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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 where I agree 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.
Also please stop using light colored text on light colored backgrounds, it’s a stupid idea. Thanks for your attention.
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.
Isn’t it amazing when text is also not selectable? Like its rendered behind some other shit?
I fucking hate websites ❤️
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.
Or when you try and select a letter and it auto selects the whole fucking work or sentence, jumping all over the place?
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.
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.
(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.
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.
it helps keep track of where you are when there are large blocks of text
So does the edge of the window & mouse pointer.
also it usually raises contrast
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.
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
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!
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!
I do this. It’s just a stimming thing while reading web articles and I hate being sent to Twitter or whatever for it.
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
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
What’s your desktop environment? Because it’s going to depend on that.
it’s sway
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
We went from using no punctuation to using too much. I struggled while reading this.
The no capitalization makes it hard for me. I think just re-writing with capitalization makes it a lot easier to read:
Note to UI designers. When reading a long piece of text. I select the text while I read it. I select the text while I read it!. I select the text using my mouse. While I read the text I often select the text. I don’t want to perform actions on the text. I don’t want to accidentally click share link. I want to select the text while I read it.
Here’s how I would mildly edit the punctuation in order to make it easier to read:
Note to UI designers; when reading a long piece of text, I select the text while I read it. I select the text while I read it! I select the text using my mouse. While I read the text, I often select the text. I don’t want to perform actions on the text. I don’t want to accidentally click share link. I want to select the text while I read it.
Here’s how I would have conveyed the thought in a JIRA comment:
UI designers could you please, for the love of all mankind, stop fucking putting fucking shitty ass popups in the god damn non-mobile website! There is no one, and I mean no-fucking-body, that is still using a desktop computer in 2025 that does not know about ctrl-c and ctrl-v. There is not sane reason for you to ever assume a user wants to visit some shitty twitter/reddit/digg/blog when they select text on a desktop computer. If I see a single one of you motherfuckers putting fucking text inside an action I swear to god I will come down there and beat you to death with your own fucking keyboard.
I’d avoid Last Exit From Brooklyn if I were you.
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.
Totally do this. Thought it was just me.
I do this because I do work on my computer and sometimes that work involves citing sources, copying and pasting sections of instructions, ensuring I’m using correct spelling of foreign names and words. And most importantly, copying and pasting wingdings and symbols that I can’t be bothered to memorize the numkey codes for. ™ 🄮℠
I HATE UNSELECTABLE TEXT WITH A BURNING PASSION (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Edit: replied to wrong comment, whoops.
How do you do that with images?
Not judging. Just curious.
Modern UI designers don’t have a fucking clue.
You’d think the first principle would be “don’t break the existing fucking UI”, but no.
Infinite scroll. Windows without toolbars. Replacing context menu with useless site-specific one. Forcing links to open in new or same tab, depriving the user of choice. Blocking text select. Blocking copy, as if that’s somehow going to stop people from stealing your shitty content. Fucking with the browser history.
And then there’s the constant reinventing of the wheel. How many times do we need to implement a fucking checkbox?
No lie, I’ve actually had designers come to me with a concept for “a visual indicator that shows the user how they are progressing through the page”.
No lie, I’ve actually had designers come to me with a concept for “a visual indicator that shows the user how they are progressing through the page”.
What the actual fuck, do these people actually use computers.
My biggest gripe is websites that take control of the browser
C-f.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.
I mean, over the years the scroll bar has got less and less visible. Maybe these people don’t even realise it exists.
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.
I hate how tiny it often is now. What the fuck. Not to mention the ever decreasing contrast.
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!
I’ve actually had designers come to me with a concept for “a visual indicator that shows the user how they are progressing through the page”
I have seen those on blog and news sites, a thin horizontal bar (sometimes under the floating title) that fills as you scroll to the bottom. I don’t get it either.
That was it. So it wasn’t even original stupidity. Sad.
How many times do we need to implement a fucking checkbox?
The vibe coding “paradigm” says: once or twice for every checkbox that appears on the page 😂
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
- You want to navigate somewhere then navigate back? Haha, no.
- If it’s not implemented properly, resources (images, videos, ads) don’t get unloaded when they’re no longer visible.
- Some fuckwit wannabe designers actually put the footer UNDER infinite scrolling pages.
If it’s not implemented properly, resources (images, videos, ads) don’t get unloaded when they’re no longer visible.
Doing this causes it’s own problems. Try searching on a page that unloads everything out of view. Or saving it
Breaks the scroll bar, for starters.
When you’re dragging the scrollbar down, the page suddenly loads new content and you’re lost.
When you’re going through a long page and you want to come back to it later, you can’t come back to where you left.
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.
This is a complete misnomer. Modern UI designers that are forced to do what corporate wants are competent. It is large scale marketing that doesn’t have a clue as to what people want in a UX.
forcing new tabs drives me crazy. like how dare you. i even tried to disable it in firefox, but when i do it makes all ‘open in browser’ things overwrite the current tab :(
I hate the opposite even more - sites that block you from opening new tabs when you need to, as if you somehow don’t ever need to be able to access multiple pieces of information concurrently, or return directly to your current context.
“Oh, we’re following the single-page app paradigm.” No, you’re a fucking website. Follow the fucking website paradigm.
You can just tell these idiots have never actually done any real work.
I have a protocol for this.
- go to website
- if UX is offensive exit website
- add website to pihole blacklist and description of why
- never visit website again
I know it doesn’t mean much to them, but I refuse to accept a shitty online experience when a product team actively circumvents standard internet experiences like highlighting, copy/paste, or browser jacking (looking at you Microsoft).
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.
May I ask how old you are? And what was the first OS you used?
deleted by creator
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.
Most people dislike
[citation needed]
Most people
