I would like to see more support in UI/UX for people who are not neurotypical. Or, customizable interfaces to support people with disabilities. When you build for the common denominator, these people get left out.
When you build for the common denominator, a huge number of people are left out, including those with disabilities.
> customizable interfaces to support people with disabilities.
Customizable interfaces are the only real solution -- not just for people with disabilities, but for everybody.
There are a number of websites and applications that I stopped using because of UX choices I am allergic to. If they were configurable, it might have been possible for me to mitigate the worst parts.
Further, UX/UI decisions have been getting worse over time, making configurability even more important as time goes on.
> Which apps have you stopped using because the UX choices.
The biggest example for me is Firefox. FF's UX has always been horrible, but until the revamp, it was always possible to configure it to be OK without a great deal of effort. After the revamp, the UX is still horrible (although in different ways), but the ability to configure the bad parts away has been seriously reduced.
> And what are those things that made you stop using those sites?
Overreliance on Javascript, hidden functionality, and (related) the lack of discoverability top my list of peeves. Also, with websites, being too aggressive with enforcing a particular layout, color scheme, fonts, etc.
I've used it for years. It can browse sites, manage tabs and so on. Even synchronization between devices works fine. There are some issues but I wouldn't call it horrible. Could you elaborate more?
It depends on how you mean. If you're a web dev, and/or willing to mess with CSS, then perhaps it's more configurable? But there is significant friction in doing so, even if you do know how to work at that level. In terms of what normal users can realistically do, the browser is much less configurable.
Also, that pretty much only affects the look, it doesn't affect how the browser behaves.
One little thing I think makes a huge difference is just using the user agent a bit more.
You can write styles at only apply in high-contrast or reduced-motion mode.
Use relative text sizes so you the user agent can use a value for the root font size that isn’t 16px.
Use buttons for buttons, links for links, and <dialog> for dialogs etc.
I’ve thought about just making more web apps that have nearly no styling, maybe just some layout, but otherwise relying on the user agent styles. That’s a ton of user customizability for FREE! And honestly, it usually doesn’t look that bad.
One I really appreciate is having sane tab indexes and the ability to trigger things like buttons and drop-downs using the keyboard. A slick select box loses a lot of points for me if I can’t navigate and use it with just my keyboard.
We have made Dark mode an expected feature on UI's, hopefully with time we will get an Expert mode that allows customizable interfaces (anyone remember Foobar2000 or GMusicBrowser?). Home Assistant is a good example of such UI.
