Products · Pattern or everyday thing

Web UI design

Raised as a usability problem by 23 people on Hacker News over 19 years (2008–2026), in 22 threads.

People raised many different problems with Web UI design, 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 23 complaints

Web tooltip interfaces are complicated, inconsistent across desktop, mobile and screen readers2026-08-09
Web UI toolkits are hard to interpret, low contrast, and do little for accessibility2026-06-22
Layout shifts after loading so the user clicks something other than what they meant to2026-04-29
Button text cannot be selected, so copying it requires workarounds like screenshots or OCR2025-09-25
Icon-styled buttons get double-clicked and give no feedback that the click registered2025-08-08
No immediate feedback after pressing, so users repeatedly click and trigger duplicate actions2025-05-27
Custom web controls built from divs with hidden JavaScript lack accessibility2025-03-12
Example pickers are unusable on iOS 18 and take almost a minute to load2025-03-12
Web-based apps lost consistent keyboard navigation and efficient workflows, becoming cluttered and inconsistent2025-02-28
Common UI controls look and behave differently on every site, so users must relearn them2024-10-29
Click handler works in Firefox but silently fails in Safari and Chrome2024-07-12
Actions fire on mouse release, so users cancel mid-click and the action still happens or is hard to abort2024-05-23
Page flickers during updates and elements jiggle when hover styles change2024-04-09
Web interface is very slow to respond2023-11-22
Windows pass odd state around, and dragging items between windows is awkward2023-08-25
Custom-designed controls with no information density and plain-text-looking buttons are hard to use2023-03-06
UI elements appearing or vanishing just before a click causes accidental clicks on the wrong thing2022-11-28
Inconsistent button order and behavior across dialogs; unclear keyboard and autofill support2022-11-17
Web UI elements are half-broken, slow, and different on every site, wasting user time2022-07-13
Every GUI is different and cluttered, so users must relearn interfaces and lose their skills2021-12-06
Web UI requires hand-writing code in several syntaxes instead of drag-and-drop design2021-11-09
Gray text colors look hard to read on many screens with different contrast2020-05-10
Standard web controls don't suit instant-interaction apps built on SproutCore2008-08-16