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Comment by mrjin | Hacker News Reader

Google has gone rogue for a long time. But for UX, it's not necessarily dark pattern. IMO, there is a bad smell, started by Google, particularly Chrome if I remembered correctly, which tends to hide menus/actions by moving them under the burger/3 dots menu. Such behavior saves a little bit screen estates but adds one extra click to finish one particular operation and the bigger problem is that it hides the available options from the user and in turn makes applications less intuitive.

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Nope. The presence of the burger icon still affords discoverability even if a little less convenient. I can still see it and go "oh here is an icon and let me see what comes up if I tap it". In the GPay case, you see nothing and so assume there is nothing beyond what you're seeing. The thing is, a menu that you can tap to get at the QR code used to be there to help get to it. It was removed.

Same story in a lot of iOS design. There used to be a button where you could see all the options: now there’s some magic gesture for everything. Wtf, just show me a list, show me options I don’t yet know that I need or would know what to call, show me what you can do.

A simple example is how you can slide some list items to expose a delete button. Yet only some lists support that. So you’re apparently expected to slide every list to see if it supports that paradigm. Instead of doing something like normalizing a small arrow on list items that support such a thing. Everything is hidden.

Burger menus are great. You’d never be able to fit all those options on screen at once, nor would it make sense for rare actions. But the burger menu gives people a place to put actions on mobile UI where others, like Apple, would just remove them and gimp the mobile experience.

It’s why all of Apple’s first party applications are so bad, like the podcast and news app. There are like zero options. Just add and remove and consume.

A similar recent trend that really bugs me is apps on OSX that run in the background, with a presence in the toolbar at the top of the screen used to be closable with a single click on the icon, move the mouse to the last item in the menu, which always used to be "Quit".

Now it's hidden under layers of menus on purpose.

The worst experience I've encountered is Adobe Creative Cloud. They force you to open the app with the icon, then use the main menu of the app on the other side of the screen to choose "Quit Creative Cloud" to then be presented with the following choices: (Cancel) (Quit) (Hide) "Hide" is highlighted and "Quit" is the one you just asked for. Perviously that step would pop up a nag screen begging you not to quit the app, but that no longer happens.

They are obviously testing various ways to become "stickier". And with each iteration it gets more and more difficult to close. I just want my RAM back please!

That seems to be a very common pattern now - for some reason everyone wants to be in your menu bar and they making it increasingly difficult to close.

I won't call this particularly malicious .. but even Chrome is in this game - it asks to "hold cmd-Q" on macOS to quit chrome .. whereas every other app close when you type cmd-Q. My respect scales are tilting way away from Google and Microsoft is looking pretty good relatively.

This is configurable from the main app menu though. It’s nice not to lose all your tabs if you slip and hit Cmd-Q instead of Cmd-W

My least favorite google UX is in youtube. It's almost impossible to swipe backwards, and videos (ads) keep playing after back swiping multiple times. Even after swiping back to the home screen. It plays the ad over the home screen, and you have to click a tiny x to actually stop the ad.

Since they introduced AMP it is also so much harder to edit the address in the adress bar.

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