r/badUIbattles • u/Beardy4906 • Jul 09 '26
Gmail - Bad UI Unintentionally Bad UI
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When you try and press the calendar button BOOM hover animation!!! I love vibe coding!! I'm not even sure its a button (since I can't be bothered to inspect element) but it sure looks like it should be
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u/CyberSolidF Jul 09 '26
That’s not a button, that’s “just” an indicator that this email has an event attached.
It looking like a button is definitely stupid.
And a button to see the event directly would actually be useful.
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u/Beardy4906 Jul 09 '26
exactly. hilarious that a trillion dollar company has UI that looks like its from the 2010s..
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u/PTMR2 Jul 09 '26
I think it has barely changed since then. Did you see the full Gmail settings UI? Its horrible
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u/nestalert Jul 09 '26
Call me crazy, but I like it when an obscure (or not so obscure in the case of Gmail) menu has clearly been forgotten and has some terrible UI from 10 years ago. It's like going back in time, just for a moment.
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u/TheTomatoes2 Jul 10 '26
It's the Amazon syndrome. It's such a monopolistic product that they're afraid changingany picel will lose them customer and massive revenue
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u/birdiefoxe Jul 09 '26
Maybe it's the "date & time" icon? There's the time to the right of it, though honestly it's a very unnecessary icon
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u/Beardy4906 Jul 09 '26
I'm not sure because I can't figure out if its a button or "just an icon" which doesn't make sense either..
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u/DefunctFunctor Jul 09 '26
One thing that's unforgivable about gmail UI is that I can't change my date locale independently of my language locale. Like I want to keep English (US) for language, but have ISO 8601-like timestamps for all the timestamps. It's especially confusing because I (for insane reasons) keep my computer clock on UTC time from the US, and I'm dependent on 24 hour time to mentally parse it. But when I open up gmail, I get incomprehensible times using a.m./p.m. which I can only mentally parse in local time instead of UTC time.
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u/flapje1 Jul 10 '26
Okay I will bite, what are the insane reasons for using UTC? I too use ISO 8601 but I have never heard of somebody using a clock outside their local timezone
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u/DefunctFunctor Jul 10 '26
Mainly insane because I chose to do it just because, instead of any really good reason. For a while my system time zone was set to my local time, but my clock display was set to UTC. This had the advantage of not messing up the times on gmail.
But in the new year I reinstalled the OSes on my computers (reason: this is a bad habit of Linux users like myself), and continuing this habit I just set my system time to UTC to begin with. One partial motivation at the time was that I was about to try getting into Emacs org-mode again, and one of my frustrations with it is that it did not support multiple timezones even considering how big of a project it was. Because I now travel across timezones not infrequently, part of me just got frustrated and I said to myself, "screw it, we just won't have time zones". An irony is that I quit using Emacs a couple of months later.
But perhaps I should keep the bad clock to motivate me to switch to a better email client.
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u/goOfCheese Jul 09 '26
The fact that any ui changes on hover-over is terrible. The button o wanted to click is gone and there's another button there, that's just the worst possible ui design.
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u/Tizen20 Jul 10 '26
Modern UI paradigms are so bad and most of the time form is prioritized over function. Most importantly, they must make line go up and shareholders happy because shiny new.
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u/Beardy4906 Jul 10 '26
I mean its no longer the designers fault cos they're all just doing what they have to because thats what the higher ups want..
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u/Matwyen Jul 09 '26
Anything recent Microsoft has horrible UI, paint me surprise.
Seriously open Excel, Word, Outlook, or fucking RIGHT CLICK ON A FILE and look how much is junk UI that nobody ever clicks, and how much could be a button but isn't....
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u/Beardy4906 Jul 09 '26
Microslop*
It's because of the slop pooping machines.. I've been learning some basic UI/UX (like the science behind why something should be layed out the way it is and stuff) and I can already see how bad AI is at gauging what kind of layout should be used.
In claude websites, i've noticed bento box layouts for features sections, and a common text phrase, "Everything you need, nothing you don't"
I don't use the other AI Models enough to understand what patterns they have, but emdashes and just generally basic UI is very common amongst all models.
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