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The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)
- jibal 8mo agoI just want to be able to get to 11.
- pseudohadamard 8mo agoHere you go, https://store.thodio.com/products/new-anodized-aluminum-a-box-knob https://store.thodio.com/products/new-anodized-aluminum-a-bo...
- jibal 8mo agowhoosh
- pseudohadamard 8mo agoIs that self-referential? I knew exactly what the OP was asking.
- jibal 8mo agoWhoosh again. I'm the OP in this case.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- pseudohadamard 8mo agoAh, right, so you're someone who likes saying whoosh a lot. Feel free to let rip.
- jibal 8mo agoYou could try reading the TFA, and understanding that my comment was a joke (referring to Spinal Tap, of course) about those UIs, not a request for a knob with 11 divisions. Your knobs inspired by Spinal Tap have nothing to do with "the worst volume control UI in the world", about which the only thing I'm (jokily) concerned is whether they go up to 11, implying that having a horrible UI isn't relevant to me, only going up to 11 is ... this completely went over your head and I suspect that it still does. So the whoosh is because you completely missed what was going on here, and the second whoosh is because you missed the fact that I was the very person whose comment you responded to who called out your completely point-missing response with "whoosh". Over and out. I won't respond again.
- Rexxar 8mo agoDid you have envisioned the possibility that your were the one that have missed other people joke ?
- jibal 8mo agoIt was my joke, at the top of this thread and the only one in this thread. Have you considered the possibility that you have no idea what is going on here (your lack of fluency in English is a likely factor) and that you have no business poking your nose into it, person who is attacking me with a hostile rhetorical question for no good reason? The fact is that I do put quite a bit of effort into being sure that I understand the context--a lot more effort than you and others here have.
- socalgal2 8mo agoHow is it whoosh? Seemed exactly like what you where referencing. Knobs marked by up to 11 inspired by the same source, Spinal Tap.
- jibal 8mo agoYou could try reading the TFA, and understanding that my comment was a joke (referring to Spinal Tap, of course) about those UIs, not a request for a knob with 11 divisions. pseudohadamard's knobs inspired by Spinal Tap have nothing to do with "the worst volume control UI in the world", about which the only thing I'm (jokily) concerned is whether they go up to 11, implying that having a horrible UI isn't relevant to me, only going up to 11 is ... this completely went over your and his head and I suspect that it still does. So the whoosh is because he completely missed what was going on here, and the second whoosh is because he missed the fact that I was the very person whose comment he responded to who called out his completely point-missing response with "whoosh". Over and out. I won't respond again.
- bigfishrunning 8mo agoJust 1 more loud
- socalgal2 8mo agoI just want it to be able to be set between 0 and 1, because on iPhone 0 = off 1 = 30% volume 10 = 100% volume You are not allowed to set it between 0 and 1. + Mud flaps
- sota_pop 8mo agoI really hope this is a TiST reference.
- jibal 8mo agoOf course.
- sph 8mo agoBeautiful, forgot about this one. The precursor to some of neal.fun's creations. - https://neal.fun/not-a-robot/ https://neal.fun/not-a-robot/ - https://neal.fun/password-game/ https://neal.fun/password-game/
- aa-jv 8mo agoI once worked for a mainstream headphone manufacturer who added a volume control to a product that was so widely despised that a special firmware release had to be done to disable it completely, or else the returns bin would overflow almost overnight .. So this had me chuckling so hard, having worked professionally in the pro audio world for decades - I can say that some of these 'solutions' would actually be accepted in certain market segments .. I especially love the designs which use a built-in accelerometer. It seems the good ol' knob is not going anywhere any time soon.
- sillywalk 8mo agoI'd add the volume control for Quicktime 4. A dial that you had to use a mouse to use. http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm EDIT: previously 763 points by yankcrime on July 13, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 477 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27819384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27819384
- pseudohadamard 8mo agoAh yes, skeuomorphic design, where you take something that's a physical artefact of the hardware and force-fit it onto an utterly different device on which it makes no sense whatsoever.
- ndr42 8mo agoI agree, but boy does it look beautiful!
- flyinghamster 8mo agoAnd the silly thing is, as ridiculous as they are for mouse click/drag or touch use, those kind of dial controls are actually reasonable when coupled to a scroll wheel (like you can do in GNURadio). But Apple has never wavered from "one mouse button and nothing else is good enough for everybody," and scroll wheels aren't really an option for a touch interface.
- nico 8mo agoEvery now and then I get these hilarious volume control videos on TikTok. They show the most horrible ways for doing volume control One example (you need to play tic tac toe to set the volume) https://www.tiktok.com/@vivancodes/video/7612511893340671240 https://www.tiktok.com/@vivancodes/video/7612511893340671240 It seems like that account has quite a few more too
- sanjosanjo 8mo agoTic Tac Toe is hilarious
- gzread 8mo agoSince it's on TikTok it should be renamed Tik Tok Toe
- RiskScore 8mo agoI've seen this same thing like 100 times. I do not mind.
- harvey9 8mo agoI liked the one where you make a noise at the level you want to set the volume.
- efebarlas 8mo agoI feel like that one’s actually pretty good, why should the ear calibrate to the device when it can be vice versa?
- semolino 8mo agoHow about the most depraved volume control design of all: the actual reddit web video player (at least the embedded player on old.reddit)? The slider is hidden by default. Hovering the volume icon makes the slider appear. There is margin between the icon and slider, though, so you have to quickly "zip" your mouse across this gap/chasm before the slider disappears. If you make it over to the slider in time, your hover then preserves its visibility. I know for sure the devs at Condé ain't dogfoodin' on that interface anymore!
- db48x 8mo agoThat’s actually a really common implementation failure across all platforms. It crops up again and again, in virtually every new thing that people implement. It’s very common to see this problem when you activate a submenu of a menu, and want to move the mouse diagonally to pick some item from the submenu.
- fainpul 8mo agohttps://www.nngroup.com/articles/steering-law/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/steering-law/
- vntok 8mo agoSee here for how Amazon's mega menu was designed around this problem: https://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega-dropdown https://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega...
- Sohcahtoa82 8mo ago> Should is interesting because of its subjectiveness. It’s a question that only makes sense to be asked in first person. And you have to know about much more than just design to be able to answer it — you have to understand about business, technology, culture, people. Answering the should question is a skill you only get after many, many years answering questions alike. I wish more front-end designers would consider "should" more often. "Oh, we can make the scrollbars in our web page auto-hide so PC users get the same experience as Mac users" But should you? No. Because one of the reasons I use a PC is because auto-hiding scrollbars on a desktop/laptop is a bug, not a feature, and I disabled that bug while I had a Mac because it's annoying. "Oh, we can implement smooth scrolling in JavaScript!" But should you? No. Because browsers already do it. And your implementation will fail on at least one browser and cause scrolling to just be fucked up. If a user has disabled smooth scrolling, it's probably for a reason. Don't force it back on. "We can create our own implementation of a drop-down box" But should you? No. You're reducing accessibility for literally zero gain. I hate when I'm entering my address, tabbing through the fields, reach the State, and pressing O then R doesn't bring me to "Oregon" or "OR", and instead brings me to Rhode Island. Side note: The order of entering an address is street address, city, state, zip code. If your form order is any different, you're a madman.
- mananaysiempre 8mo ago> The order of entering an address is street address, city, state, zip code. In the US. Most of Europe uses street address; postcode, settlement and optionally province; country. There are still enough occasional warts that you shouldn’t dictate the structre of the second line, though: e.g. in France you’ll usually see things like “75005 Paris” but large institutions that get separate deliveries may list addresses like “75231 Paris CEDEX 05”, where everything but “Paris” is a postcode-like routing instruction. Unless you definitely, absolutely know better, just let people type in whatever postal label they want.
- terribleperson 8mo agoThis feels like the physical equivalent of email validation, though it's harder to properly validate. Similar to email validation, I've definitely seen people get bit (or, well, their customers getting bit) by people making untrue assumptions about the acceptable form of an address. See: a number of products that can't be ordered for USPS General Delivery simply because the address form won't allow it.
- himata4113 8mo agoHave seen this every single time, the iPhone one is my favorite. If you know, you know.
- busymom0 8mo agoCan you explain that one?
- himata4113 8mo agoin early versions of iOS apple used additional logic to "understand" what the user wanted instead of just doing what the user wanted. Also it wasn't linear, it was more of a smiley face of sensitivity
- socalgal2 8mo agoI get it's not the same thing but I wish iOS had lower volume settings. As it is, if 100% is max volume then the difference between 0 and unit above 0 on iPhones is about 30% volume. Like, in the middle of the night when everything is quiet, if I was the set it on the lowest setting and make some game sounds I could hear it 2 rooms away with doors open. But, Apple decided you don't need to set it below 30%. Maybe they're trying to force you to buy Airpods
- shreddit 8mo agoThe same with brightness. I have a shortcut to lower the white point because the lowest brightness level is still far to bright in complete darkness.
- m463 8mo agobrightness should go the other way too. for example I read kindle books on my phone in dark mode (white text on a black background). Having the brightness all the way up isn't fully bright white text, it is more like brightish grey. To get bright text to read in bright environments, I set the kindle app to black text on white background, then use accessibility to invert colors. I get noticeably brighter text on a black background.
- hombre_fatal 8mo agoMy gen1 kindle backlight is so bright at the lowest level that I angle it away from me to read at night. Just typing this out makes me realize I should get a different ereader than wait for it to die since it’s clearly never going to die. It’s been like 15 years
- bdavbdav 8mo agoThere’s an accessibility option in iOS to reduce white point that can be mapped
- reaperducer 8mo agothe difference between 0 and unit above 0 on iPhones is about 30% volume. I have found that when playing audio to a HomePod, pressing Volume Up on the phone increases the volume by 1. But if you immediately press Volume Down, it goes down by 0.5. So, with two button presses you can get the half-step increase you wanted in the first place. It's like adding "a little" to a volume change command with Siri. "Siri, turn the volume up a little" turns the volume up 0.5. "Siri, turn the volume up" turns the volume up one. "Siri, turn the volume up a lot" turns the volume up two. In macOS, there used to be a modifier key to have the volume change in half-steps, too, but I've forgotten what it is. I think the only place that Apple has done a good job with volume controls is the AirPods Max. But even there, I'd like more granularity at the low end.
- c4pt0r 8mo agoi know they will have alsamixer in this list.
- Dwedit 8mo agoIs there a list of these that are actually in real shipped software and not created as a joke?
- neya 8mo agoI like how towards the end they added the vanilla Apple mission control UI in there - which doesn't have any volume control at all just to prove their point. That really caught me off-guard and was funny af.
- dylan604 8mo agohow does it have no control? you just pull it up or down accordingly. i appreciate the joke that it's not a great design, but to say "doesn't have any volume control at all" is an odd thing to say.
- lostlogin 8mo agoWhat would be better? When I search the Android UI, it looks very similar, but horizontal.
- dylan604 8mo agoI was just saying it was funny that they just used the in real life used screen as their design of the worst thing they could come up with, especially as Apple touts itself as great at design. As others have said, if they made it a non-linear scale so that there is more room between the lower value and less as it approached the max settings. However, it is at least functional opposed to the person that I replied suggested it wasn't.
- terribleperson 8mo agoHow about one where the first click sets your volume to max, and then pops up a dialogue to subscribe to a newsletter or sign up for an account? I've never seen such an atrocity, but I could see one plausibly being developed.
- dylan604 8mo agoThe SaaS subscription one fulfilled the same sense for me. To be fair, Netflix' cheapest subscription option deliberately says that you will not be getting the best audio options including audio levels that are not the same between content. They clearly have the better audio for the higher tiers, so they are deliberately borking things.
- svelle 8mo agoThat would be bandcamp, where the free/preview player doesn't have a volume control but the library player does.
- lend000 8mo agoThe one that started shaking more and more as the volume got louder sent me. Sometimes you have to give credit where it's due, even when the result is unusable.
- user3939382 8mo agoThe worst is the “AI transformation journey” volume UI. You talk to an agent to describe the character of the volume level you want. It loads a volume control “skill” and adjusts it.
- maest 8mo agoThis "article" just rehashes the top submissions from the reddit thread and then adds some surface level musings about UX. It also blasts you with a full screen subscribe popup, ostensibly in case you want to see more rehashed content.
- Freak_NL 8mo agoThat wasn't part of the show? The popup (no idea what was on it, no one reads those of course) shows up and you think 'Ah. Yes, that would be very annoying if that happened while interacting with a volume slider.'
- iinnPP 8mo agoThe popup also scrolled down for me and I had to scroll back up to hit the X.
- flyinghamster 8mo agoSeriously, why not just link to the Reddit thread instead of this? It seems like every damn site has become a Torment Nexus.
- kibwen 8mo agoIn defense of this blogspam, the original posts were each individual submissions to /r/programmerhumor, so there's no easy way to link to a collection of them on reddit itself.
- extraduder_ire 8mo agoThat popup is typical of blogs hosted on Medium. I don't know if the author even has control over if it pops up or now.
- joe_the_user 8mo agoIt works fine with javascript blocked, thankfully.
- smoghat 8mo ago
- lzhgusapp 8mo agomacOS has its own share of UI quirks too. The volume slider is fine, but app management is surprisingly bad for a platform that prides itself on UX. There's still no native way to quit all apps at once, and Activity Monitor feels stuck in 2005. Small UI tools that just get one thing right tend to stick around.
- pasc1878 8mo agoMacOS requires there to be an App as First Responder - what app should be that if you quit all apps? The nearest that makes sense is Log Out.
- Traubenfuchs 8mo agoI feel like it‘s in bad taste to turn a reddit thread into a blog post with zero added value instead of just linking to the thread.
- noisy_boy 8mo agoI think the one with 100 checkboxes with each for a given volume gives direct access to the level of volume you want. Mad, but usable.
- chuckadams 8mo agoIt should make you manually check and uncheck every checkbox between 0 and the target volume. Miss one and it silently dismisses the dialog without changing the volume.
- wiether 8mo agoToo bad the article is from 2017 because it's missing a major one: Sonos iOS app.
- nubg 8mo agoI don't get the iOS one?
- zelphirkalt 8mo agoWhen I read the heading, I thought: "This must surely be about Windows volume control." But I didn't take into account, that this is a UX design website, so it mostly deals with UX and not with what happens after setting a specific numeric value for the volume.
- rixed 8mo agoI thought that would be about alsamixer.
- moffkalast 8mo agoHaha, and it's Alsa's best feature by far.
- dev1ycan 8mo agoI have my sennheiser bluetooth headphones connected to windows 11, for whatever reason, 90% of the time, I move the slider on Windows 11 and it ignores completely the sound on my headphones, just great working products. I have to use the physical buttons on my headphones like a caveman
- afcool83 8mo agoI still contend that the worst volume control UX is asking your teenager to turn it down…
- tiltowait 8mo agoAs I scrolled down, one of the animations started and brought up a subscription modal. "Okay, that one would be enraging," I thought, delighted, as I waited for the animation to loop. It didn't. It was the site's real subscription modal. I feel like there's a lesson in there.
- driftnode 8mo agoThe circular drag ones are genuinely worse than most of the joke submissions. At least the joke ones fail immediately. The knob UI works just well enough that you keep trying for 30 seconds before giving up.
- neoCrimeLabs 8mo agoOne of the worst volume controls I have run across is when the UI tries to simulate a physical knob. More often than not I see this on VST Plugins and I have yet to find one that I actually like - they are all equally terrible. They appear to fall into 3 buckets: 1) Worst: Direction of the cursor has move in a circular pattern as if dragging a physical knob with a cursor. 2) Annoying, but least common: You have to move the cursor horizontally to move the knob 3) Most common, but still annoying: You have to move the cursor vertically to move the knob.
- joe_the_user 8mo agoYeah, your 1 option is actually worse than some of parody submissions. What makes it truly horrific is that it works just enough to get you to put your thumb into muscle spasms trying to do it.
- the_biot 8mo agoCommon in desktop software for controlling measurement gear like oscilloscopes. Those have actual knobs on the equipment, so the software does the same thing and it's the worst thing ever.
- wishfish 8mo agoI have a mechanical keyboard with a metal roller for controlling volume. On my Mac, it works haphazardly. Rapidly rolling it downwards should mute almost immediately. But around 30-40% of the time, it'll just set it to a low volume instead. At least I work from home so this isn't an annoyance to anyone but myself. But it is annoying. Oh well. From the UI's shown, I kinda like the 0-100 radio buttons. Yes, it's incredibly ugly. But I like the immediate precision of it.
- sota_pop 8mo agoSingle pushbutton: roll to set volume to random number. > clean, concise, single button
- sota_pop 8mo agoOr actually good (for smartphones…): radial drag so my thumb can slide ergonomically. Have the entire phone UI/UX have a left/right hand setting.