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Reject option hidden or less prominent than accept

Raised by 145 people over 11 years (2016–2026), in 10 of them.

What people report

  • I often even leave a site, if it wants me to click "Agree" on some (Cookie-)dialog, before I can use the site.
    Read the comment ↗
  • even if the button exist it may be tiny and hidden at the bottom of the list of all partners
    Read the comment ↗
  • I suspect if you access the site from an EU IP address you’ll see an option besides “Accept All”.
    Read the comment ↗
  • The wall of text is horrible UI
    Read the comment ↗
  • Making the “accept all” option bright and prominent, but hiding “reject” or “manage settings”
    Read the comment ↗

Principle

Visibility and discoverability (Norman)

People report reject options that are missing, buried under "Manage settings", only shown after closing the popup, or styled as greyed-out text, so the only clearly visible choice is to accept.

A fix

Show "Accept all" and "Reject all" together on the first screen with equal size, contrast and button styling, and never style reject as a disabled-looking link. Make "Reject all" also object to legitimate-interest processing so it does what the label says, and do not block site content behind the choice.

Grouping, principle and fix drafted with Claude and reviewed by Justusability. Counts are people whose comment Claude labelled a usability complaint about this issue; see Method for how, and its limits. Something wrong here?

All 157 source comments
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