Only tangentially related, and a seemingly lost old-man battle: stop hiding my scrollbar.
Interesting article. Some points I didn't quite agree entirely with. There's a cost and practically limitation to some things (like a physical knob in a car for zooming in and out on a map - although that was probably just an example of intuitive use).
I just recently switched a toggle on a newly installed app that did the opposite of what it was labelled - I thought the label represented the current state, but it represented the state it would switch to if toggled. It became obvious once changed, but that seems the least helpful execution.
Something which drives me mad is how modern operating systems (both desktop and mobile) keep hiding file system paths. There used to be a setting on OSX which let you show the address bar in Finder (though it wasn't default) but nowadays it seems to be impossible (unless you get some third-party extension) and I have to resort to using the terminal. It's bonkers.
It makes it impossible to locate files later when I need to move or transfer them.
My working theory, which I hold quite confidently, is that anything that doesn't test well with new users in usability testing focus groups or A/B testing eventually gets the axe. But the people conducting that testing are - intentionally or unintentionally - optimizing for the wrong metric: "how quickly and easily can someone who has never seen this app before figure out how to do this action." That's the wrong thing to optimize for at a macro scale. It might make your conversions go up for a while, but at a long term cost of usability, capability, and discoverability that enrages the users that you want to convert into advanced, loyal, word of mouth evangelists for your app because they love it.
When people who are not thinking in that bigger-scale, zoomed-out, societal-level perspective conduct A/B testing or usability testing in a lab or focus group setting, they focus on the wrong metrics (the ones that make an immediate, short-term KPI go up) and then promote the resulting objectively worse UX designs as being evidence-based and data-driven.
It has been destroying software usability for the last 20 years and doing a deep disservice to subsequent generations who are growing up without having been exposed to TRULY thoughtful UX except very rarely.
Very slightly unrelated, but this trend is one of the reasons I went Android after the iPhone removed the home button. I think it became meaningfully harder to explain interactions to older users in my family and just when they got the hang of "force touch" it also went away.
First thing I do on new Pixel phones is enable 3 button navigation, but lately that's also falling out of favor in UI terms, with apps assuming bottom navigation bar and not accounting for the larger spacing of 3 button nav and putting content or text behind it.
I think the article overlooks that it is not really an accident that apps and operating systems are hiding all their user interface affordances. It's an antipattern to create lock in, and it tends to occur once a piece of software has reached what they consider saturation point in terms of growth where keeping existing users in is more important than attracting new ones. It so turns out that the vast majority of software we use is created by companies in exactly that position - Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta etc.
It might seem counter intuitive that hiding your interface stops your users leaving. But it does it because it changes your basis of assumptions about what a device is and your relationship with it. It's not something you "use", but something you "know". They want you to feel inherently linked to it at an intuitive level such that leaving their ecosystem is like losing a part of yourself. Once you've been through the experience of discovering "wow, you have to swipe up from a corner in a totally unpredictable way to do an essential task on a phone", and you build into your world of assumptions that this is how phones are, the thought of moving to a new type of phone and learning all that again is terrifying. It's no surprise at all that all the major software vendors are doing this.
I sort of disagree with this: once I’ve internalized the gestures, I really appreciate the lack of UI for them. It’s like vim and emacs: the sparse ui creates a steeper learning curve but becomes a feature once you’ve learned the tool
> If you want to lock the door, then the hidden control problem becomes evident... to lock the door, I must know that the hidden control to lock is the pound key. To make matters worse, it's not a simple press of the pound key. It's a press of the pound key for a full five seconds in order to activate the lock sequence. The combination of the long temporal window and the hidden control makes locking the door nearly impossible, unless you are well acquainted with the system and its operation.
Isn't that kind of the point? You don't want people accidentally locking the door, but if it's your door, it's easy enough to remember how to do it.
This is easily one of the most frustrating parts of the user experience on Discord. So many buttons are hidden until you mouse over them, which absolutely drives me UP A WALL. I really hope this trend discontinues.
My car’s audio system seems to go out of its way to bury sound settings (bass, treble, balance, etc.) in as many nested menus as possible. And when you do finally find the settings, they are greyed out. I had to actually watch a youtube video to figure out that they are configured at the individual source level. Super confusing and unintuitive, and especially egregious considering that this is in a vehicle you are DRIVING - confusion, distraction, and frustration are the last things you want drivers to experience.
This is what happens when "designers" who are nothing more than artists take control of UI decisions. They want things to look "clean" at the expense of discoverability and forget that affordances make people learn.
Contrast this with something like an airplane cockpit, which while full of controls and assuming expert knowledge, still has them all labeled.
Most people are intimidated by airplane cockpits. I think you’re right that specialists in certain situations where they’re familiar have much higher tolerance for visual density because, to them, it isn’t dense, it’s meaningful.
Most people for most situations, using most phone apps, do not have that familiarity. Mobile design has to simultaneously provide a lot of power and progressively disclose it such that it keeps users at or just past their optimal level of comfort, and that involves tradeoffs to hide some things and expose others at different levels of depth.
So while I agree that a lot of mobile design, and OS design in particular, pulls back way too far on providing affordances for actions, I would not use an airplane cockpit as a good guide, unless you’re also talking about a specialist tool.
The other day I was locked out of my car
the key fob button wouldn't work
Why didn't I just use my key to get in?
First, you need to know there is a hidden key inside the fob.
Second, because there doesn't appear to be a keyhole on the car door,
you also have to know that you need to disassemble a portion
of the car door handle to expose the keyhole.
Hiding critical car controls is hostile engineering. In this, it doesn't stand out much in the modern car experience.
I drive a Toyota that is nearly old enough to run for US Senator. Every control in the car is visible, clearly labeled and is distinct to the touch - at all times. The action isn't impeded by routine activity or maintenance (ex:battery change).
Because it can be trivially duplicated, this is minimally capable engineering. Yet automakers everywhere lack even this level of competence. By reasonable measure, they are poor at their job.
Lots of comments that a few plastic knobs, switches, wiring add to the cost. Yes. But buttons and knobs are more intuitive, less distracting, can be operated blind while keeping eyes on the road.
So guess what Mr.Auto Manufacturer, you can keep your hifi $30K-70K touchscreen surveillance machine on your lot. I'll keep driving my 20+ year old Corolla until you learn to do better.
I notice an interesting phenomenon here and elsewhere. There is this complaint where everyone agrees that the current state of affairs sucks. There are some (perhaps limited, but still) ways to improve it, and yet, they don’t get much traction. My very brief research produced this list of cars with limited touch screens:
Toyota 4Runner, Toyota Tacoma, Jeep Wrangler, Nissan Frontier, Ford Maverick, Ford Bronco, Jeep Gladiator, Mazda MX-5 Miata
I wonder what kind of cars do you guys drive.
Stranger still, if someone comes up with an idea of how to improve that thing that sucks, frequently the reaction is very negative. Sadly, the whole thing more and more gets into “old man yelling at the cloud” territory.
By reasonable measure, they are poor at their job.
I don't think you can make this assertion without knowing what they were tasked with doing. I very much doubt they were tasked with making the most user friendly cockpit possible. I suspect they were required to minimize moving parts (like switches and buttons) and to enable things like Sirius, iPhone and Android integration, etc.
We have a user interface design rule that keyboard shortcuts and context menus must only be "shortcuts" for commands that are discoverable via clear buttons or menus. That probably makes our apps old-fashioned.
I recall learning that the four corners of the screen are the most valuable screen real estate, because it's easy to move the mouse to those locations quickly without fine control. So it's user-hostile that for Windows 11 Microsoft moved the default "Start" menu location to the center. And I don't think they can ascribe it to being mobile-first. Maybe it's "touch-first", where mouse motion doesn't apply.
Yes! This is how things should be. And additionally, I want to see all the keyboard shortcuts visible on the menu items they activate. And every tool tip that pops up when you hover over a button should also show whatever keyboard shortcut activates that function. It's the best way for novice users to notice and the keyboard shortcuts for the things they care about without having to go elsewhere to look them up.
I think there are couple of conflated aspects here - and some of them are fine, and likely a consequence of computing devices being more ingrained in common day, and some of them are very hostile, and clearly intended to subvert the interests of the user.
As an example:
I think hiding controls in favor of "knowledge in the head", as the author phrases it, is absolutely fine when the user is presumed to be aware of features, should be able to understand they exist and know how to use them, and can reasonably learn them. Especially fine if those controls aren't used all that often, and are behind a keyboard shortcut or other common and efficient route to reach them.
On the other hand - I think there's also been a drive to visibly reduce how much control and understanding basic users might have about how a machine works. Examples of this are things like
- Hiding the scheme/path in browser url bars
- Hiding the file path in file explorers and other relevant contexts
- Hiding desired options behind hoops (ex - installing windows without signing into an account, or disabling personalized ads in chrome)
Those later options feel hostile. I need to know the file path to understand where the file is located. I can't simply memorize it - even if I see the same base filename, is it in "c:/users/me/onedrive/[file]" or "c:/users/me/backed_up_spot/[file]"? No way to know without seeing the damn path, and I can have multiple copies floating around. That's intentional (it drives users to Microsofts paid tooling), and hostile.
Basically - knowledge that can be learned and memorized can benefit from workflows that give you the "blank canvas" that the author seems to hate. Command lines are a VERY powerful tool to use a computer, and the text interface is a big part of that. R is (despite my personal distaste for it as a language) a very powerful tool. Much more powerful and flexible than SPSS.
But there are also places where companies are subverting user goals to drive revenue, and that can rightfully fuck right off.
One of my biggest complaints with modern computing is that "The internet" has placed a lot of software into a gray zone where it's not clear if it's respecting my decisions/needs/wants or the publisher's decisions/needs/wants.
It used to be that the publisher only mattered until the moment of sale. Then it was me and the software vs the world - ride or die. Now far too much software is like judas. Happy to sell me out if there's a little extra silver in it.
Notion is horrendous for this. Hiding every control behind an invisible hover target. No, I don't want my company documentation to have a minimalist aesthetic. I just want to use it.
Agree utterly. It's a real shame, and severely affects accessibility for disabled and elderly people. Not only UI discoverability but also the types of swiping or holding movements required on mobile devices. The initial mobile interfaces felt way more accessible, so I don't think its an implicit implication of limited screen real-estate. This has been a trend-driven flattening of UI, with aesthetics over functionality. The palm and compaq pilots felt sublime to use, and the ipod and early mp3 players were fine, as was the originally charming iphone skeudomorphic iconography. It's all been downhill since then.
a lot of the things being pointed out seem like non issues. It seems to me that this doesn't really explore that knowledge in head UIs are actually a lot more straightforward and easy to use with the knowledge in head. Most attempts to circumvent that bloat UIs. Also whatever you give people, if it's a repetitive use UI they tend to learn it and turn into knowledge in head, even if its a knowledge in world type of UI, you then change it and people get confused.
The article suggests a “simple, well-labeled rotary control ... would accomplish the same function” as a power button and “prevent the user from accidentally activating the control in a way that is no longer hidden”. But a rotary control itself has a serious problem, in that it can mislead the user as to the state, on or off. If the power has failed and the machine does not restart when it comes back, the rotary control will remain in the ON state when the machine is off. From memory, Donald Norman called this kind of thing “false affordance” and gave the example of a door that needed to be pulled having a push-plate on it.
So my iMac, among many other devices like the light I wear on my head camping, has a button which you long-press to turn on. It is a very common pattern which most people will have come across, and it’s reasonable to expect people to learn it. The buttons are even labelled with an ISO standard symbol which you are expected to know.
As a longtime user of ancient Macs, I find the modern iMac's longpress-powerbutton frustrating. It usually takes me multiple tries to figure out if I pressed it long enough, or too long, or not enough. When I have pressed it just right, the iMac still doesn't respond immediately in a visible or audible way: there's just enough delay for me to start fiddling with the power button again.
Compare to the momentary buttons on ye olde Macs that existed on both the case and the keyboard, which gave immediate feedback. The one on the case also had a longpress action, but only as an override.
"Nope, didn't want this on right now. Bumped it by accident. Long-press!" is easier for me to get behind.
80 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 67.4 ms ] threadInteresting article. Some points I didn't quite agree entirely with. There's a cost and practically limitation to some things (like a physical knob in a car for zooming in and out on a map - although that was probably just an example of intuitive use).
I just recently switched a toggle on a newly installed app that did the opposite of what it was labelled - I thought the label represented the current state, but it represented the state it would switch to if toggled. It became obvious once changed, but that seems the least helpful execution.
It makes it impossible to locate files later when I need to move or transfer them.
When people who are not thinking in that bigger-scale, zoomed-out, societal-level perspective conduct A/B testing or usability testing in a lab or focus group setting, they focus on the wrong metrics (the ones that make an immediate, short-term KPI go up) and then promote the resulting objectively worse UX designs as being evidence-based and data-driven.
It has been destroying software usability for the last 20 years and doing a deep disservice to subsequent generations who are growing up without having been exposed to TRULY thoughtful UX except very rarely.
I will die on this hill.
First thing I do on new Pixel phones is enable 3 button navigation, but lately that's also falling out of favor in UI terms, with apps assuming bottom navigation bar and not accounting for the larger spacing of 3 button nav and putting content or text behind it.
It might seem counter intuitive that hiding your interface stops your users leaving. But it does it because it changes your basis of assumptions about what a device is and your relationship with it. It's not something you "use", but something you "know". They want you to feel inherently linked to it at an intuitive level such that leaving their ecosystem is like losing a part of yourself. Once you've been through the experience of discovering "wow, you have to swipe up from a corner in a totally unpredictable way to do an essential task on a phone", and you build into your world of assumptions that this is how phones are, the thought of moving to a new type of phone and learning all that again is terrifying. It's no surprise at all that all the major software vendors are doing this.
Isn't that kind of the point? You don't want people accidentally locking the door, but if it's your door, it's easy enough to remember how to do it.
Contrast this with something like an airplane cockpit, which while full of controls and assuming expert knowledge, still has them all labeled.
Most people for most situations, using most phone apps, do not have that familiarity. Mobile design has to simultaneously provide a lot of power and progressively disclose it such that it keeps users at or just past their optimal level of comfort, and that involves tradeoffs to hide some things and expose others at different levels of depth.
So while I agree that a lot of mobile design, and OS design in particular, pulls back way too far on providing affordances for actions, I would not use an airplane cockpit as a good guide, unless you’re also talking about a specialist tool.
Because it can be trivially duplicated, this is minimally capable engineering. Yet automakers everywhere lack even this level of competence. By reasonable measure, they are poor at their job.
So guess what Mr.Auto Manufacturer, you can keep your hifi $30K-70K touchscreen surveillance machine on your lot. I'll keep driving my 20+ year old Corolla until you learn to do better.
Toyota 4Runner, Toyota Tacoma, Jeep Wrangler, Nissan Frontier, Ford Maverick, Ford Bronco, Jeep Gladiator, Mazda MX-5 Miata
I wonder what kind of cars do you guys drive.
Stranger still, if someone comes up with an idea of how to improve that thing that sucks, frequently the reaction is very negative. Sadly, the whole thing more and more gets into “old man yelling at the cloud” territory.
I don't think you can make this assertion without knowing what they were tasked with doing. I very much doubt they were tasked with making the most user friendly cockpit possible. I suspect they were required to minimize moving parts (like switches and buttons) and to enable things like Sirius, iPhone and Android integration, etc.
I recall learning that the four corners of the screen are the most valuable screen real estate, because it's easy to move the mouse to those locations quickly without fine control. So it's user-hostile that for Windows 11 Microsoft moved the default "Start" menu location to the center. And I don't think they can ascribe it to being mobile-first. Maybe it's "touch-first", where mouse motion doesn't apply.
And some of their conferences are just downright awful UI
https://s2025.siggraph.org/
As an example:
I think hiding controls in favor of "knowledge in the head", as the author phrases it, is absolutely fine when the user is presumed to be aware of features, should be able to understand they exist and know how to use them, and can reasonably learn them. Especially fine if those controls aren't used all that often, and are behind a keyboard shortcut or other common and efficient route to reach them.
On the other hand - I think there's also been a drive to visibly reduce how much control and understanding basic users might have about how a machine works. Examples of this are things like
- Hiding the scheme/path in browser url bars
- Hiding the file path in file explorers and other relevant contexts
- Hiding desired options behind hoops (ex - installing windows without signing into an account, or disabling personalized ads in chrome)
Those later options feel hostile. I need to know the file path to understand where the file is located. I can't simply memorize it - even if I see the same base filename, is it in "c:/users/me/onedrive/[file]" or "c:/users/me/backed_up_spot/[file]"? No way to know without seeing the damn path, and I can have multiple copies floating around. That's intentional (it drives users to Microsofts paid tooling), and hostile.
Basically - knowledge that can be learned and memorized can benefit from workflows that give you the "blank canvas" that the author seems to hate. Command lines are a VERY powerful tool to use a computer, and the text interface is a big part of that. R is (despite my personal distaste for it as a language) a very powerful tool. Much more powerful and flexible than SPSS.
But there are also places where companies are subverting user goals to drive revenue, and that can rightfully fuck right off.
One of my biggest complaints with modern computing is that "The internet" has placed a lot of software into a gray zone where it's not clear if it's respecting my decisions/needs/wants or the publisher's decisions/needs/wants.
It used to be that the publisher only mattered until the moment of sale. Then it was me and the software vs the world - ride or die. Now far too much software is like judas. Happy to sell me out if there's a little extra silver in it.
I'm convinced advertisers will find a way to leverage that behavior in some new dark UI pattern.
So my iMac, among many other devices like the light I wear on my head camping, has a button which you long-press to turn on. It is a very common pattern which most people will have come across, and it’s reasonable to expect people to learn it. The buttons are even labelled with an ISO standard symbol which you are expected to know.
Compare to the momentary buttons on ye olde Macs that existed on both the case and the keyboard, which gave immediate feedback. The one on the case also had a longpress action, but only as an override.
"Nope, didn't want this on right now. Bumped it by accident. Long-press!" is easier for me to get behind.