Unforgivable Sins of UI Design

[Thad]

If you're going to steal focus, it had goddamn-well better be something that needs my attention right the fuck now. Not something I can look at in five minutes. Not "Steam just restarted; here are some ads." Not "Outlook is prompting you for your MFA for the third time today."

If my battery is at 10%, that is something that is high-priority enough to interrupt my work. Anything short of that, show a highlight in my taskbar and I'll get to it when I get to it. If that's good enough for "you have a meeting in 5 minutes", it's good enough for damn-near anything else.

[KingRoyal]

Android has a had a "feature" for a while where it will periodically push news articles it thinks is relevant to your interests to your notifications. The actual utility of this will vary from person to person, but that's not the issue. The issue is that clicking on the article in your notification bar doesn't take you to the article, it takes you to a Google News landing page which instantly refreshes and removes the article you wanted to read.

[Thad]

Samsung: "Hey, icons are stupid; let's just make all three icons at the bottom of the Android screen just indistinct lines. Also, let's put them in the opposite order from where they go in standard Android."

Another trend that's been bugging the fuck out of me: making a checkbox show a checkmark all the time and using a color change to indicate whether it's selected or not. Like "gray box with checkmark" for unchecked, "green box with checkmark" for checked. GTFO with that shit. Don't fucking show a checkmark in a deselected box, you complete and utter fucking imbeciles.

[mharr]

Started down the rabbit hole of reading up on Dark Patterns today and learned there are a bunch of concerned citizens providing alternative interfaces for major offending websites.

https://nitter.net/evilsharkey for example. It even lets you add /rss to the url like it was still 2001.

[Thad]

There's a browser plugin called Privacy Redirect that changes Twitter links to Nitter instances, YouTube links to Invidious instances, etc.

Problem number one is that it doesn't replace Twitter iframes. (This is understandable when you consider the security implications if browsers allowed extensions to replace an iframe with an entirely different website.)

Problem number two is that it requires a lot of care and feeding. I find it redirects me to defunct instances more often than not (especially with Invidious). You can customize the list of sites it chooses from, but I find myself largely playing whac-a-mole, going in and manually removing an instance when it doesn't work. I guess I could just cut each list down to a single working instance (my preference for Nitter at the moment is nitter.domain.glass), but the downside there is that even good instances have occasional downtime.

[mharr]

Okay, with a bit of dicking around I think I have a pretty good mobile setup for this. Install Fennec browser, a privacy nerd fork of Firefox and add the custom add-on collection "17014436, dtgl". This combines Privacy Redirect with options for all the usual officially recognised add-ons such as ublock.

[Thad]

Requiring me to sign into an account before I can unsubscribe from a newsletter should be fucking illegal.

[Upthorn]

I... think it actually is?

[beatbandito]

It is technically not illegal as long as they aren't making you view more than one web page or send more than one email. So if they can argue that if you had stayed logged in on that device it would have gone right to the page, it's legal enough to probably not be worth fighting.

One I'm surprised I haven't posted about yet is Teladoc. You are completely unable to contact your provider in any way besides them calling you for an appointment. And if there is a new message for you, I shit you not, they will send a text saying you got a new email and an email saying you got a new message on their dashboard and NEITHER HAS A LINK. Literally just saying you should check down a daisychain.

[Thad]

I... think it actually is?

Microsoft's still doing it, so either they're using some kind of carveout or just DGAF.

[mharr]

Thanks to the English middle class insisting on voting themselves out of existence our NHS has been privatized by inches for decades now, a large part of this replacing human interaction with third party call centers, websites and apps. Our pharmacy app has removed the home delivery option for local disabled patients (paying customers only) and I just ran into this gem trying to order anatomical pads.

[mharr]

My partner doesn't have her antidepressant meds this weekend because after she talked to the doctor to get them reissued the practice pharmacy apparently called us back to confirm using not only a number we didn't recognize, but one that was entirely blocked and anonymous.

Am I overthinking the system, or can y'all see some common circumstances where someone in need of antidepressants might not pick up a call like that? Circumstances that have definitely applied in Tansy's past too, and should be on file in her medical history.

[Mongrel]

My doc's phone number is like that, but only his personal cell, which, okay, not giving patients your personal number makes sense. The number for the medical office he works out of isn't anonymised and is clearly displayed when they call. Same with our pharmacy.

I guess I can see it for numbers you don't want people calling back on, especially for a mental health team (even if you know you're harmless, they have to use the same number for people who require more careful management), but a pharmacy??? That's weird.

[nosimpleway]

My psychiatrist's office also has an anonymized number. Yes, it also leads to intentionally-ignored calls sometimes. Seems like a bad system.

[mharr]

If you gotta use a phone system wearing spammer/harasser cosplay at least pre-arrange the call by text or something. Why does no-one over the age of thirty know that text channels exist? Tech's been mainstream for two decades now.

[Thad]

Okay, I don't know if "always put a shortcut to a newly-installed app on the desktop to the right of the homescreen" is an Android thing, an F-Droid thing, a LineageOS thing, or what, but it's some goddamn fucking bullshit.

But then, the idea that someone might want to actually use Android on a tablet seems to be a thought that never occurred to any Android developer at any time.

(I just installed a custom build of LineageOS on my Galaxy Tab S, which is long out of support but I'll be goddamned if I'm going to buy a new tablet when the one I have works just fine.)

[Upthorn]

It's an android thing. I hate it, too, and was disappointed that installing lineage on my phone didn't fix it.

[mharr]

Text editing boxes on touchscreen devices with non-interactable dead space to the right of each line. You want the cursor in that blank bit halfway down? Your target is somewhere on the left, three pixels wide and fucking invisible. Have fun, old man.

[Thad]

There's probably a security justification for popping up a "this will interrupt anyone who's logged into this computer" warning when I click "shut down" on a login screen even if nobody is logged in, but damn it's annoying.

[Thad]

Login pages where the button is disabled until you type something into the fields.

You dipshits know that autofill is a thing, right? Has been for like twenty years?