Stop Hiding My Controls: Hidden Interface Controls Are Affecting Usability

I drive a Toyota that is nearly old enough to run for US Senator. Every control in the car is visible, clearly labeled and is distinct to the touch - at all times. The action isn't impeded by routine activity or maintenance (ex:battery change).

Because it can be trivially duplicated, this is minimally capable engineering. Yet automakers everywhere lack even this level of competence. By reasonable measure, they are poor at their job.

  Because it can be trivially duplicated

Only tangentially related, and a seemingly lost old-man battle: stop hiding my scrollbar.

Interesting article. Some points I didn't quite agree entirely with. There's a cost and practically limitation to some things (like a physical knob in a car for zooming in and out on a map - although that was probably just an example of intuitive use).

I just recently switched a toggle on a newly installed app that did the opposite of what it was labelled - I thought the label represented the current state, but it represented the state it would switch to if toggled. It became obvious once changed, but that seems the least helpful execution.

    The other day I was locked out of my car
    the key fob button wouldn't work

    Why didn't I just use my key to get in? 
    First, you need to know there is a hidden key inside the fob.
    Second, because there doesn't appear to be a keyhole on the car door,
    you also have to know that you need to disassemble a portion 
    of the car door handle to expose the keyhole.

Hiding critical car controls is hostile engineering. In this, it doesn't stand out much in the modern car experience.

I think the article overlooks that it is not really an accident that apps and operating systems are hiding all their user interface affordances. It's an antipattern to create lock in, and it tends to occur once a piece of software has reached what they consider saturation point in terms of growth where keeping existing users in is more important than attracting new ones. It so turns out that the vast majority of software we use is created by companies in exactly that position - Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta etc.

It might seem counter intuitive that hiding your interface stops your users leaving. But it does it because it changes your basis of assumptions about what a device is and your relationship with it. It's not something you "use", but something you "know". They want you to feel inherently linked to it at an intuitive level such that leaving their ecosystem is like losing a part of yourself. Once you've been through the experience of discovering "wow, you have to swipe up from a corner in a totally unpredictable way to do an essential task on a phone", and you build into your world of assumptions that this is how phones are, the thought of moving to a new type of phone and learning all that again is terrifying. It's no surprise at all that all the major software vendors are doing this.

We have a user interface design rule that keyboard shortcuts and context menus must only be "shortcuts" for commands that are discoverable via clear buttons or menus. That probably makes our apps old-fashioned.

I recall learning that the four corners of the screen are the most valuable screen real estate, because it's easy to move the mouse to those locations quickly without fine control. So it's user-hostile that for Windows 11 Microsoft moved the default "Start" menu location to the center. And I don't think they can ascribe it to being mobile-first. Maybe it's "touch-first", where mouse motion doesn't apply.

Very slightly unrelated, but this trend is one of the reasons I went Android after the iPhone removed the home button. I think it became meaningfully harder to explain interactions to older users in my family and just when they got the hang of "force touch" it also went away.

First thing I do on new Pixel phones is enable 3 button navigation, but lately that's also falling out of favor in UI terms, with apps assuming bottom navigation bar and not accounting for the larger spacing of 3 button nav and putting content or text behind it.

This is what happens when "designers" who are nothing more than artists take control of UI decisions. They want things to look "clean" at the expense of discoverability and forget that affordances make people learn.

Contrast this with something like an airplane cockpit, which while full of controls and assuming expert knowledge, still has them all labeled.

This is easily one of the most frustrating parts of the user experience on Discord. So many buttons are hidden until you mouse over them, which absolutely drives me UP A WALL. I really hope this trend discontinues.

I'm sorry, this website doesn't have a mobile interface, are you seriously complaining about accessibility when you don't support majority of the web?

My car’s audio system seems to go out of its way to bury sound settings (bass, treble, balance, etc.) in as many nested menus as possible. And when you do finally find the settings, they are greyed out. I had to actually watch a youtube video to figure out that they are configured at the individual source level. Super confusing and unintuitive, and especially egregious considering that this is in a vehicle you are DRIVING - confusion, distraction, and frustration are the last things you want drivers to experience.

While I appreciate the ACM having an article on this, their own site is a poor example of good UX.

And some of their conferences are just downright awful UI

https://s2025.siggraph.org/

I'm on the edge of my seat waiting to see how skeuomorphic icons will solve this and every other problem.

Fig.1 doesn't look like a drop-down menu - is the term really used for that style?

I sort of disagree with this: once I’ve internalized the gestures, I really appreciate the lack of UI for them. It’s like vim and emacs: the sparse ui creates a steeper learning curve but becomes a feature once you’ve learned the tool

Something which drives me mad is how modern operating systems (both desktop and mobile) keep hiding file system paths. There used to be a setting on OSX which let you show the address bar in Finder (though it wasn't default) but nowadays it seems to be impossible (unless you get some third-party extension) and I have to resort to using the terminal. It's bonkers.

It makes it impossible to locate files later when I need to move or transfer them.

    defaults write com.apple.Finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool true

> If you want to lock the door, then the hidden control problem becomes evident... to lock the door, I must know that the hidden control to lock is the pound key. To make matters worse, it's not a simple press of the pound key. It's a press of the pound key for a full five seconds in order to activate the lock sequence. The combination of the long temporal window and the hidden control makes locking the door nearly impossible, unless you are well acquainted with the system and its operation.

Isn't that kind of the point? You don't want people accidentally locking the door, but if it's your door, it's easy enough to remember how to do it.

Alan Dye in shambles.