... Until I'm down to the last 1 or 2 words.

This comment makes me think there aren't many stray cats left in your neighborhood.

I do this too, I'm the only one I know who doesn't think it's weird to do, I'm glad I'm not alone.

I'm not sure what it's a symptom of, but I often mess up reading the correct line when the lines a fairly wide. (I want to say dyslexia? But if I do have that then it's only mild)
I point with my finger with physical media also when lines are wide enough. It just helps read faster :3
I'm also glad to know I'm not alone in highlighting the text as I go

Hell yeah josef

Also: stop fucking redefining hotkeys, and place a toggler for pages where is makes sense (Figma etc., basically a whole complex programs in a webpage)