alt Hacker News… railing against greyed-out items is… interesting. One of my biggest peeves with a lot of modern software is the trend of "gaslight the user about the existence of functionality".
A lot of software (Github, Okta, etc. etc.) will just delete portions of their UI, usually because you don't have permission to access it, or even just some of it. So, if you google "how do I do X?" the AI — assuming it gets it right at all — will tell you to click on UI that doesn't exist. Even if you then scroll to the organic docs, those will also have you click UI that does not exist.
A greyed-out item gives you the affordance of knowing that that feature / path exists, even if it's not available right here, right now. Truly good UI would also give me an affordance of knowing why (e.g., a tooltip saying "to access blah, you need permission blah"), but that's just asking for the moon, I know.
But when you're staring at docs referencing a non-existence menu item: is it because I lack a permission? What permission? Or perhaps the docs are just out of date? — you don't know!
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Modern software UX is gaslight central. I think people are scared that if users read something they'll get confused or frustrated, so they just default to... nothing? Even error messages are dying. Half the time shit doesn't work and there's no indication. Maybe a loading spinner just disappears and that's supposed to be your clue to try again.
Thanks for putting this into words better then I would. I was screaming discoverablity at my screen.
Agreed. Unless it's a really frequently used UI, my company defaults to showing all options to all users regardless of permissions. It's better to see "Manage users" in the settings menu which takes you to a page explaining that you don't have permission as opposed to seeing nothing and wondering why it's not there even though the help article says it should be there.
No, putting an explanation on the help article that this feature is only available to admins doesn't work. No one reads anything.