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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
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 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/ )
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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 love that there are no images, not even Unicode emojis, no ads, no side bars, etc.
But at this point I think the bad UX on Hacker News has to be an intentional joke.
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.
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
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 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.
It also blasts you with a full screen subscribe popup, ostensibly in case you want to see more rehashed content.
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
- https://neal.fun/not-a-robot/
- https://neal.fun/password-game/
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
If anyone has the same problem: https://web.archive.org/web/20260218142023/https://www.nngro...
https://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega...
(Apple forgot about it again for OS X, but that's a different story.)
> I’m sure this problem was solved years and years ago, forgotten, rediscovered, solved again, forgotten, rediscovered, solved again.
"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?
When I search the Android UI, it looks very similar, but horizontal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The nearest that makes sense is Log Out.
It didn't. It was the site's real subscription modal.
I feel like there's a lesson in there.
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.
+ Mud flaps
Over and out. I won't respond again.
Over and out. I won't respond again.
Also it wasn't linear, it was more of a smiley face of sensitivity