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”.
MacOS by default hides scroll bars. They're big on form over function which I hate.
Some people are just like that.
I knew a couple that mounted their TV in a way that all the ports (eg: HDMI) were inaccessible. They just didn't care that a big chunk of the TV's functionality was now blocked. They didn't want to see wires.
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.
Excel does all those things it does because it's always done those things it does, and if Microsoft changes it everyone will pitch a fit and probably sue because now they have to retrain their entire accounting department.
I disagree. There are louts of things that would not change old behavior but add so much convenience. Like cell reference for diagram ranges. But nope, we are stuck in 199...4?
I love some of the newer things like LET and LAMBDA. But I'd kill for structured references to be properly implemented everywhere. I'm a bit over using INDIRECT to get around it (when I can).
Yes. I have build dynamic diagrams with indirect, I feel ashamed.
Let us use Python instead of cancerous VBA. You can not even add comments to your variable definitions. Or named vars in functions. Why do I even need macros at all to simply define a function?
You don’t, any more. At least not for relatively simple functions.
LAMBDA combined with the name manager lets you do custom functions even in a regular .xlsx workbook.
You don’t get the full control flow and extended functionality you do in VBA, and Python would be amazing of course, but I find LAMBDA covers about 90% of use cases.
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.
Not much anymore, sorry to say - this was a few decades ago! I remember her showing us some mockups on index cards and other paper-based models, showing what different user actions might display (I was studying computer science at the same time, so it was a bit of a common interest). I also remember her talking about watching groups of users trying to use a piece of software, and using eye tracking along with mouse tracking and other devices to see where their focus tended to be drawn, where they spent their time, etc. as they tried to accomplish certain tasks; studying different aspects of discoverability.
I also remember she was a big fan of Saturn's cars - apparently they were big into usability, and as a consequence were easy to maintain and tended to avoid things like problematic blind spots. I do remember changing the headlight was extremely easy - you pulled two pins and the whole headlight assembly popped out!
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.
This was just happening to me with Amazon.
I wanted to get to the support link in the footer but they always loaded new stuff before I could click on it
Plus if you want to find older content, you can't just skip to a page, you need to scroll through every goddamn item until you find what you're looking for.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Win 11 is so bad. Right click sucks so bad now.
Win 10 start menu is the same. No I don't want to search the Internet for apps I would open a browser for that, I would like to use the apps on my PC.
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.
I think most people, including me, appreciate how it looks cleaner though. On Android I get you, they should allow custom themes, but for Linux you can easily swap to a more information dense one.
The problem with "cleanness" is that individual elements of a data structure more complex than a tiered list blend together without visual separation. It very quickly becomes illegible.
Well, you can switch to non-GTK applications but beyond that you can't really get more information density into apps that follow the Adwaita design language. You can't even really theme them.
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.
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.
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...
I have to do this all of the time whenever anybody sends me a screenshot of their error message, rather than copying and pasting the error message into the ticket. Or worse still a photo of their screen that shows the error message.
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.
At the start of Covid, we had to start working from home. Our Chief Security Idiot thought that was a good time to impose measures that made it impossible to reboot a computer without physical access. When I questioned how that would work with my desktop, which stayed in the office building that I couldn’t legally access, he kept saying I had to take the “laptop” with me. I told him several times that it was a desktop, but he just couldn’t understand until my boss got involved.
That was my first run-in with our idiot-in-charge-of-security, and it only got worse after that.
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.
@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".
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!
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.
I've played the old silver box DnD games from 1988 and 1989. The magic effects were listed in the clue book instead of the manual. Talk about purposefully asshole design
The Wizardry series of games were very DnD like, but they kind of made up a language for the spell names. You don't get a fireball, you get Halito. A big fireball is Mahalito. So you need the manual spread across your legs just to know whether you need to cast porfic or calfo on the locked chest in front of you.
They had more of a tolerance for bullshit back in the 80's.
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.
As someone who doesn't do this, I can only guess it's like holding your book mark parallel under the lines in a book as you read it, which I thought was fairly uncommon. Apparently a bunch of people read this way?
It makes more sense on monitors with large blocks of text or large paragraphs. With a monitor so big relative to a book, and scrolling making it easy to lose where you were, it can sometimes be tough for folks to read through huge chunks. Some people select chunks of text to help break up those monoliths into manageable bites along with putting a clear marker for where they are if they scroll or otherwise lose their place..
As someone who does occasionally do this, I don’t think it’s about readability. After all I also read books, which are not known for short bits of text in narrow columns. And I don’t use a bookmark, pen, or finger to keep track of where I’m at.
I think it’s more about keeping your hand busy, subconsciously even. Although to be honest I also don’t do that while reading books.
Maybe it’s a remnant of when every computer had a screensaver, and constantly moving the mouse meant keeping the screen alive.
From a usability, accessibility, and comfort perspective a book is incredibly different from a device that's blasting your eyeballs with highly contrasting light.
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.
If you're selecting merely to read, there's a good chance the text is too small, the lines too long without enough space, the contrast too low, and that would all be addressed by following common web accessibility standards.
Good accessibility is good UI.
16px is commonly considered a good minimum text size for accessibility.
When I outgrew thinking tiny text was cool, I standardized interfaces to render at least that size & found a vast improvement.
(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)
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.
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.
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 :(
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Oh yeah, I’m a terrible text block skimmer and desperately need line breaks, punctuation, etc. (Also, not to mention the repetition really triggered my need to skim, lol). That many repeated phrases turned some words into white noise. So that was my bad.
Good to hear the element blocker works!
It def sounds tedious to manually block things, but like some comments have mentioned, there are probably some browser add ons that may have the functionality you seek.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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
Do this to note my place, especially when the text is smaller and the lines are long. Makes it so much easier to find the line I left off on if I have to step away, or to find my way back to the next line more easily.
It’s the equivalent of putting my finger or a bookmark down on a page in a novel.
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
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)
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.
I really dont know. I dont select text while I read it? I get the frustration but what's the majority? If your in the minority I dont think you should be ignored but also I dont know how they cater to everyone.
I say, the majority adopt something they adopt it because that's how the majority like it. If the majority disagrees make changes to suit their needs. If the resources exist to cater to everyone, cater to everyone. If not, as a member of the minority, its on you to find a work around or move on.
How often do you actually use a pop-up that comes up when selecting text? And is it really more convenient than selecting followed by a right click, or pressing a shortcut?
Even if the people who select text while reading are in the minority, this post shows it’s a large minority. And I’m quite convinced that the number of times such a pop-up is used, is also a minority.
Im not arguing that it is great feature just that it doesn't bother me. Not in the way someone who selects text while they read would. I even say if the majority of people agreed with OP I'd be fine with the changed UI. I just dont like the idea that you can shout "cater to me" and that's automatically a valid opinion because there is some consensus.
Yeah but the thing is…there’s no reason to have some bullshit .js do some weird unexpected thing when I select text on a website. There just isn’t.
Not only is the function never the same between sites, leading to a new experience for my brain to deal with each time, but it’s also obnoxious business bro bullshit that has no place on the WWW.
I say, the majority adopt something they adopt it because that’s how the majority like it.
In the world of UIs, majorities "adopt" something they adopt because it's the default, imposed, and people tend to just not change the defaults (or it flat out can't be done).
but also I dont know how they cater to everyone
Add it as a tunable in settings? Most stuff has settings, it's marginal zero effort to add a new one.
In the world of UIs, majorities “adopt” something they adopt because it’s the default, imposed, and people tend to just not change the defaults (or it flat out can’t be done).
If they willingly adopt it then its not an issue, no?
Add it as a tunable in settings? Most stuff has settings, it’s marginal zero effort to add a new one.
If its so easy they should equally be capable of implementing their own work around, no?
Whether its something that people adopted willingly or not makes no difference to whether it's an issue. Most things can still be (or still have to be) improved. And once again, "adopt" is sus. As is "willingly" (are you "willingly" accepting something that marketing tells you to be true?).
If its so easy they should equally be capable of implementing their own work around, no?
That's something that is done sometimes, yes. Say, Librewolf could restore some tunables that were removed from Firefox. But that still depends on how invasive the change is (and on whether you can actually implement a workaround or not, which means you'd need the code, a build system, etc).
You cater everyone by putting a context menu in that comes up when you right click or long press on a touch screen. This problem has been solved for decades. Applications aren't designed by the majority. They're designed by a handful of developers who I suspect are usually ordered to do shit by some moron project manager that just wants changes made so they can report to their superiors that they did something.
Fine. Except Im not really sure what the younger generations are up to these days. I think covid and two trump presidencys are going to have some real detrimental effects to the tech space.
Seems more like the writer's problem: everyone else selects text to perform a function.
They could point with the mouse or use the bottom of the window as a guide & tap the ↓ key.
As relatable problems go, not being able to select text solely for its own sake doesn't feel that great of one.
Doing it just feels so extra: like, why do that & just waste it?
Are we hyperactive?
Should we work on impulse control?
Selecting highlights to show the scope of an operation.
As a nuisance, offering extra, context-relevant functionality doesn't seem that great of one, either: I can just ignore that & ctrl-c.
And I don't see a great alternative to a popover offering that functionality.
It probably saves a few clicks when done right.
Removing standard functionality, however, is extremely relatable.
I'll go into Dev Tools to remove anything disabling copy & paste, because fuck that & burn the control freak who signed off on that.
No we don't. Everyone else selects text to select text (with left click), that's how you copy the text, but just as importantly: that's how you select text.
Selecting text, a core functionality of a computer, is pointless?
Highlighting text isn't pointless, even if you don't personally do it.
Some of us struggle with long lines of text (people with varying degrees of dyslexia)
It literally doesn't inconvenience anyone. And is the standard behaviour on most websites that you can select text. Who here is out there complaining about selectable text? It's usually the opposite (because then you can't copy)
I'm not sure you meant to come across a bit shitty, but if you meant to, I'll invite you to think about exercising empathy for your fellow humans before you speak.
Just because you don't use it, doesn't mean it's pointless.
And saying it is, after having it explained why it's useful to others, is not very pleasant.
Selecting text, a core functionality of a computer, is pointless?
Can you identify any OS GUI in history that offered text selection without operations to perform on the selection?
That was always the core function: select the input of an operation.
Some of us struggle with long lines of text (people with varying degrees of dyslexia)
There are solutions for that: accessibility standards.
It's been well researched and is basic to good UI design.
All the problems you point out leading you to do something extra just to read indicate problems addressed by fixing broken accessibility.
It'd be better to fix those basic UI problems instead of defend doing extra things we shouldn't have to do that they weren't really designed to do.
Yes, practically all the desktop ones. You can just select text with it just selecting the text. On most websites. I'm pretty sure OP is referring to websites that "helpfully" put UI elements in the way after highlighting.
Most text editors do this well, they put the UI elements above the text, not in the way.
The vast, vast, majority of websites still do nothing when you select text.
We're not talking about phones, you typically read that in portrait so the lines are short.
Perhaps I have made an assumption that not everyone was on the same page about.
Selecting text on android also works great with the UI that pops up there. I'm pretty sure we're only talking about annoying websites, on desktop.
Can you identify any OS GUI in history that offered text selection without operations to perform on the selection? without operations without
I doubt any early OS designer went "Pure selection is useful on its own. Let's ship that without the ability to do anything to it." then at a later iteration someone went "I have a clever idea: let's add the ability to operate (eg, cut, copy, overwrite) on that selection!".
Even the name is suggestive: select.
Select for what?
Input for something.
It still seems like a criticism that picks over the wrong thing while disregarding a host of deeper problems (eg, noncompliance with accessibility standards) that led them there.
Reading is basic: the text size, spacing, line length, contrast should be accessible without extra steps.
Font ought to be adjustable from their user agent, so dyslexic users can set a dyslexic font.
Selection popovers shouldn't obscure the selection.
Etc.
Yes, without operations visible. Highlighting text just highlights it on the vast majority of websites on desktop, right now. Unless you're on edge, where it does obscure as soon as you let go of the mouse.
You need to right click, or use keyboard shortcuts to do anything with your highlighted text, unless your browser is getting in the way. Some websites do also get in the way.
And this is exactly what the OP wants (or rather my interpretation):
Selection popovers shouldn't obscure the selection. Etc.
Other programs do this far better. The key complaint is that popups pop up in front of the text.
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”.
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.
I hate how tiny it often is now. What the fuck. Not to mention the ever decreasing contrast.
MacOS by default hides scroll bars. They're big on form over function which I hate.
Some people are just like that.
I knew a couple that mounted their TV in a way that all the ports (eg: HDMI) were inaccessible. They just didn't care that a big chunk of the TV's functionality was now blocked. They didn't want to see wires.
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.
One of the many extremely basic issues with Excel. Absolutely disgusting.
Excel does all those things it does because it's always done those things it does, and if Microsoft changes it everyone will pitch a fit and probably sue because now they have to retrain their entire accounting department.
The undo and copy behavior for Excel started with office 365. Also the repeat after hitting the end of the redo stack.
I disagree. There are louts of things that would not change old behavior but add so much convenience. Like cell reference for diagram ranges. But nope, we are stuck in 199...4?
I love some of the newer things like LET and LAMBDA. But I'd kill for structured references to be properly implemented everywhere. I'm a bit over using INDIRECT to get around it (when I can).
Yes. I have build dynamic diagrams with indirect, I feel ashamed.
Let us use Python instead of cancerous VBA. You can not even add comments to your variable definitions. Or named vars in functions. Why do I even need macros at all to simply define a function?
You don’t, any more. At least not for relatively simple functions.
LAMBDA combined with the name manager lets you do custom functions even in a regular .xlsx workbook.
You don’t get the full control flow and extended functionality you do in VBA, and Python would be amazing of course, but I find LAMBDA covers about 90% of use cases.
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?
Not much anymore, sorry to say - this was a few decades ago! I remember her showing us some mockups on index cards and other paper-based models, showing what different user actions might display (I was studying computer science at the same time, so it was a bit of a common interest). I also remember her talking about watching groups of users trying to use a piece of software, and using eye tracking along with mouse tracking and other devices to see where their focus tended to be drawn, where they spent their time, etc. as they tried to accomplish certain tasks; studying different aspects of discoverability.
I also remember she was a big fan of Saturn's cars - apparently they were big into usability, and as a consequence were easy to maintain and tended to avoid things like problematic blind spots. I do remember changing the headlight was extremely easy - you pulled two pins and the whole headlight assembly popped out!
The vibe coding "paradigm" says: once or twice for every checkbox that appears on the page 😂
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.
This was just happening to me with Amazon. I wanted to get to the support link in the footer but they always loaded new stuff before I could click on it
Doing this causes it's own problems. Try searching on a page that unloads everything out of view. Or saving it
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.
Plus if you want to find older content, you can't just skip to a page, you need to scroll through every goddamn item until you find what you're looking for.
Breaks the scroll bar, for starters.
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.
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.
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.
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
Win 11 is so bad. Right click sucks so bad now.
Win 10 start menu is the same. No I don't want to search the Internet for apps I would open a browser for that, I would like to use the apps on my PC.
Just FYI if it every gets to be too much: Linux has gotten extremely easy to install, and KDE has gotten astonishingly polished.
Just convince my jackass boomer boss please.
Are the tools you need available on Linux? You could ask. Sometimes it works.
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.
I think most people, including me, appreciate how it looks cleaner though. On Android I get you, they should allow custom themes, but for Linux you can easily swap to a more information dense one.
The problem with "cleanness" is that individual elements of a data structure more complex than a tiered list blend together without visual separation. It very quickly becomes illegible.
Well, you can switch to non-GTK applications but beyond that you can't really get more information density into apps that follow the Adwaita design language. You can't even really theme them.
You can absolutely use custom GTK themes. I used WhiteSur theme for a while before switching back to default
Doesn't that require extensions, which are only semi-supported?
No, just the GNOME Tweaks app. And extensions are fully supported in my experience, by the way
Tbh I love material design and adwaita, it looks great
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:
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.
Is he also into discipline, with a Bible in his hand and a beard on his chin?
👌
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.
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
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.
Like when someone makes an image of text? At least OP set alt text & linked to the source with real text: rare at lemmy.
I get unreasonably (okay, reasonably) upset when the simplest way to share an image is to take a screenshot of the image.
Not at all unreasonable imho!
My other favourite is screenshot > Google lens > select text ..
I have to do this all of the time whenever anybody sends me a screenshot of their error message, rather than copying and pasting the error message into the ticket. Or worse still a photo of their screen that shows the error message.
You guys are getting images of errors? It’s like pulling teeth to get that from some users ugh
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.
Mobile first rule.
And then lazy port to desktop.
"it's mobile first!"
"And desktop second, right?"
"What's desktop?"
“What's a desktop?”
At the start of Covid, we had to start working from home. Our Chief Security Idiot thought that was a good time to impose measures that made it impossible to reboot a computer without physical access. When I questioned how that would work with my desktop, which stayed in the office building that I couldn’t legally access, he kept saying I had to take the “laptop” with me. I told him several times that it was a desktop, but he just couldn’t understand until my boss got involved.
That was my first run-in with our idiot-in-charge-of-security, and it only got worse after that.
Please tell us more stories, that sounds entertaining :D
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.
80% population have access to mobile phones.
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.
Code and logs don't count, that's not normal reading. That's cheating.
[citation needed]
Most people
May I ask how old you are? And what was the first OS you used?
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:
Ironically, my mobile Lemmy client will still not let me select text until I reply.
There are tools for that.
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?!
I've played the old silver box DnD games from 1988 and 1989. The magic effects were listed in the clue book instead of the manual. Talk about purposefully asshole design
The Wizardry series of games were very DnD like, but they kind of made up a language for the spell names. You don't get a fireball, you get Halito. A big fireball is Mahalito. So you need the manual spread across your legs just to know whether you need to cast porfic or calfo on the locked chest in front of you.
They had more of a tolerance for bullshit back in the 80's.
Morrowind’s Xbox manual was literally wrong about multiple spell effects lol
The Rollercoaster Tycoon manual made up game mechanics that didn't exist.
Mystery-Meat Navigation!
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!
As someone who doesn't do this, I can only guess it's like holding your book mark parallel under the lines in a book as you read it, which I thought was fairly uncommon. Apparently a bunch of people read this way?
It makes more sense on monitors with large blocks of text or large paragraphs. With a monitor so big relative to a book, and scrolling making it easy to lose where you were, it can sometimes be tough for folks to read through huge chunks. Some people select chunks of text to help break up those monoliths into manageable bites along with putting a clear marker for where they are if they scroll or otherwise lose their place..
As someone who does occasionally do this, I don’t think it’s about readability. After all I also read books, which are not known for short bits of text in narrow columns. And I don’t use a bookmark, pen, or finger to keep track of where I’m at.
I think it’s more about keeping your hand busy, subconsciously even. Although to be honest I also don’t do that while reading books.
Maybe it’s a remnant of when every computer had a screensaver, and constantly moving the mouse meant keeping the screen alive.
From a usability, accessibility, and comfort perspective a book is incredibly different from a device that's blasting your eyeballs with highly contrasting light.
For the screens I'm using, a book page is way narrower than the standard text region of a screen.
The fact that I couldn't select text on this post because it's a completely unnecessary graphic kind of makes me hate you.
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.
So does the edge of the window & mouse pointer.
If the contrast sucks, then the UI is already broken. There are accessibility standards for
If you're selecting merely to read, there's a good chance the text is too small, the lines too long without enough space, the contrast too low, and that would all be addressed by following common web accessibility standards. Good accessibility is good UI.
16px is commonly considered a good minimum text size for accessibility. When I outgrew thinking tiny text was cool, I standardized interfaces to render at least that size & found a vast improvement.
(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.
I can confirm the dyslexia thing and highlighting
No, you are seeing what the people too clueless to install tracking protection are doing.
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 :(
I lived in that beautiful era. It was glorious.
Kinda. Very specific edge case that can be solved with a custom feature like a browser extension.
I do this. It’s just a stimming thing while reading web articles and I hate being sent to Twitter or whatever for it.
Edit: replied to wrong comment, whoops.
How do you do that with images?
Not judging. Just curious.
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:
Here's how I would mildly edit the punctuation in order to make it easier to read:
Here's how I would have conveyed the thought in a JIRA comment:
I’d avoid Last Exit From Brooklyn if I were you.
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.
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.
Number one thing I hate is html/css/js used for anything that is not a website. Fucking stop it.
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.
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.
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.
I'm complaining about pop-up widgets appearing when you select text, like the email icon here:
Edge is the absolute worst for this. Infuriating
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.
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.
You're right, putting
##.quote-share-buttonsin my uBlock filter list got rid of it. Still, blocking all these elements myself is really laborious.Oh yeah, I’m a terrible text block skimmer and desperately need line breaks, punctuation, etc. (Also, not to mention the repetition really triggered my need to skim, lol). That many repeated phrases turned some words into white noise. So that was my bad.
Good to hear the element blocker works!
It def sounds tedious to manually block things, but like some comments have mentioned, there are probably some browser add ons that may have the functionality you seek.
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.
I have a protocol for this.
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).
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.
I hear you! It sounds like you want
user-select: noneon 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.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
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:
middlemouse.pasteinabout:configto remove this behavior, as Firefox handles this separatelyIt 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.
it's sway
Also please stop using light colored text on light colored backgrounds, it's a stupid idea. Thanks for your attention.
Do this to note my place, especially when the text is smaller and the lines are long. Makes it so much easier to find the line I left off on if I have to step away, or to find my way back to the next line more easily.
It’s the equivalent of putting my finger or a bookmark down on a page in a novel.
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
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)
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.
Hell yeah josef
I really dont know. I dont select text while I read it? I get the frustration but what's the majority? If your in the minority I dont think you should be ignored but also I dont know how they cater to everyone.
I say, the majority adopt something they adopt it because that's how the majority like it. If the majority disagrees make changes to suit their needs. If the resources exist to cater to everyone, cater to everyone. If not, as a member of the minority, its on you to find a work around or move on.
How often do you actually use a pop-up that comes up when selecting text? And is it really more convenient than selecting followed by a right click, or pressing a shortcut?
Even if the people who select text while reading are in the minority, this post shows it’s a large minority. And I’m quite convinced that the number of times such a pop-up is used, is also a minority.
It's as annoying as the floating context bar in Illustrator and Photoshop. And i dont even typically select text while reading it
Im not arguing that it is great feature just that it doesn't bother me. Not in the way someone who selects text while they read would. I even say if the majority of people agreed with OP I'd be fine with the changed UI. I just dont like the idea that you can shout "cater to me" and that's automatically a valid opinion because there is some consensus.
Yeah but the thing is…there’s no reason to have some bullshit .js do some weird unexpected thing when I select text on a website. There just isn’t.
Not only is the function never the same between sites, leading to a new experience for my brain to deal with each time, but it’s also obnoxious business bro bullshit that has no place on the WWW.
Oh you sweet innocent child.
In the world of UIs, majorities "adopt" something they adopt because it's the default, imposed, and people tend to just not change the defaults (or it flat out can't be done).
Add it as a tunable in settings? Most stuff has settings, it's marginal zero effort to add a new one.
If they willingly adopt it then its not an issue, no?
If its so easy they should equally be capable of implementing their own work around, no?
Whether its something that people adopted willingly or not makes no difference to whether it's an issue. Most things can still be (or still have to be) improved. And once again, "adopt" is sus. As is "willingly" (are you "willingly" accepting something that marketing tells you to be true?).
That's something that is done sometimes, yes. Say, Librewolf could restore some tunables that were removed from Firefox. But that still depends on how invasive the change is (and on whether you can actually implement a workaround or not, which means you'd need the code, a build system, etc).
You cater everyone by putting a context menu in that comes up when you right click or long press on a touch screen. This problem has been solved for decades. Applications aren't designed by the majority. They're designed by a handful of developers who I suspect are usually ordered to do shit by some moron project manager that just wants changes made so they can report to their superiors that they did something.
If this is the case, then the majority of people know how to copy text. It's basic functionality of a desktop computer.
So, just let us select text without useless popups!
Fine. Except Im not really sure what the younger generations are up to these days. I think covid and two trump presidencys are going to have some real detrimental effects to the tech space.
My two cents is that we've been in the wild west of the internet and suitable regulations aren't in place.
I refer mostly to all the straight up anti-competitive, anti-consumer, anti-privacy practices that are rampant.
Though, I do not hold hope for it to be well-regulated any time soon 😅
Seems more like the writer's problem: everyone else selects text to perform a function. They could point with the mouse or use the bottom of the window as a guide & tap the ↓ key.
I firmly want the computer to do what I tell it to do. Not assume what I want.
The standard was if you wanted to do something with the text, you'd right click. Don't arbitrarily change the UX in a non-standard way.
Right-click? We civilized people ctrl-c. 😁
As relatable problems go, not being able to select text solely for its own sake doesn't feel that great of one. Doing it just feels so extra: like, why do that & just waste it? Are we hyperactive? Should we work on impulse control? Selecting highlights to show the scope of an operation.
As a nuisance, offering extra, context-relevant functionality doesn't seem that great of one, either: I can just ignore that & ctrl-c. And I don't see a great alternative to a popover offering that functionality. It probably saves a few clicks when done right.
Removing standard functionality, however, is extremely relatable. I'll go into Dev Tools to remove anything disabling copy & paste, because fuck that & burn the control freak who signed off on that.
[citation needed]
No we don't. Everyone else selects text to select text (with left click), that's how you copy the text, but just as importantly: that's how you select text.
Seems kinda pointless. Maybe we need a dedicated OS for people to just fidget around for no reason: a cat jungle gym for humans.
Selecting text, a core functionality of a computer, is pointless?
Highlighting text isn't pointless, even if you don't personally do it.
Some of us struggle with long lines of text (people with varying degrees of dyslexia)
It literally doesn't inconvenience anyone. And is the standard behaviour on most websites that you can select text. Who here is out there complaining about selectable text? It's usually the opposite (because then you can't copy)
I'm not sure you meant to come across a bit shitty, but if you meant to, I'll invite you to think about exercising empathy for your fellow humans before you speak.
Just because you don't use it, doesn't mean it's pointless.
And saying it is, after having it explained why it's useful to others, is not very pleasant.
Can you identify any OS GUI in history that offered text selection without operations to perform on the selection? That was always the core function: select the input of an operation.
There are solutions for that: accessibility standards. It's been well researched and is basic to good UI design.
All the problems you point out leading you to do something extra just to read indicate problems addressed by fixing broken accessibility. It'd be better to fix those basic UI problems instead of defend doing extra things we shouldn't have to do that they weren't really designed to do.
Yes, practically all the desktop ones. You can just select text with it just selecting the text. On most websites. I'm pretty sure OP is referring to websites that "helpfully" put UI elements in the way after highlighting.
Most text editors do this well, they put the UI elements above the text, not in the way.
The vast, vast, majority of websites still do nothing when you select text.
We're not talking about phones, you typically read that in portrait so the lines are short.
Perhaps I have made an assumption that not everyone was on the same page about.
Selecting text on android also works great with the UI that pops up there. I'm pretty sure we're only talking about annoying websites, on desktop.
Seems the question was misread.
I doubt any early OS designer went "Pure selection is useful on its own. Let's ship that without the ability to do anything to it." then at a later iteration someone went "I have a clever idea: let's add the ability to operate (eg, cut, copy, overwrite) on that selection!". Even the name is suggestive: select. Select for what? Input for something.
It still seems like a criticism that picks over the wrong thing while disregarding a host of deeper problems (eg, noncompliance with accessibility standards) that led them there. Reading is basic: the text size, spacing, line length, contrast should be accessible without extra steps. Font ought to be adjustable from their user agent, so dyslexic users can set a dyslexic font. Selection popovers shouldn't obscure the selection. Etc.
Yes, without operations visible. Highlighting text just highlights it on the vast majority of websites on desktop, right now. Unless you're on edge, where it does obscure as soon as you let go of the mouse.
You need to right click, or use keyboard shortcuts to do anything with your highlighted text, unless your browser is getting in the way. Some websites do also get in the way.
And this is exactly what the OP wants (or rather my interpretation):
Other programs do this far better. The key complaint is that popups pop up in front of the text.