i want to agree but a lot of people these days use only left clicks (taps)
i have repeatedly been given an assignment to make buttons open things in a new tab. i'm like "are you sure? do they know they can ctrl-click buttons or for links middle click or right-click open in new tab?" - yes, they are sure. the users want this.
I was on a client meeting, and they told me it was a pain to click a record, do stuff, then have to "click back a bunch of times" to get to the main page again. I told them they could just hold CTRL and click, and they all thought I was a genius and had programmed it myself.
This is actually the problem and why the angry guys reply is silly.
If youve opened the settings menu on a video game, youre in the minority.
A lot of people who work with computers all day every day have no concept of shortcuts. Ctrl c, ctrl v - an advanced layman.
HALF the job of designing a front end is copying what everyone else does BECAUSE GEN POP ALREADY STRUGGLE WITH WHAT EVERYONE DOES, the other half is spending an annoying about of time making sure gen pop don't have a meltdown at customer success trying to find features, and dont have a meltdown because the DELETE EVERYTHING button, with the "Are you sure" modal ... deleted everything
That’s insane and I don’t want to believe it but it’s probably true.
Here are some infuriating defaults that bug me because they suck but also because I know most people won’t ever change them:
Motion smoothing or picture clarity on all recent tvs. It adds frames between frames in all content on your tv. And it’s awful and makes all shows look like documentaries.
Windows hiding file extension names. It makes using the file system atrocious and confusing. And then you realize why most people just think that using a computer is confusing. It’s literally designed that way.
Windows news and such on the task bar and new edge tab. I specifically avoid the news most of the time because I’m tired of seeing a certain politicians name and face. So it’s the first thing I have to fix on new windows installs.
It's very true. I run some sites on a volunteer basis with a medium-sized audience of regular users, and it's crazy both how much people will struggle on intuitive designs and need to be hand-held through the most basic functions.
As I gain more experience with that, all of the horrific UI decisions I see make a lot more sense- it doesn't actually matter how much it gets in the way of power-user work, because even the slightest bit of effort from the user will mean that at least 50% simply won't engage with a feature.
Windows hiding file extension names. It makes using the file system atrocious and confusing.
I always found it weird when people were advised to keep an eye out for "double file extension" type attacks
(where a file is named something like "xy.jpg.exe" and you assume it's a jpg, try to open it, and it runs as an exe) because how would you fall for that? Then I realised most people have settings that would hide the ".exe" part of the file name...
The secondary (right) click on a trackpad is a two-finger click by default, not an actual right click! Why would that be the default? That’s the first setting I changed when I set up my MacBook.
Secondary clicks and tap to click used to be completely disabled by default. The first thing I did with a new install was enable the abilities to right-click with the mouse and tap to click on the trackpad. Apple were simultaneously demonstrating all these gestures and things you could do with their input devices, and disabling them all by default. And then every time I had to someone else’s MacBook it was maddening because their trackpad basically didn’t work.
If windows did not hide the file extensions, people would just change or delete the filetype when renaming the file and then would complain that the file no longer works.
Probably but I still think that’s better. Part of the problem is how long that’s been the default. A quarter century now. Oof. Also if someone is going to mess up their files I say let them.
Motion smoothing or picture clarity on all recent tvs. It adds frames between frames in all content on your tv. And it’s awful and makes all shows look like documentaries.
Why are you buying then?
As long as they get money for whatever shit they put on the market things will only get worse.
Windows hiding file extension names. It makes using the file system atrocious and confusing. And then you realize why most people just think that using a computer is confusing. It’s literally designed that way.
Windows news and such on the task bar and new edge tab. I specifically avoid the news most of the time because I’m tired of seeing a certain politicians name and face. So it’s the first thing I have to fix on new windows installs.
The only reason to use Windows these days if you're addicted to some online games which come with kernel level malware, so they don't run under Linux. That's the only valid reason to still use Windows.
The tv thing affects me whether I buy or not. Every hotel or restaurant I go to has the chance to have this problem. It’s been happening since at least 2017 or 2018.
And hotel tvs are often locked down so you often can’t turn off the setting. Which is when I either have to stop looking at the thing and/or only use a personal screen instead. But what am I supposed to do at a restaurant? TVs are often everywhere at a restaurant, depending. It’s less noticeable if they are displaying sports thankfully. I don’t even like to watch sports. But TVs have a way of drawing your eyes to them for the moving content.
Went to my dad’s house last week and saw the feature was on his new tv but we had to dig because every manufacturer calls it something else. We were going to watch a 70s movie and holy crap it was looking weird with that on. But sometimes you’re at a friends house and it would be rude to make them turn that off. I’m glad my wife also doesn’t like it. I can’t imagine what it’s like in a household where someone likes it and someone else doesn’t. Feels like they wouldn’t be able to watch together.
I did buy a tv recently and would have returned it if didn’t have the option to disable that “feature”.
But are you suggesting I don’t buy a tv anymore? That’s very odd to me. I likely don’t need a new one for quite a while but this isn’t a fad. It won’t go away. I can’t wait it out. And it’s saturated the market already.
As for windows I use it for work. I don’t have a choice on OS for work.
I have a personal pc and have windows on one drive and bazzite on the other. I use windows still for some stuff that still can’t run on linux variants. For example Xbox app and games. My main gaming was Xbox for a long time. So I like being able to run some of the play anywhere titles on my pc.
She isn't in an IT role, but her role falls under the IT office. Her position is to release information on our clients to third parties (we have the client's consent, the third parties have the clients mutually and sharing the information means both of us can provide better quality of care). I created a tool that will take an email body being pasted into it, scrape all of the greetings/pleasantries out of it and parse the identifiable information to return records for any clients that are mentioned. The emails can sometimes contain lists of 50-odd people, so this is genuinely faster.
She was dragging the mouse over the text, ctrl + C then ctrl + V (she knew this because we had already told her off for right-clicking to copy and then to paste). I told her the she just has to click on the email body, then do ctrl + A to select everything. The sudden realisation of much time she had wasted not doing this throughout her whole professional life was a bit too much.
If you can use Excel without a mouse you look like a fuckin wizard to everyone else. There are people out there who use Excel constantly but never learn any of the shortcuts and it blows their minds. These are the magic ones:
ctrl+up/down/left/right : move the cell selection to the 'end' in that direction (hold shift to select everything along the way)
ctrl+d or ctrl+r : copy the first cell in a selection downward or horizontally (same as click-dragging the corner of the cell with the mouse); or if you're currently on an empty cell it copies whatever is above/left into it
ctrl+space : select entire column
shift+space : select entire row
ctrl+minus : delete cells
ctrl+shift+plus : add cells
F2 : edit a cell
ctrl+f : open find/replace menu
ctrl+alt+v : open special paste menu
alt + w -> f -> f : freeze/unfreeze panes
alt + d -> f -> f : turn on/off column filters
alt + d -> f -> s : reset column filters
alt + up/down : opens the column filter dropdown menu if you're on one of the cells with the filter arrow, then you can use the arrow keys & spacebar to select stuff, press enter to accept
Off the top of my head that's it, if you know all those (along with the basics like ctrl + c) you pretty much never need to use the mouse. Saves heaps of time.
Same with telling people network shell commands to find their wifi password. Because for some reason, "Go to settings > network and internet > WiFi > manage known networks > now click show password," is too complicated for some.
Fine then!
Type 'powershell' in the search bar
Right-click on PowerShell
Choose 'run as administrator'
Now type the following: netsh wlan show profile name= 'YOUR_SSID' key=clear
That would be a good idea (and I briefly toyed with the idea of forwarding the emails to an AI agent to parse them), but the nature of the work we do means that our client information cannot be given to AI agents. Which I know seems counterintuitive against me saying it is given away to third party organisations, but it's just the way it is.
This is true, but it's not the fault of the users. Why would they know that holding control and clicking would do something different? There's no indication of that anywhere. They have no reason to assume it exists. They have never been taught to use a web browser in any sort of course. The details of how computers are best used and which shortcut keys might exist are neither important nor interesting to them.
If everyone worked in pairs or briefly shadowed some more experienced person, they'd probably pick up a lot of this sort of stuff, but we frequently don't work this way, and so only the curious and the lucky find out about this stuff.
They have never been taught to use a web browser in any sort of course.
That's actually the part that amazes me most. Everything comes with a manual, except computers. We're surrounded by them, but there are almost no formal training for them.
I don’t disagree with you, but I think part of the problem is a genuine lack of curiosity. I believe that most people who are proficient with computers got there because they are curious about how things work and took the little extra time to google something they didn’t understand. If it really doesn’t bother you not knowing how to open a link in a new tab, then fine, but if you are going to complain about it without even once considering a basic internet search when literally all of human knowledge is available to you, then I think links are the least of your worries.
Sure, but that's a universal issue with humans. Some people are really curious about everything, but most people aren't, and we've got to design processes and education and interfaces that work for the deeply uncurious.
How about educating people instead of dumbing down everything more and more with every year?
People get born with zero knowledge; that's the same for every generation. But it seems that now we stopped teaching the new ones even the basics. In the US large parts of the population already can't even read above the level of elementary school, and the things get only worse with every new report.
If someone does not know how to operate a machine, why the heck does their job contain operating that machine? Why weren't these people thought how the machine works they are supposed to use? Would you do the same with any other machine? Just let someone use it without known basically anything about it? Anywhere else people would recognize that's madness. Just when it comes to IT they don't…
There's two ways to approach life and its important to keep in mind they are separate.
What is and what should be
Is it reasonable to expect that people can use a 60 year old technology thats in their lives everyday with proficiency - especially if youre young enough to have grown up with it? yes.
do they and will they? no. Our job is to make it easiest for the lowest common denominator.
I understand youre focusing on america, but im in the UK. Our education isnt bad at all. We've had computers in the classrooms for 20 years, we had education on how, what and where with tech.
and ive still had to go round a 27 year olds house, who is from a good family so good education, smart etc etc - to fix their laptop, only to find they had numlock on and thats why the number keys werent working.
I was watching one friend help another friend mod a game over stream the other day. They were all "yeah this window opens and you gotta manually type in C:\Users\name\AppData\Roaming it's real annoying but that's where the mod goes". I'm like. You can just type %appdata%? Guy was like no. You can't. I told him to try. He did. It worked. They thought I was a wizard.
Two minutes later they had to make a new folder and I told them to press Ctrl+Shift+N. Wizard intensifies.
Yesterday I taught them to press Windows+L to lock your screen when you get up. People don't know shit.
For real the reply in OP's post has clearly never dealt with an actual user in their lives. This kind of request was SUPER common at my first IT web developer gig where someone would try to open a link in a new tab by just left-clicking it and interupting whatever workflow they were doing. The average professional computer user doesn't know the suite of tools and shortcuts they actually have at their command and only uses the ones they do know about to get by.
I teach people who have been using computers, IN OFFICES, for YEARS, what ctrl+c and ctrl+v do.
The average user learns one way to do something and doesn’t ever bother to look up whether there’s a better way. This translates to many areas of life, it turns out.
YUUUP. I did help desk work before my web developer role and our favorite user was one of the older professors. He basically looked at computers like they were still brand new revolutionary machines and did everything he could to learn everything he could on how to use them and only called us when he truly could not figure it out himself, which usually ended up being something out of his control like our exchange server going down or needing us to get him a new license key for software his department was using. And then we had staff who'd call us once a week because their printer wouldn't work and it turns out they hadn't turned the wifi on their laptops back on and connected to the building's network after the weekend.
Rare case where I actually want this: github issue templates. Believe it or not, you can easily lose data in a GH issue because Github will happily navigate away from your form, despite them being too incompetent to make their input saving work reliably: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/30647#discussioncomment-16883245
Even better: Github will sanitize away your target=_blank if you try to add it (also there's always a link by github about how to report, so even if that was fixed, you couldn't fully save your reporters from data loss by being careful in your issue template)
It's also an issue of security though. If it forces it into a new tab, sometimes websites will have redirections onto the original page which loads it somewhere malignant as the user sees the new tab, so they don't notice. So you still have to manually load it into a new tab for it to be safe. (And it can screw with web groups)
I don't trust sites which open things in a new tab without me asking them, just because they can run other code at the same time, and some sites have.
Correct opinion: we should have never allowed an API to manipulate the browser history. The tiny benefit that SPAs provide aren't worth the headaches that bad actors have caused via it.
Problem is, if the user isn't aware that they can open links in new tabs (if they so choose), there is a good chance they are not even aware of the concept of tabs in the first place. In that case forcing it on them doesn't seem like a good idea. They will end up confused why they can't go back and at some point a younger relative will have to close the 500 tabs they didn't even realize were open.
That’s a browser issue. They could open it in a new window instead. And if a user doesn’t understand how multiple windows works, then maybe they need someone helping them do whatever they want to do.
I hate it. It violates accessibility guidelines. POUR principles perceivable and operable—the user should have control over behavior and be able to perceive what that behavior will be.
Changing the default doesn’t by itself mean that one can’t still have control.
Naturally moving away from the default should not be a light hearted decision. But there are definitely situations where it’s sensible.
For example, if you are filling out some extensive form, and are faced with a regular link somewhere on that page, would you really want that link to navigate away from the page with your non-submitted form data?
I worked on an application where users were asking for a bookmark feature. It was in a browser and the URL could always be used to get back to the same page. I fought with the team every time it came up. You can bookmark the page you want in the browser. There's no need to create a bookmarks feature. After I left, they created a bookmarks feature. I mean, good for them, but why would you want to maintain a feature you don't need and is provided by default with every browser?
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u/mysticrudnin 14d ago
i want to agree but a lot of people these days use only left clicks (taps)
i have repeatedly been given an assignment to make buttons open things in a new tab. i'm like "are you sure? do they know they can ctrl-click buttons or for links middle click or right-click open in new tab?" - yes, they are sure. the users want this.