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Hidden interface controls that affect usability

(interactions.acm.org)
559 points cxr | 1 comments | 05 Jul 25 23:10 UTC | HN request time: 0.206s | source
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weinzierl ◴[06 Jul 25 03:23 UTC] No.44477561[source]▶
I get why you would hide interface elements to use the screen real estate for something else.

I have no idea why some interfaces hide elements hide and leave the space they'd taken up unused.

IntelliJ does this, for example, with the icons above the project tree. There is this little target disc that moves the selection in the project tree to the file currently open in the active editor tab. You have to know the secret spot on the screen where it is hidden and if you move your mouse pointer to the void there, it magically appears.

Why? What is the rationale behind going out of your way to implement something like this?

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autobodie ◴[06 Jul 25 03:46 UTC] No.44477657[source]▶
Intellij on Windows also buries the top menus into a hamburger icon and leaves the entire area they occupied empty! Thankfully there is an option to reverse it deep in the settings, but having it be the default is absolutely baffling.
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DidYaWipe ◴[06 Jul 25 04:03 UTC] No.44477724[source]▶
Microsoft pulls the same BS. Look at Edge. Absolute mess. No menu. No title bar. What application am I even using?

This stupidity seems to have spread across Windows. No title bars or menus... now you can't tell what application a Window belongs to.

And you can't even bring all of an application's windows to the foreground... Microsoft makes you hover of it in the task bar and choose between indiscernible thumbnails, one at a time. WTF? If you have two Explorer windows open to copy stuff, then switch to other apps to work during the copy... you can't give focus back to Explorer and see the two windows again. You have to hover, click on a thumbnail. Now go back and hover, and click on a thumbnail... hopefully not the same one, because of course you can't tell WTF the difference between two lists of files is in a thumbnail.

And Word... the Word UI is now a clinic on abject usability failure. They have a menu bar... except WAIT! Microsoft and some users claim that those are TABS... except that it's just a row of words, looking exactly like a menu.

So now there's NO menu and no actual tabs... just a row of words. And if you go under the File "menu" (yes, File), there are a bunch of VIEW settings. And in there you can add and remove these so-called "tabs," and when you do remove one, the functionality disappears from the entire application. You're not just customizing the toolbar; you're actually disabling entire swaths of features from the application.

It's an absolute shitshow of grotesque incompetence, in a once-great product. No amount of derision for this steaming pile is too much.

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int_19h ◴[06 Jul 25 06:53 UTC] No.44478435[source]▶
This isn't just a Windows thing. Look at Gnome for another example. macOS of late also likes to take over the title bar for random reasons, although there at least the menu bar is still present regardless.
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DidYaWipe ◴[06 Jul 25 09:57 UTC] No.44479299[source]▶
I've always considered the Mac's shared menu bar a GUI 1.0 mistake that should have been fixed in the transition to OS X. Forcing all applications to share a single menu that's glued to the top of the screen, and doesn't switch back to the previous application when you minimize the one you're working with, is dumb.

Windows and Unix GUIs had it right: Put an application's menu where it belongs, on the application's main frame.

But now on Windows... NO menu? Oh wait, no... partial menus buried under hamburger buttons in arbitrary locations, and then others buried under other buttons.

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danaris ◴[06 Jul 25 11:01 UTC] No.44479616[source]▶
...The Mac menu bar is what it is for a very good reason. Being at the top of the screen makes it an infinitely-tall target.

All you have to do to get to it is move your mouse up until you can't move it up any more.

This remains a very valuable aspect to it no matter what changes in the vogue of UIs have come and gone since.

The fact that you think that you've "minimized the application" when you minimized a window just shows that you are operating on a different (not better, not worse, just different) philosophy of how applications work than the macOS designers are.

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1. DidYaWipe ◴[07 Jul 25 08:09 UTC] No.44487855[source]▶
Ah yes, this old argument. Except nobody slams his cursor against the top of the screen in real life, assuming that the menu bar is "infinitely tall." Watch real users interact with a Mac's menu, and you simply won't see this behavior. Not to mention that it doesn't work if you're using a laptop and a second monitor positioned behind and above it.

And we're talking about a GUI here, so when I minimize an application's GUI then yes, I expect that I've minimized the application. And again, I think you'll find that the vast majority of users work under this M.O.

But your observation raises another usability issue caused by the single menu: Instead of an "infinite" desktop, the Mac reduces the entire screen to a single application's client area... so, historically, Mac applications treated it that way...littering it with an armada of floating windows that you had to herd around.

The problem is that turning the whole screen into one application's client area fails because you can see all the other crap on your desktop and all other open applications' GUIs THROUGH the UI of the app you're trying to use. It's stupid.

So, to users' relief, the floating-window nonsense has been almost entirely abandoned over the last couple of decades and single-window applications have become the norm on Mac as they have been on Windows forever. Oh wait, hold on... here comes Apple regressing back to "transparent" UI with "liquid glass;" a failed idea from 20+ years ago.

Full circle, sadly.