HACKER Q&A
📣 thrdbndndn

What's your pet peeve of common UX/UI?


Mine: overlay on video (especially when they're not full screened).

They're often too obstructive for no reason (often has a too large dark gradient that blocks bottom or top of the video), takes forever to disappear, and hard to operate (very easy to accidentally pause the video). For example, CC button for YouTube: it totally could be below the video element.

This is especially annoying on mobile since there is not keyboard shortcuts.


  👤 wruza Accepted Answer ✓
Video-related: seek bar too thin or close to buttons. I constantly press prev/next/mute when rewinding an intro. Also, seek preview only appears when the cursor is in the bar. Move a little off it vertically, and seek preview disappears.

Youtube: missing on right arrow key and pressing numpad zero instead rewinds you to the start of a video. That’s truly idiotic, because no idea where I was watching.

Focus can be on a video, or on “controls”. You press up arrow to volume up, but it jumps +5s because focus was left on a seek bar last time.

iPhone: inputs zoom on focus-in but do not unzoom after you’re “Done”. Pinch the site back to 100% yourself, that’s so much fun isn’t it.

MS Windows scrollbars and their small reset distance.

General: Buttons that look like labels. Frames that look like air.

Vertical centering of bullet points next to multiline text.


👤 coder4life
There's a main text input field.

Why the hell can't I start typing as soon as I get to that page?!

You really insist I use the mouse?! My fingers were just on the keyboard typing the url. Goddamn you

^^^^ I feel this way often. This is a solved problem for the past 20 years. As for the past 10 years, the same problem on the phone: Start at that field and bring up the keyboard


👤 mikro2nd
"We'll send you an OTP via SMS" with no other alternative. And usually with a fairly short timeout.

I live in an area with poor cellular coverage. SMSs can take as long as weeks (6 weeks in one extreme case) to get to me.


👤 bediger4000
Flat design. You cannot discover how to navigate other than just messing around. An abomination. Please put in hyperlinks that look like links. Buttons should visibly be button. No hidden click areas.

👤 politelemon
It's called UX, which is for experience. Website speed is part of experience, but gets pretty much no attention. It seems UX is limited to aesthetics but not entirely user experience.

👤 night-rider
Infinite scrolling. It’s a dark pattern.