I get it's not the same thing but I wish iOS had lower volume settings. As it is, if 100% is max volume then the difference between 0 and unit above 0 on iPhones is about 30% volume. Like, in the middle of the night when everything is quiet, if I was the set it on the lowest setting and make some game sounds I could hear it 2 rooms away with doors open. But, Apple decided you don't need to set it below 30%. Maybe they're trying to force you to buy Airpods
I upvoted you - at least, I hope I did. HN's vote buttons have such poor UX that a) it's difficult to hit the right button b) it's impossible to know, after doing so, whether you even hit the right button!
Nowadays there is. For the first ten years or so, you just had to shrug and apologize to the commenter for accidentally and irrevocably downvoting them.
This is an issue in many audio players. Maybe not as bad as in iOS (I don't know, can't compare), but the steps when the volume is low are nearly always too large. I like to play audio on low volumes, especially in quiet environments, and it seems designers/developers don't cater to that use case. One step is too low are even complete silent, one step louder is too loud.
Yeah, the default Android volume control had (has?) the same problem. I remember when I got an early Pixel model that I thought there wasn't a low enough volume - this issue was filed in 2015 and is still marked as open: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/37035441
In fact, it's the worst of the worst, since it's just plausible looking enough to be the only option on over a billion devices.
On top of that, the EU passed a bill to make them fix it, and they... didn't. If you have headphones that are too loud at 'unit above zero', and use the volume limiter in the device safety section to set it to a reasonable level, it just completely mutes the headphones.
This isn't a hardware issue. Bluetooth devices have an integer volume setting, and the "unit above zero" setting is definitely not '1' on iOS like it is on android.
I've hit this problem with 100% of the non-apple headphones I've used.
I experienced the same "muted, TOO LOUD" when I bought some very sensitive IEMs, but fortunately I have a rooted Android where I can customise the volume control curve, so I moved more of the steps down towards the lower end of the DAC range and made the loudest just a little beyond "threshold of pain".
That would be interesting to have the volume bars logarithmic instead of linear.
The focus ring on manual cinema camera lenses are like this where there is 270° or rotation from near to infinity giving a human plenty of room to move while AF lenses only have 90°. The distances are much smaller and harder to get smooth focus pulls and feels much more linear. So yeah, not the same, but similar-ish in that there's not enough action in the sweet spot and too much in extremes
My gen1 kindle backlight is so bright at the lowest level that I angle it away from me to read at night.
Just typing this out makes me realize I should get a different ereader than wait for it to die since it’s clearly never going to die. It’s been like 15 years
for example I read kindle books on my phone in dark mode (white text on a black background). Having the brightness all the way up isn't fully bright white text, it is more like brightish grey.
To get bright text to read in bright environments, I set the kindle app to black text on white background, then use accessibility to invert colors. I get noticeably brighter text on a black background.
I face the same situation on Android, there is no way to play music really quiet on Sennheiser TW4. Isn't this also plugs manufacturer's fault? (not valid for apple obviously)
"Disable absolute volume" setting (in Developer options) might help. It separates the phone volume control from the headphones volume control so it's like a preamp.
the difference between 0 and unit above 0 on iPhones is about 30% volume.
I have found that when playing audio to a HomePod, pressing Volume Up on the phone increases the volume by 1.
But if you immediately press Volume Down, it goes down by 0.5. So, with two button presses you can get the half-step increase you wanted in the first place.
It's like adding "a little" to a volume change command with Siri.
"Siri, turn the volume up a little" turns the volume up 0.5.
"Siri, turn the volume up" turns the volume up one.
"Siri, turn the volume up a lot" turns the volume up two.
In macOS, there used to be a modifier key to have the volume change in half-steps, too, but I've forgotten what it is.
I think the only place that Apple has done a good job with volume controls is the AirPods Max. But even there, I'd like more granularity at the low end.
That wasn't part of the show? The popup (no idea what was on it, no one reads those of course) shows up and you think 'Ah. Yes, that would be very annoying if that happened while interacting with a volume slider.'
In defense of this blogspam, the original posts were each individual submissions to /r/programmerhumor, so there's no easy way to link to a collection of them on reddit itself.
And the silly thing is, as ridiculous as they are for mouse click/drag or touch use, those kind of dial controls are actually reasonable when coupled to a scroll wheel (like you can do in GNURadio). But Apple has never wavered from "one mouse button and nothing else is good enough for everybody," and scroll wheels aren't really an option for a touch interface.
Ah yes, skeuomorphic design, where you take something that's a physical artefact of the hardware and force-fit it onto an utterly different device on which it makes no sense whatsoever.
One of the worst volume controls I have run across is when the UI tries to simulate a physical knob. More often than not I see this on VST Plugins and I have yet to find one that I actually like - they are all equally terrible.
They appear to fall into 3 buckets:
1) Worst: Direction of the cursor has move in a circular pattern as if dragging a physical knob with a cursor.
2) Annoying, but least common: You have to move the cursor horizontally to move the knob
3) Most common, but still annoying: You have to move the cursor vertically to move the knob.
Common in desktop software for controlling measurement gear like oscilloscopes. Those have actual knobs on the equipment, so the software does the same thing and it's the worst thing ever.
Yeah, your 1 option is actually worse than some of parody submissions. What makes it truly horrific is that it works just enough to get you to put your thumb into muscle spasms trying to do it.
I have a mechanical keyboard with a metal roller for controlling volume. On my Mac, it works haphazardly. Rapidly rolling it downwards should mute almost immediately. But around 30-40% of the time, it'll just set it to a low volume instead. At least I work from home so this isn't an annoyance to anyone but myself. But it is annoying.
Oh well. From the UI's shown, I kinda like the 0-100 radio buttons. Yes, it's incredibly ugly. But I like the immediate precision of it.
How about one where the first click sets your volume to max, and then pops up a dialogue to subscribe to a newsletter or sign up for an account? I've never seen such an atrocity, but I could see one plausibly being developed.
The SaaS subscription one fulfilled the same sense for me.
To be fair, Netflix' cheapest subscription option deliberately says that you will not be getting the best audio options including audio levels that are not the same between content. They clearly have the better audio for the higher tiers, so they are deliberately borking things.
How about the most depraved volume control design of all: the actual reddit web video player (at least the embedded player on old.reddit)?
The slider is hidden by default. Hovering the volume icon makes the slider appear. There is margin between the icon and slider, though, so you have to quickly "zip" your mouse across this gap/chasm before the slider disappears. If you make it over to the slider in time, your hover then preserves its visibility.
I know for sure the devs at Condé ain't dogfoodin' on that interface anymore!
That’s actually a really common implementation failure across all platforms. It crops up again and again, in virtually every new thing that people implement. It’s very common to see this problem when you activate a submenu of a menu, and want to move the mouse diagonally to pick some item from the submenu.
It's slightly irritating to see Amazon get credit for that, when Bruce Tognazzini used that same solution 40 years ago when working on the classic MacOS interface!
(Apple forgot about it again for OS X, but that's a different story.)
"older versions of MacOS featured a menu designed by NN/g principal Bruce Tognazzini; that menu did not exhibit this behavior, but instead, used a vector-based triangular buffer to allow users to move diagonally. Unfortunately, in the years since, Apple has reverted this excellent bit of interaction design."
But I'm on macOS 15 and the menus seem to behave that way (the good way). Did they re-implement it?
Yes, they did eventually. If I'm understanding correctly, the original design used a simple funnel shape with 45 degree sides (suitable for the resource-limited systems of the day), and when they eventually re-implemented it they used a funnel defined by the left hand corners of the submenu, as per the Amazon design. (See the large animgif halfway down https://thomaspark.co/2011/10/making-menus-escapable/ )
When I read the heading, I thought: "This must surely be about Windows volume control." But I didn't take into account, that this is a UX design website, so it mostly deals with UX and not with what happens after setting a specific numeric value for the volume.
I like how towards the end they added the vanilla Apple mission control UI in there - which doesn't have any volume control at all just to prove their point. That really caught me off-guard and was funny af.
how does it have no control? you just pull it up or down accordingly. i appreciate the joke that it's not a great design, but to say "doesn't have any volume control at all" is an odd thing to say.
I was just saying it was funny that they just used the in real life used screen as their design of the worst thing they could come up with, especially as Apple touts itself as great at design.
As others have said, if they made it a non-linear scale so that there is more room between the lower value and less as it approached the max settings.
However, it is at least functional opposed to the person that I replied suggested it wasn't.
As I scrolled down, one of the animations started and brought up a subscription modal. "Okay, that one would be enraging," I thought, delighted, as I waited for the animation to loop.
It didn't. It was the site's real subscription modal.
> Should is interesting because of its subjectiveness. It’s a question that only makes sense to be asked in first person. And you have to know about much more than just design to be able to answer it — you have to understand about business, technology, culture, people. Answering the should question is a skill you only get after many, many years answering questions alike.
I wish more front-end designers would consider "should" more often.
"Oh, we can make the scrollbars in our web page auto-hide so PC users get the same experience as Mac users"
But should you?
No. Because one of the reasons I use a PC is because auto-hiding scrollbars on a desktop/laptop is a bug, not a feature, and I disabled that bug while I had a Mac because it's annoying.
"Oh, we can implement smooth scrolling in JavaScript!"
But should you?
No. Because browsers already do it. And your implementation will fail on at least one browser and cause scrolling to just be fucked up. If a user has disabled smooth scrolling, it's probably for a reason. Don't force it back on.
"We can create our own implementation of a drop-down box"
But should you?
No. You're reducing accessibility for literally zero gain. I hate when I'm entering my address, tabbing through the fields, reach the State, and pressing O then R doesn't bring me to "Oregon" or "OR", and instead brings me to Rhode Island. Side note: The order of entering an address is street address, city, state, zip code. If your form order is any different, you're a madman.
> The order of entering an address is street address, city, state, zip code.
In the US. Most of Europe uses street address; postcode, settlement and optionally province; country. There are still enough occasional warts that you shouldn’t dictate the structre of the second line, though: e.g. in France you’ll usually see things like “75005 Paris” but large institutions that get separate deliveries may list addresses like “75231 Paris CEDEX 05”, where everything but “Paris” is a postcode-like routing instruction. Unless you definitely, absolutely know better, just let people type in whatever postal label they want.
I have mixed opinions on this one. I appreciate the auto populating of City/State when you first enter the Zip. By doing that first, the suggestions of typing in address/street could be a much more accurate list as you've already filtered by state/city. The ones that come up with options from other states when I type in 1234 Main St will give me a list of pretty much every state/city in the country.
This feels like the physical equivalent of email validation, though it's harder to properly validate.
Similar to email validation, I've definitely seen people get bit (or, well, their customers getting bit) by people making untrue assumptions about the acceptable form of an address. See: a number of products that can't be ordered for USPS General Delivery simply because the address form won't allow it.
>"We can create our own implementation of a drop-down box"
Have been using MS "Dynamics" and wanted to add custom styling as a user. Even small lists/tables have all the off-screen elements destroyed so you can't copy stuff from the page, but also you might have to scroll things into view before they get styled (:has gets broken).
They re-implement tables as a swamp of elements which now lack semantic relationships.
They give the same elements random ids, they're non-deterministic. You can only really style by hierarchy, but for every property they seem to add at least one new element.
Everything about it is slow and cumbersome, and no wonder a simple table has hundreds of elements.
It's so Microsoft, the "don't bake your own widgets" taken to the n-th degree.
> "Oh, we can make the scrollbars in our web page auto-hide so PC users get the same experience as Mac users"
That's interesting. Our UI has scroll bars for sub-panels. On my Mac in FF, the scroll bar is always visible when there is overflow. Same screen on a co-worker's Chrome has the autohiding scroll bars even when there is overflow. So it feels more like a Chrome issue than a Windows issue, but I guess at this point in time we just assume everyone is using Chrome.
Yes — so much friction is introduced by redesigning when there should be refinement at most. Or doing nothing at all.
It takes wisdom to do that, and it doesn’t justify a salary. So we get experimented upon by UX designers at every company.
While the volume controls are fun, at this stage in the thread I’m struck by how few people have got to the point of the article at the end: the “should” question.
It should make you manually check and uncheck every checkbox between 0 and the target volume. Miss one and it silently dismisses the dialog without changing the volume.
The one that started shaking more and more as the volume got louder sent me. Sometimes you have to give credit where it's due, even when the result is unusable.
macOS has its own share of UI quirks too. The volume slider is fine, but app management is surprisingly bad for a platform that prides itself on UX. There's still no native way to quit all apps at once, and Activity Monitor feels stuck in 2005. Small UI tools that just get one thing right tend to stick around.
The worst is the “AI transformation journey” volume UI. You talk to an agent to describe the character of the volume level you want. It loads a volume control “skill” and adjusts it.
I have my sennheiser bluetooth headphones connected to windows 11, for whatever reason, 90% of the time, I move the slider on Windows 11 and it ignores completely the sound on my headphones, just great working products. I have to use the physical buttons on my headphones like a caveman
I once worked for a mainstream headphone manufacturer who added a volume control to a product that was so widely despised that a special firmware release had to be done to disable it completely, or else the returns bin would overflow almost overnight ..
So this had me chuckling so hard, having worked professionally in the pro audio world for decades - I can say that some of these 'solutions' would actually be accepted in certain market segments .. I especially love the designs which use a built-in accelerometer.
It seems the good ol' knob is not going anywhere any time soon.
You could try reading the TFA, and understanding that my comment was a joke (referring to Spinal Tap, of course) about those UIs, not a request for a knob with 11 divisions. pseudohadamard's knobs inspired by Spinal Tap have nothing to do with "the worst volume control UI in the world", about which the only thing I'm (jokily) concerned is whether they go up to 11, implying that having a horrible UI isn't relevant to me, only going up to 11 is ... this completely went over your and his head and I suspect that it still does. So the whoosh is because he completely missed what was going on here, and the second whoosh is because he missed the fact that I was the very person whose comment he responded to who called out his completely point-missing response with "whoosh".
You could try reading the TFA, and understanding that my comment was a joke (referring to Spinal Tap, of course) about those UIs, not a request for a knob with 11 divisions. Your knobs inspired by Spinal Tap have nothing to do with "the worst volume control UI in the world", about which the only thing I'm (jokily) concerned is whether they go up to 11, implying that having a horrible UI isn't relevant to me, only going up to 11 is ... this completely went over your head and I suspect that it still does. So the whoosh is because you completely missed what was going on here, and the second whoosh is because you missed the fact that I was the very person whose comment you responded to who called out your completely point-missing response with "whoosh".
I get it's not the same thing but I wish iOS had lower volume settings. As it is, if 100% is max volume then the difference between 0 and unit above 0 on iPhones is about 30% volume. Like, in the middle of the night when everything is quiet, if I was the set it on the lowest setting and make some game sounds I could hear it 2 rooms away with doors open. But, Apple decided you don't need to set it below 30%. Maybe they're trying to force you to buy Airpods
I upvoted you - at least, I hope I did. HN's vote buttons have such poor UX that a) it's difficult to hit the right button b) it's impossible to know, after doing so, whether you even hit the right button!
There is either an unvote or undown option once you’ve hit one
That's still a bad UI.
But at this point I think the bad UX on Hacker News has to be an intentional joke.
Ah, thanks. That confirms I upvoted, but I think "vote" is a silly verb to use to convey the opposite of "down"!
I’d say 60% of the time I go to vote I click a users name instead when I’m on mobile.
Nowadays there is. For the first ten years or so, you just had to shrug and apologize to the commenter for accidentally and irrevocably downvoting them.
HACK is a fantastic reader, highly recommended
This is an issue in many audio players. Maybe not as bad as in iOS (I don't know, can't compare), but the steps when the volume is low are nearly always too large. I like to play audio on low volumes, especially in quiet environments, and it seems designers/developers don't cater to that use case. One step is too low are even complete silent, one step louder is too loud.
Yeah, the default Android volume control had (has?) the same problem. I remember when I got an early Pixel model that I thought there wasn't a low enough volume - this issue was filed in 2015 and is still marked as open: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/37035441
It definitely deserves a place on the list.
In fact, it's the worst of the worst, since it's just plausible looking enough to be the only option on over a billion devices.
On top of that, the EU passed a bill to make them fix it, and they... didn't. If you have headphones that are too loud at 'unit above zero', and use the volume limiter in the device safety section to set it to a reasonable level, it just completely mutes the headphones.
This isn't a hardware issue. Bluetooth devices have an integer volume setting, and the "unit above zero" setting is definitely not '1' on iOS like it is on android.
I've hit this problem with 100% of the non-apple headphones I've used.
If you long press the volume bar in control center then it opens a larger version you can drag to adjust more precisely.
Also if you pull down the today center or whatever it is on iOS, it has a music player interface you can drag the volume there too
You are my hero! Does this get added to the list of worst controls though since it's so buried?
You can also just drag directly on the slider that appears on the side of the screen when you press the volume buttons
Lovely. Never would have thought about that. Thank you!
It's already included in the list, between the pricing UI and the Windows XP disks
I experienced the same "muted, TOO LOUD" when I bought some very sensitive IEMs, but fortunately I have a rooted Android where I can customise the volume control curve, so I moved more of the steps down towards the lower end of the DAC range and made the loudest just a little beyond "threshold of pain".
That would be interesting to have the volume bars logarithmic instead of linear.
The focus ring on manual cinema camera lenses are like this where there is 270° or rotation from near to infinity giving a human plenty of room to move while AF lenses only have 90°. The distances are much smaller and harder to get smooth focus pulls and feels much more linear. So yeah, not the same, but similar-ish in that there's not enough action in the sweet spot and too much in extremes
The same with brightness. I have a shortcut to lower the white point because the lowest brightness level is still far to bright in complete darkness.
My gen1 kindle backlight is so bright at the lowest level that I angle it away from me to read at night.
Just typing this out makes me realize I should get a different ereader than wait for it to die since it’s clearly never going to die. It’s been like 15 years
brightness should go the other way too.
for example I read kindle books on my phone in dark mode (white text on a black background). Having the brightness all the way up isn't fully bright white text, it is more like brightish grey.
To get bright text to read in bright environments, I set the kindle app to black text on white background, then use accessibility to invert colors. I get noticeably brighter text on a black background.
I face the same situation on Android, there is no way to play music really quiet on Sennheiser TW4. Isn't this also plugs manufacturer's fault? (not valid for apple obviously)
"Disable absolute volume" setting (in Developer options) might help. It separates the phone volume control from the headphones volume control so it's like a preamp.
the difference between 0 and unit above 0 on iPhones is about 30% volume.
I have found that when playing audio to a HomePod, pressing Volume Up on the phone increases the volume by 1.
But if you immediately press Volume Down, it goes down by 0.5. So, with two button presses you can get the half-step increase you wanted in the first place.
It's like adding "a little" to a volume change command with Siri.
In macOS, there used to be a modifier key to have the volume change in half-steps, too, but I've forgotten what it is.I think the only place that Apple has done a good job with volume controls is the AirPods Max. But even there, I'd like more granularity at the low end.
This "article" just rehashes the top submissions from the reddit thread and then adds some surface level musings about UX.
It also blasts you with a full screen subscribe popup, ostensibly in case you want to see more rehashed content.
That wasn't part of the show? The popup (no idea what was on it, no one reads those of course) shows up and you think 'Ah. Yes, that would be very annoying if that happened while interacting with a volume slider.'
The popup also scrolled down for me and I had to scroll back up to hit the X.
Seriously, why not just link to the Reddit thread instead of this? It seems like every damn site has become a Torment Nexus.
In defense of this blogspam, the original posts were each individual submissions to /r/programmerhumor, so there's no easy way to link to a collection of them on reddit itself.
It works fine with javascript blocked, thankfully.
That popup is typical of blogs hosted on Medium. I don't know if the author even has control over if it pops up or now.
I'd add the volume control for Quicktime 4. A dial that you had to use a mouse to use.
http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm
EDIT:
previously
763 points by yankcrime on July 13, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 477 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27819384
And the silly thing is, as ridiculous as they are for mouse click/drag or touch use, those kind of dial controls are actually reasonable when coupled to a scroll wheel (like you can do in GNURadio). But Apple has never wavered from "one mouse button and nothing else is good enough for everybody," and scroll wheels aren't really an option for a touch interface.
Ah yes, skeuomorphic design, where you take something that's a physical artefact of the hardware and force-fit it onto an utterly different device on which it makes no sense whatsoever.
I agree, but boy does it look beautiful!
One of the worst volume controls I have run across is when the UI tries to simulate a physical knob. More often than not I see this on VST Plugins and I have yet to find one that I actually like - they are all equally terrible.
They appear to fall into 3 buckets:
1) Worst: Direction of the cursor has move in a circular pattern as if dragging a physical knob with a cursor.
2) Annoying, but least common: You have to move the cursor horizontally to move the knob
3) Most common, but still annoying: You have to move the cursor vertically to move the knob.
Common in desktop software for controlling measurement gear like oscilloscopes. Those have actual knobs on the equipment, so the software does the same thing and it's the worst thing ever.
Yeah, your 1 option is actually worse than some of parody submissions. What makes it truly horrific is that it works just enough to get you to put your thumb into muscle spasms trying to do it.
I have a mechanical keyboard with a metal roller for controlling volume. On my Mac, it works haphazardly. Rapidly rolling it downwards should mute almost immediately. But around 30-40% of the time, it'll just set it to a low volume instead. At least I work from home so this isn't an annoyance to anyone but myself. But it is annoying.
Oh well. From the UI's shown, I kinda like the 0-100 radio buttons. Yes, it's incredibly ugly. But I like the immediate precision of it.
Beautiful, forgot about this one. The precursor to some of neal.fun's creations.
- https://neal.fun/not-a-robot/
- https://neal.fun/password-game/
Every now and then I get these hilarious volume control videos on TikTok. They show the most horrible ways for doing volume control
One example (you need to play tic tac toe to set the volume) https://www.tiktok.com/@vivancodes/video/7612511893340671240
It seems like that account has quite a few more too
Tic Tac Toe is hilarious
Since it's on TikTok it should be renamed Tik Tok Toe
How about one where the first click sets your volume to max, and then pops up a dialogue to subscribe to a newsletter or sign up for an account? I've never seen such an atrocity, but I could see one plausibly being developed.
That would be bandcamp, where the free/preview player doesn't have a volume control but the library player does.
The SaaS subscription one fulfilled the same sense for me.
To be fair, Netflix' cheapest subscription option deliberately says that you will not be getting the best audio options including audio levels that are not the same between content. They clearly have the better audio for the higher tiers, so they are deliberately borking things.
I still contend that the worst volume control UX is asking your teenager to turn it down…
How about the most depraved volume control design of all: the actual reddit web video player (at least the embedded player on old.reddit)?
The slider is hidden by default. Hovering the volume icon makes the slider appear. There is margin between the icon and slider, though, so you have to quickly "zip" your mouse across this gap/chasm before the slider disappears. If you make it over to the slider in time, your hover then preserves its visibility.
I know for sure the devs at Condé ain't dogfoodin' on that interface anymore!
That’s actually a really common implementation failure across all platforms. It crops up again and again, in virtually every new thing that people implement. It’s very common to see this problem when you activate a submenu of a menu, and want to move the mouse diagonally to pick some item from the submenu.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/steering-law/
"Your request has been blocked..." That's a new 403 page.
If anyone has the same problem: https://web.archive.org/web/20260218142023/https://www.nngro...
Wow thanks for that.
See here for how Amazon's mega menu was designed around this problem:
https://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega...
It's slightly irritating to see Amazon get credit for that, when Bruce Tognazzini used that same solution 40 years ago when working on the classic MacOS interface!
(Apple forgot about it again for OS X, but that's a different story.)
From the article:
> I’m sure this problem was solved years and years ago, forgotten, rediscovered, solved again, forgotten, rediscovered, solved again.
From the NN/g article:
"older versions of MacOS featured a menu designed by NN/g principal Bruce Tognazzini; that menu did not exhibit this behavior, but instead, used a vector-based triangular buffer to allow users to move diagonally. Unfortunately, in the years since, Apple has reverted this excellent bit of interaction design."
But I'm on macOS 15 and the menus seem to behave that way (the good way). Did they re-implement it?
Yes, they did eventually. If I'm understanding correctly, the original design used a simple funnel shape with 45 degree sides (suitable for the resource-limited systems of the day), and when they eventually re-implemented it they used a funnel defined by the left hand corners of the submenu, as per the Amazon design. (See the large animgif halfway down https://thomaspark.co/2011/10/making-menus-escapable/ )
I liked the one where you make a noise at the level you want to set the volume.
I feel like that one’s actually pretty good, why should the ear calibrate to the device when it can be vice versa?
When I read the heading, I thought: "This must surely be about Windows volume control." But I didn't take into account, that this is a UX design website, so it mostly deals with UX and not with what happens after setting a specific numeric value for the volume.
I like how towards the end they added the vanilla Apple mission control UI in there - which doesn't have any volume control at all just to prove their point. That really caught me off-guard and was funny af.
how does it have no control? you just pull it up or down accordingly. i appreciate the joke that it's not a great design, but to say "doesn't have any volume control at all" is an odd thing to say.
What would be better?
When I search the Android UI, it looks very similar, but horizontal.
I was just saying it was funny that they just used the in real life used screen as their design of the worst thing they could come up with, especially as Apple touts itself as great at design.
As others have said, if they made it a non-linear scale so that there is more room between the lower value and less as it approached the max settings.
However, it is at least functional opposed to the person that I replied suggested it wasn't.
As I scrolled down, one of the animations started and brought up a subscription modal. "Okay, that one would be enraging," I thought, delighted, as I waited for the animation to loop.
It didn't. It was the site's real subscription modal.
I feel like there's a lesson in there.
> Should is interesting because of its subjectiveness. It’s a question that only makes sense to be asked in first person. And you have to know about much more than just design to be able to answer it — you have to understand about business, technology, culture, people. Answering the should question is a skill you only get after many, many years answering questions alike.
I wish more front-end designers would consider "should" more often.
"Oh, we can make the scrollbars in our web page auto-hide so PC users get the same experience as Mac users"
But should you?
No. Because one of the reasons I use a PC is because auto-hiding scrollbars on a desktop/laptop is a bug, not a feature, and I disabled that bug while I had a Mac because it's annoying.
"Oh, we can implement smooth scrolling in JavaScript!"
But should you?
No. Because browsers already do it. And your implementation will fail on at least one browser and cause scrolling to just be fucked up. If a user has disabled smooth scrolling, it's probably for a reason. Don't force it back on.
"We can create our own implementation of a drop-down box"
But should you?
No. You're reducing accessibility for literally zero gain. I hate when I'm entering my address, tabbing through the fields, reach the State, and pressing O then R doesn't bring me to "Oregon" or "OR", and instead brings me to Rhode Island. Side note: The order of entering an address is street address, city, state, zip code. If your form order is any different, you're a madman.
> The order of entering an address is street address, city, state, zip code.
In the US. Most of Europe uses street address; postcode, settlement and optionally province; country. There are still enough occasional warts that you shouldn’t dictate the structre of the second line, though: e.g. in France you’ll usually see things like “75005 Paris” but large institutions that get separate deliveries may list addresses like “75231 Paris CEDEX 05”, where everything but “Paris” is a postcode-like routing instruction. Unless you definitely, absolutely know better, just let people type in whatever postal label they want.
I have mixed opinions on this one. I appreciate the auto populating of City/State when you first enter the Zip. By doing that first, the suggestions of typing in address/street could be a much more accurate list as you've already filtered by state/city. The ones that come up with options from other states when I type in 1234 Main St will give me a list of pretty much every state/city in the country.
This feels like the physical equivalent of email validation, though it's harder to properly validate.
Similar to email validation, I've definitely seen people get bit (or, well, their customers getting bit) by people making untrue assumptions about the acceptable form of an address. See: a number of products that can't be ordered for USPS General Delivery simply because the address form won't allow it.
>"We can create our own implementation of a drop-down box"
Have been using MS "Dynamics" and wanted to add custom styling as a user. Even small lists/tables have all the off-screen elements destroyed so you can't copy stuff from the page, but also you might have to scroll things into view before they get styled (:has gets broken).
They re-implement tables as a swamp of elements which now lack semantic relationships.
They give the same elements random ids, they're non-deterministic. You can only really style by hierarchy, but for every property they seem to add at least one new element.
Everything about it is slow and cumbersome, and no wonder a simple table has hundreds of elements.
It's so Microsoft, the "don't bake your own widgets" taken to the n-th degree.
> "Oh, we can make the scrollbars in our web page auto-hide so PC users get the same experience as Mac users"
That's interesting. Our UI has scroll bars for sub-panels. On my Mac in FF, the scroll bar is always visible when there is overflow. Same screen on a co-worker's Chrome has the autohiding scroll bars even when there is overflow. So it feels more like a Chrome issue than a Windows issue, but I guess at this point in time we just assume everyone is using Chrome.
Yes — so much friction is introduced by redesigning when there should be refinement at most. Or doing nothing at all.
It takes wisdom to do that, and it doesn’t justify a salary. So we get experimented upon by UX designers at every company.
While the volume controls are fun, at this stage in the thread I’m struck by how few people have got to the point of the article at the end: the “should” question.
I thought that would be about alsamixer.
Haha, and it's Alsa's best feature by far.
I think the one with 100 checkboxes with each for a given volume gives direct access to the level of volume you want. Mad, but usable.
It should make you manually check and uncheck every checkbox between 0 and the target volume. Miss one and it silently dismisses the dialog without changing the volume.
Is there a list of these that are actually in real shipped software and not created as a joke?
The one that started shaking more and more as the volume got louder sent me. Sometimes you have to give credit where it's due, even when the result is unusable.
macOS has its own share of UI quirks too. The volume slider is fine, but app management is surprisingly bad for a platform that prides itself on UX. There's still no native way to quit all apps at once, and Activity Monitor feels stuck in 2005. Small UI tools that just get one thing right tend to stick around.
MacOS requires there to be an App as First Responder - what app should be that if you quit all apps?
The nearest that makes sense is Log Out.
Too bad the article is from 2017 because it's missing a major one: Sonos iOS app.
I've seen this same thing like 100 times. I do not mind.
The worst is the “AI transformation journey” volume UI. You talk to an agent to describe the character of the volume level you want. It loads a volume control “skill” and adjusts it.
I feel like it‘s in bad taste to turn a reddit thread into a blog post with zero added value instead of just linking to the thread.
I have my sennheiser bluetooth headphones connected to windows 11, for whatever reason, 90% of the time, I move the slider on Windows 11 and it ignores completely the sound on my headphones, just great working products. I have to use the physical buttons on my headphones like a caveman
I once worked for a mainstream headphone manufacturer who added a volume control to a product that was so widely despised that a special firmware release had to be done to disable it completely, or else the returns bin would overflow almost overnight ..
So this had me chuckling so hard, having worked professionally in the pro audio world for decades - I can say that some of these 'solutions' would actually be accepted in certain market segments .. I especially love the designs which use a built-in accelerometer.
It seems the good ol' knob is not going anywhere any time soon.
I just want to be able to get to 11.
I just want it to be able to be set between 0 and 1, because on iPhone
You are not allowed to set it between 0 and 1.+ Mud flaps
Here you go, https://store.thodio.com/products/new-anodized-aluminum-a-bo...
whoosh
How is it whoosh? Seemed exactly like what you where referencing. Knobs marked by up to 11 inspired by the same source, Spinal Tap.
You could try reading the TFA, and understanding that my comment was a joke (referring to Spinal Tap, of course) about those UIs, not a request for a knob with 11 divisions. pseudohadamard's knobs inspired by Spinal Tap have nothing to do with "the worst volume control UI in the world", about which the only thing I'm (jokily) concerned is whether they go up to 11, implying that having a horrible UI isn't relevant to me, only going up to 11 is ... this completely went over your and his head and I suspect that it still does. So the whoosh is because he completely missed what was going on here, and the second whoosh is because he missed the fact that I was the very person whose comment he responded to who called out his completely point-missing response with "whoosh".
Over and out. I won't respond again.
Is that self-referential? I knew exactly what the OP was asking.
Whoosh again. I'm the OP in this case.
Ah, right, so you're someone who likes saying whoosh a lot. Feel free to let rip.
You could try reading the TFA, and understanding that my comment was a joke (referring to Spinal Tap, of course) about those UIs, not a request for a knob with 11 divisions. Your knobs inspired by Spinal Tap have nothing to do with "the worst volume control UI in the world", about which the only thing I'm (jokily) concerned is whether they go up to 11, implying that having a horrible UI isn't relevant to me, only going up to 11 is ... this completely went over your head and I suspect that it still does. So the whoosh is because you completely missed what was going on here, and the second whoosh is because you missed the fact that I was the very person whose comment you responded to who called out your completely point-missing response with "whoosh".
Over and out. I won't respond again.
Did you have envisioned the possibility that your were the one that have missed other people joke ?
Just 1 more loud
I don't get the iOS one?
i know they will have alsamixer in this list.
Have seen this every single time, the iPhone one is my favorite. If you know, you know.
Can you explain that one?
in early versions of iOS apple used additional logic to "understand" what the user wanted instead of just doing what the user wanted.
Also it wasn't linear, it was more of a smiley face of sensitivity