- cross-posted to:
- a11y
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- a11y
- [email protected]
Too narrow, hidden, minimal feedback…
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UX design got better and better for many years…but it has definitely been regressing over the past few years, IMO. It’s weaponized minimalism at this point. Because it “looks cool, bro”.
It’s a variant of enshittification.
The overuse of the word enshittification drives me crazy.
Enshittification of “enshittification”
/s
Enshittiception
Yeah, it has a very specific meaning, and people are now using it to mean “things becoming shitty”. Just because “shit” is the base word doesn’t mean that’s what the whole word means.
Enshittification doesn’t mean “thing gets shittier”? Who knew?!
No, it doesn’t.
From Wikipedia:
Enshittification, also known as platform decay,[1] is a way to describe the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that act as two-sided markets.
From the guy who coined the term itself:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification.
That’s just listing the whys and hows of "things get shittier ".
Being a pedant is never a good look. You’re missing the larger point. The same corporate impulse that drives platform decay ripples out to things like UX design. And that impulse is: the customer doesn’t matter anymore, we already got your money, only what we want matters.
It’s a neologism that actually does mean exactly that.
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Feels like it’s always been a buzzword for whatever someone doesn’t like right now
Thank you. I think it was overused even the moment it was used for its intended purpose. It feels really im14andthisisedgy to me.
I’m actually really glad we’re hearing it.
It’s a sign that people are finally starting to have higher standards.
I think those with low standards would get upset. Nobody likes to admit they’re being taken advantage of.
What do you mean ‘overuse’?
It’s just now entering our vernacular.
Are they wrong for using a word correctly? Or are you wrong for being a bitch about it? Hmmm.
Underuse IMO. We’ve grown complacent in so many regards.
Buy!!!?
[YES SPEND ALL MY MONEY]
[no]
You know that the [no] option would be [maybe later]
I FUCKING HATE THIS
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[keep reminding me til I accidentally click yes or just fold]
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LOL, harsh facts right here.
applying any design language feels wrong. it’s pure manipulation – i remember being forced onto the official twitter app and couldn’t believe there wasn’t a scroll bar. i felt lost; the timeline felt infinite, swallowing
They want you doom scrolling.
It’s one reason I like kbin. I’ll read to page 5 and that’s my limit for a session. Endless scrolling is annoying.
On kbin you have the choice to set it to doom scroll if you want.
Choice is the important thing with something like doom scrolling.
Yes.
I also like upvote and downvote separated. Some apps don’t have that option.
Lots of people who are designing websites and webapps are just out for the design. Usability went in the background for whatever reason.
But more and more people are getting more aware of user friendly UI and functions for people with disabilities. But yet it’s not the highest priority sadly.
for whatever reason
Flashy sleek shit gets invested in.
Outside of business specifically oriented towards people with accessibility issues, the energy just doesn’t translate into VC.
Companies who do try to shoehorn it in when products are more mature usually have:
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A codebase with a frustrating amount of refactoring in order to retroactively get things in line.
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Development inertia where it’s seen as a low value activity among developers and product owners
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Lack of clear guidance/tools/processes to QA new work
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Lack of will to retroactively identify the breadth and scope of changes you even want to make
There is no mystery. It’s not going to get you sexy VC money at the beginning, and then it’s bizarrely more work than you’d think once your project is sufficiently large.
That doesn’t explain why already established products are ditching things like plainly visible scroll bars in products like Microsoft word and other content viewers.
That’s true. I can speak from experience how I’ve seen it go down in many products, but no idea what apple and Microsoft are thinking.
It’s bizarre, because usually at some point in size, companies will start to explicitly have accessibility UAT processes. Even directorship roles specifically with that responsibility
It’s bizarre, because usually at some point in size, companies will start to explicitly have accessibility UAT processes. Even directorship roles specifically with that responsibility
I used to be a programmer for a large cable company (rhymes with “bombast”) and at one point I was the only programmer there working on accessibility in all their mobile products. The executives there at all levels had a shocking contempt for accessibility as something to even be concerned about at all and it showed in the disastrous state of all their apps. The only reason they even began to address the problem was the threat of million-dollars-per-month fines from the FCC for all the accessibility audit failures. They even hired a blind guy as accessibility VP but he quit in despair over the corporate lack of concern after just a few months.
This. And it doesn’t only apply to companies. I have a personal blog with a couple accessibility issues that I haven’t bothered to fix because I’ve built a lot of my CSS around my bad HTML. Part of the issue is that I built my site as a school project for a web design class I was taking, so code quality wasn’t great. One day I might redesign it better, but I don’t have the energy for now.
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And just straight up broken by idiocy like infinite scroll.
I would imagine the same designer who implements infinite scroll would also design bad scrollbars
I recently had to talk a designer out of implementing a “webpage progress indicator” that was a thin horizontal bar across the top of the page that filled in as you progressed through the content.
A few pages have those. What don’t you like about them?
They are bad replicas of school bars. Except you can’t use these to scroll the page and they use horizontal progress to express vertical progress. Everything they do could be done more effectively by having a visible scroll bar.
Unless they were copying it from somewhere else, what were their arguments to implement it? Is it about gamefication of reading an article?
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links that are only modal floater windows drive me insane too. this isn’t anything! make a website!
Most fun are the infinite scroll pages with a footer.
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Hey, it’s difficult to figure out how to present large amounts of information in a usable fashion. So let’s just NOT EVEN FUCKING BOTHER and just put everything into a gigantically long list instead.
I am sick of modern minimalist UI where functionality is not a priority.
I always prefer win32 applications for this reason.
Heck, I even prefer the ultra-skeuomorphic textured-everything approach of Mountain Lion-era OS X over the current ultra-minimalist approach where everything is either a hairline or a big flat monocolored shape.
It actually makes it harder to parse the UI when a button, a text field, a label, and a random part of the window can look exactly the same. I’d rather take a file manager that tries to look like a 1980s hifi stereo.
Or you know, a reasonable middle ground.
In the early '90s Alan Cooper wrote a book called About Face which unfortunately has dropped off the face of the earth as far as its influence on UI design is concerned. One of its many sensible proscriptions was that UI elements that can be interacted with should be visibly distinct from elements that are just there to display information. As a programmer, it drives me insane to have to use any of the modern apps that have completely abandoned this principle - or to have to deal with designers who have literally mocked me for thinking this is important.
Yes, that is the worst aspect of modern UI design. Interactable elements that are distinguished from labels solely by color because accessibility is so 2010. Labels that have that same color for emphasis. Flat black windows with black borders in front of other flat black windows that will get focus if you accidentally click them.
Or what the article is about: Tiny, hidden scroll bars because Fitts’s law means nothing and every user has a touchscreen and 20/20 vision.
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You can hide ribbon menu afaik by double clicking on any tap. I’m sure least MS Office support it.
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I see.
So, is there a better alternative to ribbons?
I am a developer and I am genuinely interested to know if there’s a better way to make frequently used buttons accessible.
I can’t speak for games or something like that, but I’ve been using MS Office since the mid 90s, and they kept the menus well into 2000 and beyond. I never had a problem finding anything. But then at some point after allowing menus if you wanted them, they totally dispensed with them and made the ribbon mandatory across all Office apps.
It’s been fifteen goddamn years and I -STILL- can’t find shit. Like, I’ve used mail merge maybe three times in my life, but even today I could find it rapidly in the old menu system: it was grouped next to the labels over to the right somewhere but before Help, take me 10, 15 seconds tops to find it.
Today, it’s “ms word [version] mail merge location” in a search or dragging out the customize ribbon tool and simply skimming though All Commands to see if I find it there first. No fucking clue where it’s hidden now, because I hardly ever use it, and the menus are not organized in intuitive, regular layouts: some buttons perform a single task, some open a submenu, others open a full window of further options.
Menus are a simple, elegant and time effective way of organizing a complex GUI: intuitive, hidden until you need them, no excess use of real estate, can be flipped through rapidly if you’re not familiar with the app, fairly standard for all users, and easy to walk someone through remotely. The ribbon has none of that, IMO.
. . . if there’s a better way to make frequently used buttons accessible.
In an app like Word, put frequently used buttons on the old format bar and put the menus back above them; make the menus fixed but the toolbars customizable to a small degree, and now you have the best of all worlds, IMO.
Menus are a simple, elegant and time effective way of organizing a complex GUI
I think what killed menus are all the people who can’t fucking read.
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I’m 100% with you on all of this! Just give me a classic windows menu at the top. I don’t want any ribbons, side bars, hovering bullshit that covers what I’m working on… Everything should have a keyboard shortcut. Everything should have visibility options.
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Control key shortcuts.
Form follows function! Not the other way around!
You’re correct.
However, in our capitalist world, form follows profit. 
I love it when scrollbars are like, half an atom wide. Makes it easy to use the website.
What the fuck is it with apps just making the scrollbar completely hidden until you scroll with the mouse or keyboard? Microsoft seems like the biggest offender with this. It’s so irritating, they’ve got more than enough space to just keep it around all the time, it’s what I’m expecting to find there, hiding it just makes more annoyed each time. It’s not as bad if you’re using a mouse with a scroll wheel, but on a laptop with a trackpad it’s beyond annoying.
I assume it’s part of a trend of having as much useless white space as possible, so that they can stuff more ads into it.
For 1080p screens at least, 170% zoom seems to be perfect fit for most content (for websites where 100% zoom is likely designed for lower resolutions) meaning sidebar ads are not even on-screen (IIRC, maybe you’d need to scroll to not see the left one but not sure how to test this).
Though I guess more sites likely don’t need as much zoom to fill content, for instance Kbin is full-width at 150%. Itch doesn’t have whitespace even at 100% (on the right side, the left side has it due to the left sidebar that is stuck at the top of the page).
I guess they think all trackpads do the two finger scroll now. Not always the case.
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People with dexterity and hand control challenges have a difficult time with these skinny scroll bars.
I have neither dexterity nor hand control challenges and I still find it incredibly hard to grab those skinny scroll bars.
One additional design “feature” I really despise is auto hiding scroll bars. So then to visually see when I am I have to scroll up and down to bring it back.
And web designers that do that stupid scroll hijacking where scrolling “stops” and then things move around for a bit should be launched into the sun. It’s the most anti-UX design I’ve ever seen. It’s literally the same as temporarily causing your mouse cursor to move in the opposite direction of input and then calling it a “design feature”.
Imagine if each application on your computer arbitrarily changed up the direction your mouse cursor moves. It’s literally the same thing. Computer input should be 100% predictable and reliable. The instant you do that it makes the computer/program/website feel sluggish and inoperative.
That scroll hijacking legit feels like getting stunned in call of duty or something, suddenly your mouse just doesn’t want to do what you tell it to.
Scroll bar hiding/skinny scroll bars are for people who don’t use them.
Apple hides them by default because they expect you to use the trackpad/scroll pad(?) on the magic mouse.
Just more examples of modern designers creating shit to stay relevant.
I hate modern design. We had good design up until the mid-2000s, then it all started going to shit.
Back in the day, the guideline was to put useful information and links at the top of the page when it loads, so that people could read the important bits and follow the links they needed without having to scroll down. Then everyone started using the entire space on load for a stock marketing photo or video so you would always need to scroll to see anything useful. Then they added whitespace everywhere so you’d need to scroll more. Then they removed the scrollbars. And sometimes they make scrolling do unpredictable animations instead of scrolling. It has become self-indulgent design instead of functional.
Yeah seriously. Like I am okay with them auto hiding when the mouse is away, but nowadays, even when you’re mousing over them, they’re only like 3-4px wide. What kind of a mouse target is that?! Ridiculous.
I have a broken scroll wheel (which happens every 5-10 years, whenever the lifecycle of my mouse reaches its end), and I feel the pain every freakin time I wanna scroll.
Nowadays with such high-resolution screens I just can’t understand why it’s needed to make those scrollbars so narrow.
For a while I was playing video games with a mouse that had a broken scroll wheel. Some games just don’t even implement a scroll bar at all… So you have to hold down the arrow keys to go through each item. So infuriating.
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Well, I won’t agree, because I haven’t met with this problem yet. I’m just here to somewhat disagree with the upvote part: in my book, upvote means agreement. I find it totally unnecessary to repeat the same thing, when you can just upvote. That’s what upvote is for.
(But as I said, I didn’t agree, so it wasn’t me, I didn’t upvote.)
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My favorite text-related thing in websites is the layouts with enormous amounts of screen real estate that still put important information (like song or film titles) in a single line that ends up truncated with ellipses (with bonus points when they don’t even implement a tooltip that would show you the whole thing). Like, wrapping text and having the rest of the UI flow beneath it has been easy to do in any language for literally decades, but somehow programmers don’t know how to do it and designers get pissed if you make them even think about that.
So, to tl;dr the article: size does matter
It’s not the length of the scrollbar, it’s how you use it (and also girth)
I would like my scroll bars back please. Scroll wheel on a mouse is not enough. Neither is a fling gesture on touchpad or screen.
Sorry bro, the modern designers said they were too big.
You can use the scrollwheel on your mouse, though. Have you seen the meme?
https://old.reddit.com/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu/comments/df8cd/watching_someone_use_a_computer/
This is literally the fault of the reddit generation of design. Ironically, reddit is one of the worst-designed pieces of shit on the planet.
Oh well.
I’ve never seen that gif before in my life. Stop bringing Reddit with you everywhere
What are you talking about?
What makes you think I assumed everyone who read this saw it?
Lol.
I like the way GTK is doing it. You have a thin scrollbar that is overlayed over the content and has no background (so just the knob) but when you get near it with the mouse, the background appears and it becomes double as thick. That way you’re not wasting any space but you don’t have this issue of it being hard to use either.
What I also like about GTK’s scrollbars is that the scrollbar only auto hides when the scroll area completely looses focus. As long as the mouse cursor is hovering anywhere in the scrolling region the scrollbar is visible, so you don’t have to scroll first to see where the scroll position is.
Am I the only one who never considered normal scrollbars to be a ‘waste of space’?
It’s surprising to me how modern designers seem to care about scrollbars, but not all the white space we see on everything else.
It could be that websites are being made unbearable, to pressure users into switching to the site’s mobile apps, which are generally spyware. I can’t stand looking at homedepot.com on a phone, for example. Even if I don’t look at the screen, I can feel the phone warming up in my hand as the crapware javascript on the site drains the phone battery.
