Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Application settings menus
Raised as a usability problem by 12 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2010–2026), in 12 threads.
People raised many different problems with Application settings menus, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 12 complaints
- Buttons placed in title bars break muscle memory and waste actions2026-05-12
- Settings hidden under inconsistent menus, takes long to find2025-09-18
- Constant UI changes move controls, so users can't find things and must relearn2025-03-14
- Terse error codes give no clue what went wrong, forcing debugging with strace2022-11-17
- Long settings lists make options hard to find, requiring digging2022-02-02
- Apps' own tabs create nested UI and compete with the window manager's layout control2019-03-11
- Each program's custom config format makes automation tedious and invites human error2014-11-22
- Each app handles tabs differently, so windowing behaviour is inconsistent and cluttered2014-10-11
- Long waiting before the app can be used hurts the user experience2012-11-24
- Every app sets its own keybindings, so users must reconfigure each app separately for their layout2012-06-22
- Moving between UI panes by keyboard needs awkward function key combinations2012-02-02
- White text on light gray background is hard to read; sidebar widgets add clutter2010-10-21