Contra the previous post, just spotted this “Same settings, new look!” callout in Firefox, on a page I have never visited before, talking about a feature I have never used:

I mentioned this once – when you get someplace new, everything is new. This redesign announcement’s conditions were engineered poorly, because they didn’t even consider people who didn’t use the feature before the redesign.

I keep thinking of the very old computers from the 1940s, 1950s, and even 1960s, where the challenge wasn’t what to do with the computer, but with keeping the computer running. There was a machine called JOHNNIAC which gained a nickname “pneumoniac” because it refused to work on a warm day. On many other computers, there was a daily ritual of finding which of the vacuum tubes blew up and had to be replaced. Some teams had a literal downtime tax; they knew and communicated in advance that 40% of the days the machine would not be up to the task, consumed by tweaks and repairs to bring it just to the state of being ready to do work.

When I look at those kinds of pop-ups and callouts, I think how we’re unwillingly recreating the very same conditions. I deeply believe people are exhausted not just by changes in software, but also constant questions, pop-ups, unnecessary notifications, “STOP 2 END,” “tell us what you think,” emails to unsubscribe from, unsubscribes that don’t work the first time, and so on.

Software should not require the user to occasionally click on buttons just to keep it running.

I wanted to show you a year’s worth of messages from my barber’s software, because this is what software should be.

No spam, no upsells, no growth hacks, no unwelcome cuteness or puzzling verbosity. It’s so curt and straight to the point it should be set in a 1970s Helvetica: The appointment’s tomorrow. Any questions?

An interesting short story from Ernie Smith at Tedium, who ventured out to do the opposite of what we usually cover on this blog – disrespect his motor memory:

Recently, I made a realization: I have been unwillingly addicted to Facebook for a long time, and it’s not even because I like Facebook. Rather, it’s because I find it an extremely easy URL to type into a modern web browser’s omnibar. This sounds crazy, but the first two letters, f and a, are on the home row, and I don’t really rely on bookmarks, but my browser’s history function to type in URLs.

This creates a sort of recency bias. If I type in the same URL a lot, it’s the one that pops up the most. And so, if I’m at a browser with no clear idea of what my intent for the next page I load up, I inevitably type in “fa,” which would suck me in. […]

So, what I ended up doing was creating a URL that does nothing but forward to Google News. […] The result is that whenever I type in my new Facebook URL, I go to a news aggregator, which is inevitably what I was using Facebook for anyway. A week later, and my Facebook usage has gone down considerably.

There is something really interesting about creating your own URL for a purpose like this. Smith doesn’t disclose his, but you can imagine it’s something like facebook.aresluna.org that just redirects to a news aggregator. If creating a new URL is too difficult, there are always other options:

Wanna go to fatberg.com every time you load your computer? Or maybe faxtoy.net?

This is a good example of some of the challenges with “recent” interfaces I am such a big fan of. If you’re designing recents and you think they can turn against the user or otherwise get in their way, it’s good to offer not just a “clear recents” feature that gets rid of them all, like here in Apple’s Music…

…but also individual clears, like here in Bluesky:

I don’t know if this is true for all the browsers, but in Chrome and Safari, you can also clear individual suggestions this way:

Smith writes a bit more about the addictive nature of computers, but I’ll let you read on your own.

I got pissed at Chrome the other day. This is not the first user-hostile thing Chrome did – off the top of my head, I remember the updater fiasco from some years ago, and the more recent auto-installation of a 4GB file – but as you’ll see, this one is squarely in my wheelhouse.

The transgression: Chrome took over a shortcut on my Mac – Ctrl+G – and it used it to throw me into Chrome’s version of Gemini that I have never used or was interested in using. Moreover, it decided it’s okay for Ctrl+G to put me there even if I pressed the shortcut outside of Chrome.

I was never asked by Chrome if it’s okay to do so. The way I found it installed it was in a very unpleasant way: I tried to use Ctrl+G in my coding editor to jump to a specific line, and I got this instead:

Stuff like that can make you feel like you lost your mind. I have no idea what this window is supposed to do, where did it come from, or even – initially – why it appeared. Note that it doesn’t even identify itself as either Chrome or Gemini, unless you read the scary caveat. It feels like the UI equivalent of breaking and entering.

Unsurprisingly, the pop-up doesn’t confess to stealing the shortcut, or allow you to toggle it off in any way:

It is possible to undo that behavior, but one has to connect it to Chrome first, and then go deep into its settings – first by clicking on “AI innovations,” and then by clicking on “Gemini in Chrome” – to find it:

Let’s not beat around the bush: This is effectively malware behaviour. It’s bullshit. It’s cancer. It’s deeply disrespectful toward the user. It’s prioritizing hollow metrics at the expense of everything else. But I don’t want this blog to chase news of the day or feed the outrage machine, so let me try to turn my anger into something useful.

We can start here: There are some global keyboard shortcuts that are genuinely good. A video call mute shortcut, screenshotting, “next slide” if you’re presenting in Zoom. Everything related to computer operation – volume, brightness, media transport controls – needs to be available regardless of focus or context. (In my keyboard customization essay, I introduced my own global keyboard shortcuts, for example for scanning the next page.)

But, an app installing a global keyboard shortcut without user consent is bad. This can never be anything other than opt-in. At the very least, Chrome should have shown me a clear UI that said “We’re thinking Ctrl+G would be fun for you to use. You okay with that?” and a button for me to press to confirm.

(Note: Ctrl+G is the shortcut for Macs. As far as I can tell, on Windows it is Alt+G.)

From people’s reactions, it seems this shortcut is auto-enabled for a subset of users – perhaps people who used Gemini before, or people on a plan that happens to include it. No matter how specific or small that group is, or how useful they might find the Ctrl+G pop-up, the issue remains: I have never consented to the app doing this.

I also partly blame macOS for ceding its responsibilities here. Mac’s keyboard customization features are a mess, and Mac doesn’t have a modern command repository. It’s not just that apps can register global shortcuts as they want, without the user knowing. It’s also that there is no shared inventory of them; if an app “swallows” a shortcut but does nothing noticeable with it, it can be really hard to figure out why a shortcut seemingly just stops working.

(Other apps that I remember having problems with “stealing” global shortcuts, and apps that a few readers posted are: 1Password, Notion, and Perplexity. I’d be curious if you have other examples!)

In light of macOS’s deficiencies, as an app, if you offer any shortcut customization – especially if you allow global shortcuts – I think it’s important to have a page that lists all of them shortcuts in one place. This is not what Chrome does, as various shortcut options are hidden on various pages in settings. Even Zoom, which is not generally known for having a great user interface, does better here:

And, since we’re back to Chrome, what a fall from grace! When Chrome started in the late 2000s, it felt like a browser that had user’s interest in mind, and protected people from ill-behaving websites. Today, it’s the operating system that needs to protect us from Chrome.

Also, don’t call a tab “AI innovations.” It’s tacky as hell. The market gets to decide what’s innovative and what is not.

Nikita Prokopov on his fun Tumblr-like site Grumpy Website that collects UI transgressions with light commentary:

Why log in when you have to, when you can instead experience the same Kafkaesque maze of pages, redirects, confirmation emails, copying codes, and searching for a second device—all a week in advance?

I agree with authentication experiences being absolutely horrible, especially in the corporate context. But I think the “your login expires in 5 days” callout is actually positive. Your reauthentication will happen anyway according to the security regimen. Instead of it potentially surprising you at a wrong moment – for example just before, or in the middle of the presentation in front of a boss – you could get ahead on that process during the next moment of downtime, and have some peace of mind.

I know Slack has a similar warning, although I don’t happen to have a screenshot handy; I imagine a few other places do, too.

(However, that gesture doesn’t give apps permission to handle expiring credentials badly. There should be no excuse for losing anything the user is doing – for example writing a long comment – just because the reauthentication kicks in in the middle of them doing that. Even the app losing its mind for a while just as its separate parts are waking up to the reality of reauthentication at their own pace and throwing strange errors, but the login screen hasn’t reappeared yet, can be really confusing.)

I like Angela Collier’s videos about physics and I was delighted to discover this 18-minute one…

…because it’s a great continuation to the thread about the complexity of Microsoft Office I shared recently.

Collier talks about why physicists prefer LaTeX to Word. LaTeX is sort of a nerdy HTML that predates HTML. It looks like this…

…and given how nerdy HTML already is, you might imagine this is a power-user tool that’s chiefly about power and control. But Collier makes the argument that there are some things that LaTeX makes much easier:

• there is absolutely no need (or peer pressure) to spend time styling the document by choosing fonts, colors, etc.,
• there is no “live preview,” and making a PDF is a separate step similar to compilation in coding – which means it doesn’t constantly occupy your mind,
• GUIs can slow you down because the keyboard is faster than the mouse,
• LaTeX doesn’t give you a lot of control over positioning, which is better than giving you only a semblance of control over positioning (this is the TikTok meme Collier alluded to briefly).

This is really interesting because it goes right to the core of the uncomfortable truth: naïve design decisions meant to make things easier might achieve the opposite. I shared the ForkLift example where the team didn’t understand what made the previous version great, and more recently the animation that could slow people down.

(Of course, there is also the issue of typographical craft of LaTeX documents set in Computer Modern, but let’s save this for another time.)

Also, the video starts with Collier apologizing for potentially making the audience feel dumb in a prior video. I don’t think it’s a joke, and I found it thoughtful and refreshing.

A nice and I think effective notification preview in Retro, with a verbatim sample text of a notification right below its name:

Not only you can see exactly what you’re going to get and make a much better-informed decision, but the app even uses actual names of your in-app contacts, so you can relate to the notifications more.

A quick post from Paul Kafasis at the software company Rogue Amoeba, talking about making update notifications less annoying:

Though [the open source update framework] Sparkle serves us very well, it has one notable downside. Update announcements are most likely to appear at the least convenient time: right after you’ve launched the app.

With that in mind, we’re making changes to how update notifications appear throughout our apps. In the future, when the software’s timed automated check detects a newer version, it will no longer pop an obtrusive window like the one seen above.

Instead, a small “Update Available” indicator will be shown in the app’s interface. You can see it right here in Audio Hijack.

I first remember this approach from Chrome in the early 2010s. (If you know it from an earlier application, please reach out!)

The browser still uses it today, but the visual treatment was different early on; the update icon badge started with green, then yellow, eventually ending up red. While this resembles traffic lights the inspiration was, apparently, rotting fruit – you’d be more likely to want to clean up an old, stinky fruit than a fresh new one.

Here are, I believe, the first three visual treatments in Chrome, 2011-2013:

How effective was that treatment, I don’t know. (It definitely felt more thought through than the trash where the skeuomorphism undermined the function itself.) But it is all interesting to me in the larger context of the tensions underlying updates:

• It’s in a company’s best interest for every user to be on the latest version, since that saves on support headaches.
• A company needs to believe the newest version is the best ever – even if it’s not – similarly as our brains need to believe we are generally right most of the time, just so we can function.

That’s why I always appreciate the improvements that prioritize the user experience over the company’s.

A good post by John Gruber on Daring Fireball investigating why apps pester you with the annoying “enjoying this app?” windows and attendant semi-shady practices (choose 5 stars and you get sent to App Store, but choose anything less, and your review will get redirected to Mr. Dev Null).

The answer? They don’t really have a choice:

“[Steven Troughton-Smith:] Review prompts are the difference between a great app getting five positive reviews, and thousands of positive reviews. […]”

You have to play the game as the game stands, and Apple controls the game. And in the game as it stands, apps need 5-star reviews to gain traction in the App Store, perhaps especially so for apps in crowded categories. And for most apps, the only way to achieve that is through prompting. But the right thing to do, for the user experience in the app, is never to prompt for reviews.

I think it’s worth knowing about stuff like this for another reason. Absent understanding or institutional memory, any exception gets normalized and ceases being an exception. If specifically iOS apps have to do this for reasons explained in the post, this is still not an excuse for web apps or websites to indiscriminately pester people with prompts like these, too.

A fun 24-minute video from Technology Connections about designed sounds in real life: elevator dings, airplane chimes, railway crossing dings, and so on.

While I am sympathetic to the notion that sound pollution is a thing we need to be concerned with, the choice between silence and sound pollution is a false choice. There’s a lot of those happening these days, probably because we’re so stuck in binary thinking. But as airplanes show us, we can design sounds which aren’t obtrusive, but which are helpful. And when you get yourself out of binary thinking, you can do things like make your most obnoxious apps be silent while your important ones make themselves known, and in ways which are meaningful to you and pleasant to everyone else.

It is an interesting parallel to the post about syntax highlighting from a while back, and one of the posts about cartography design I shared recently; they all explore how you can create a richer space capable of conveying more information without overwhelming people, by being intentional about the design.

You can tell the story of Mac OS via the story of its settings, and the same is likely true of Photoshop.

Recently, spelunking in the preferences of Photoshop 2025, I found this extremely curious thing:

To transcribe:

Focus mode limits the appearance of certain optional user interface messages so that you can use Photoshop with fewer interruptions.

With this option enabled:

• The Welcome screen will not include “what’s new” feature descriptions
• Blue in-product alerts promoting discovery and use of certain features will be suppressed
• What’s New will not auto start when Photoshop is launched
• The color mode preference will be auto set to “Neutral Color Mode”

The three first options should be self explanatory. Neutral Color Mode is sort of the “graphite” option of Photoshop’s UI where the (already rare?) accented blue elements become white instead.

As much as I’ll always applaud a piece of software working on annoying you less, this is all so very strange. I don’t mean that the last option seems unrelated, and the first and third one kind of mutually exclusive… but just the very idea of shoving it in as an opt-in in the last tab of settings, under “technology previews”, and asking people for feedback feels peculiar to me.

Not to spoil the outcome, but even this “technology preview” is completely gone in the updated Photoshop 2026. I wonder if this is fallout from a mangled launch (even for those few who I imagined turned it on, the option didn’t live up to its promise), but also perhaps a political fight inside Adobe between product and growth teams? I bet we’ll never know.

I do not personally have a grand unified theory of how to explain things or announce features in products because it’s so situational, and I understand that especially Photoshop given its age might be the hardest difficulty level. I’d personally prefer to receive announcements of new features over email so I can read them at my leisure, and with each new thing or change linked to a playground that would allow me to experience it in the best way – but I can’t say with any certainty that this would work for everyone.

But I would expect people on the Photoshop team to have more experience here, and this focus mode approach just feels a bit… naïve to me. My two warm takes: 1. People aren’t generally as frustrated with how features are announced, but with what features are. 2. Why wouldn’t everyone deserve the gift of focus?

Many people already linked to Terry Godier’s thoughtful essay about email and RSS and the dangers of skeuomorphism by default:

Email is where the metaphor made its jump from atoms to bits. “Inbox” was borrowed legitimacy. It sounded like that wooden tray, so it inherited its psychology. But the wooden tray had a constraint: physical space. A desk could only hold so much. The digital inbox had no bottom. Still, mostly real obligations. Humans writing to you, expecting responses.

This all resonated me, although only to a point. I long stopped paying attention to those unread counters in Gmail and even though I know they exist, they feel wholly meaningless. And I personally would prefer my RSS reader to work more like email, because worrying that I cannot catch up if I wait too long and old entries get recycled is actually adding stress for me.

But I’m thankful for someone else pushing back on the barrage of red dots and fake urgency, and just thinking about it all is worthwhile. I’m very open to the idea of building something that eschews numbers to begin with, and for trying different operating models. (I deleted Threads from my phone after it was pushing me toward the algorithmic timeline filled with outrage, which was detrimental to my mental health.) I could even imagine choosing different RSS feeds to have different rules – this one “cannot miss,” the other one “casual.”

I also want to talk about the essay’s presentation.

The site makes heavy use of scroll effects. Okay, heavy subdued use, but like most of these, this is presentational rather than semantic. In this story at least, it feels a bit more thoughtful and it does feel like it enhances the experience and atmosphere, starting with the ticking number at the very top.

Yet, there are challenges. First, it does seem like there’s a lot of subtle movement going on and at some point that becomes a distraction. Also, I don’t know if it’s a bug or a particular stylistic choice, but things do not reveal themselves until they are almost off the screen. As an example, this is not a screenshot in the middle of animation – this is the page in a resting state, where the bottom is impossible to read:

This property, combined with the fact that all these are always reversible (something that even the recent Death to Scroll Fade page that ridiculed these avoided) makes the essay fiddly and harder to read than it needs to be.

To author’s credit, there is an alternative static version provided and linked to at the very top. But that version is also styled differently, and has more of a “terminal” look.

Thinking out loud and building a set of principles out of these observations, I would personally do it this way:

• a static version should be stylistically indistinguishable from the dynamic version
• ideally, there would be an easily accessible switch between motion/no-motion, similarly to how some sites allow you to switch to dark/​light theme regardless of where you are in the story
• if the user specifies “prefer reduced motion” in accessibility settings, a static version should kick in automatically
• make the text effects finish as they scroll in, continuing the momentum on their own – don’t make them stop in the middle
• unless the animation is particularly important or gimmicky (by the way: I love a good gimmick!), going back and forward again should not replay it

On Mastodon, Hendrik Weimer posted 5 most boosted Fediverse posts of 2025. The numbers look kind of low, but the author explains the methodology below.

At any rate, two of the 5 posts have to do with our trust in software.

Number 1 from Max Leibman:

No, I do not want to install your app.
No, I do not want that app to run on startup.
No, I do not want that app shortcut on my desktop.
No, I do not want to subscribe to your newsletter.
No, I do not want your site to send me notifications.
No, I do not want to tell you about my recent experience.
No, I do not want to sign up for an account.
No, I do not want to sign up using a different service and let the two of you know about each other.
No, I do not want to sign in for a more personalized experience.
No, I do not want to allow you to read my contacts.
No, I do not want you to scan my content.
No, I do not want you to track me.
No, I do not want to click “Later” or “Not now” when what I mean is NO.

Number 5 from JA Westenberg:

RSS never tracked you.
Email never throttled you.
Blogs never begged for dopamine.
The old web wasn’t perfect.
But it was yours.

Neil Panchal writing in 2020 about a cool little page called diskprices.com:

The performance of this website is stellar. It loads almost instantly. And the list (although it’s not sortable) gets the job done, it is sorted by price already which is the most important attribute.

Diskprices.com deserves the UI/UX award of the decade. We’ve lost our ability to design user interfaces laser-focused on the user. Instead, we have purple gradients, scroll jacking, responsive bullshit, emojis, animations, and many other things designers do today. The utilitarian approach of Diskprices.com is refreshing, although the contemporary designers cast it off as ‘brutalist design’, thereby marking it as a statement of fashion.

But both the creators of the page and Panchal might be getting this wrong:

Do you need a graphic designer?
No. This site is designed to maximize information density, accessibility, and performance. More whitespace, colors, and icons won’t help.

I think this is incorrect. The creator of the page is a graphic designer, that just happens to be the perfect graphic designer for the job.

I stumbled upon this small page about friction by Carl Barenbrug. I found myself vehemently disagreeing with one example listed; I don’t think Undo Send is an example of friction, as to me it actually feels like the exact opposite (“Are you sure you want to send this email?” dialog box would be friction – just like the last example Barenbrug showed).

But this paused me in my tracks:

“Intentional pagination instead of infinite scrolling is progress with awareness.”

It made me realize that the only implementation of infinite scrolling I know is basically pretending the page has already been there the whole time… if it’s done well, and if you move slow enough, and if you don’t pay attention to the scrollbar, it really feels like the page goes on and on forever.

But… it doesn’t have to be that way. You could turn off the smoke or hide some of the mirrors. You could uncouple the gesture from what follows. You could add milestones (in the traditional sense of the word) after every X results. You could make the scrollbar react differently. Instead of frictionless scroll, you could force the user to bounce off of a bottom of the page in a similar vein as pull-to-refresh forces them to bounce off of its top.

I’m curious now. Did anyone ever experiment with infinite scrolling that feels… closer to pagination?