Products · Broad category
GUIs
Raised as a usability problem by 14 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2010–2026), in 14 threads.
This is a broad category rather than one product, so its issues aren't ranked on the home page.
People raised many different problems with GUIs, 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 15 complaints
- Clicking through GUI tool buttons is slow and clunky for professionals2026-10-02
- GUIs not properly tested for keyboard use, slowing power users and hurting accessibility2026-08-22
- Users must memorize which icon to click; functionality is hidden behind hamburger menus2025-11-05
- GUIs hide settings, use hard-to-see flat design and slow tasks with animations2024-05-10
- Hard to search for a GUI feature or affordance2024-02-06
- GUIs hide everything and waste half the screen on decorations2022-12-10
- Icons are hard to decipher and the mouse cursor is hard to track visually2022-06-17
- Bombards users with more visual information than needed for small changes, disrupting thought2022-03-17
- GUIs rely too much on user memory and need dozens of manual steps2021-01-28
- Hidden state and obscure organization make it hard to know which options interfere with each other2018-09-02
- Mouse use is extremely non-intuitive at standing desks, causing injury risk2016-03-21
- GUIs can't do unusual tasks; users are told to learn CLI instead2015-11-06
- Clicks are guessed into commands by the machine, so users can't predict what will happen2015-11-05
- Non-obvious icons and no help finding forgotten options2015-05-17
- GUIs are fundamentally flawed as a way for people to operate software2010-09-25