Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Modal interfaces
Raised as a usability problem by 8 people on Hacker News over 13 years (2013–2025), in 8 threads.
People raised many different problems with Modal interfaces, 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 9 complaints
- Single knob cycles through modes, forcing checking the screen and extra taps to adjust settings2025-02-11
- Page refreshes after the user fills in a modal login form2023-05-24
- Pressing Escape to cancel IME completion also closes the form and loses entered input2021-04-09
- Users type text in a modal editor and get confused when it doesn't appear2019-08-11
- Modal interfaces make people unable to type or act where they expect, with hidden mode state2017-05-23
- Keys do different things depending on hidden mode, with unclear feedback about which mode is active2017-05-23
- Unclear whether a pause symbol shows current state or the action on click2016-02-08
- Switching between modes is hard to do without making errors2014-09-10
- Single knob or button requires repeated presses to reach the desired mode, gaining nothing2013-05-13