Overdone Overlays

October 2010

There is a trend toward slimming down UIs by moving application widgets directly onto the user’s content. Apple calls QuickTime Player X “a completely new QuickTime Player application with a clean, uncluttered design.” Google Chrome uses an overlay for the status bar instead of reserving the bottom edge of the window.

This is a bad idea. Please stop.

Putting big boxes all over the video I’m watching makes the application more cluttered, not less. If you have a fixed element in the bottom left corner of a web page, Chrome will obscure it whenever it thinks the page is loading. Hiding or rearranging controls based on mouse movement is extremely distracting.

Overlays are only acceptable (and even then, usually not the best solution) in full screen mode. Either way, they shouldn’t randomly appear whenever I bump the mouse. Timers, thresholds, and animations don’t help, either.

Thank you.