You must log in or # to comment.
Isn’t it amazing when text is also not selectable? Like its rendered behind some other shit?
I fucking hate websites ❤️
Or when you try and select a letter and it auto selects the whole fucking work or sentence, jumping all over the place?
I HATE that. I like to save things i read or find interesting in Joplin (open source notebook software) and it always has to be this giant fucking undertaking to copy some text off a website. I am annoyed just thinking about it… So i always end up just copying everything on the page instead. Don’t have time for that shit…
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.
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 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.
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
May I ask how old you are? And what was the first OS you used?
deleted by creator
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!
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.
(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)
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 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.
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.
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.
We can see what you all are doing.
No, you are seeing what the people too clueless to install tracking protection are doing.
I can confirm the dyslexia thing and highlighting
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 I agree that 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.
As someone who doesn’t do this, I can only guess it’s like holding your book mark parallel under the lines in a book as you read it, which I thought was fairly uncommon. Apparently a bunch of people read this way?
It makes more sense on monitors with large blocks of text or large paragraphs. With a monitor so big relative to a book, and scrolling making it easy to lose where you were, it can sometimes be tough for folks to read through huge chunks. Some people select chunks of text to help break up those monoliths into manageable bites along with putting a clear marker for where they are if they scroll or otherwise lose their place…
As someone who does occasionally do this, I don’t think it’s about readability. After all I also read books, which are not known for short bits of text in narrow columns. And I don’t use a bookmark, pen, or finger to keep track of where I’m at.
I think it’s more about keeping your hand busy, subconsciously even. Although to be honest I also don’t do that while reading books.
Maybe it’s a remnant of when every computer had a screensaver, and constantly moving the mouse meant keeping the screen alive.
From a usability, accessibility, and comfort perspective a book is incredibly different from a device that’s blasting your eyeballs with highly contrasting light.
For the screens I’m using, a book page is way narrower than the standard text region of a screen.
I do this. It’s just a stimming thing while reading web articles and I hate being sent to Twitter or whatever for it.
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.
This is what you sound like: Xkcd Workflow
I do not want the program to react when I left click ordinary text. The program should not anticipate my needs. It should wait until I’ve told it I need something (with a right click) before doing anything.
I’m gonna break your heart then. Until about 15 years ago it used to be that literally all interactable/clickable text was both blue AND UNDERLINED to indicate it was a clickable link. Then some self-important designers with no user experience testing decided that was just too ugly and stopped underlining links to give it a “clean” minimalist look. It was then a trend, so everyone copied it. Now we still live with those consequences :(
I lived in that beautiful era. It was glorious.
Kinda. Very specific edge case that can be solved with a custom feature like a browser extension.
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.
Nonsense. AI adds rich features like these that no one wanted so VCs can become rich. The only thing missing on modern computers is blindingly-bright nuclear explosion white LEDs that shine directly into your optic nerve, all the time.
You mean like the kind used on digital billboards, the ones bright enough to kill your night vision when you’re driving down an otherwise-dark highway?
Are you some kind of Luddite? We need quasar-level lighting everywhere at all times for the safety of our children.
I do it, too. I rarely read any text without subconsciously marking the text while reading it. Might be a tool for me (ADHD) to make it easier not to lose track - I don’t know.
But regardless of why people do it and while I agree that it’s probably something very specific not a lot of users do, I refuse to believe that anyone actually uses those select->popup-> share features, ever. Often the little pop-up even blocks the text above it which is just insanely bad UX imo.
Sites should never mess with core functionality without asking (scrolling, selection, tab/keyboard navigation, hijacking common shortcuts/right click, clipboard, history, etc).
I believe someone came up with that idea a decade+ ago and people just want it on their site to add value without actually checking if anyone uses it.
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).
