Frustrations and Fixes in Modern UI Design Practices | October 04 2024, 17:01

There must be a special place in hell for those who program automatic text insertion when you copy something to the clipboard.

Right next to those who prevent copying text or images to the clipboard (as if you can’t just take a screenshot), enable autoplay on videos (like Facebook, for example), put a useful footer below a block that has infinite scrolling, making it impossible to ever reach the footer (I have this issue on my WordPress blog, for example, and can’t fix it), create software that functions differently on mobile and desktop (Facebook again), reset everything to zero when you go back to a page with infinite scrolling, prevent sharing a link to a post page (LinkedIn), break navigation with the back button (a lot of them do this), and limit passwords to certain special characters (for example, I was registering at the DMV yesterday, where an exclamation mark is considered a special character but an underscore isn’t).

I think we should publish a book on UI antipatterns. Because compiling what should be done is now impossible, there are too many variations, but what should not be done is a relatively limited list that can be divided into “sometimes even professionals do this” and “everything else”.