The worst volume control UI in the world
A playable gallery of terrible volume sliders
Hit play, then every slider below controls the volume of Tiësto & Black Eyed Peas — “Pump It Louder.”
Sometime in the late 2010s, a group of bored developers and designers opened a Reddit thread and dared each other to invent the worst volume control they could think of. Not a slightly clumsy fader. The kind of interface that would make you miss a song, a meeting, or your will to live.
That joke never really ended. It migrated into r/badUIbattles, where people still try to out-horrible one another with playable, deliberately unusable UI. This page is our own entry: thirteen original volume widgets, all terrible on purpose, all wired to the same track. Press play, then pick a fight with the control.
About wants, cans, needs, and shoulds
Everyone wants to invent a cleverer control. The culture of design keeps whispering that a pattern which has looked the same for decades is unfinished, and that a portfolio is a place to prove you can surprise people.
A lot of people can. These thirteen widgets are the evidence. A weekend, a browser, and a slightly unwell sense of humor are enough. The tools are sitting there, waiting for the next person who wants to replace a slider with a rocket, a roulette wheel, or a scream.
Almost no one needs to. The ordinary volume slider is dull because it works. People already know where to put their thumb. Familiarity is not a failure of imagination; it is the reason the song starts on time.
Then there is the should. Should you rebuild a control everyone already understands? That is a different question from whether you can, and a prototype cannot answer it. It asks what the product is for, who has to live with the result, and whether the new idea earns the time it steals. Sometimes the honest answer is no. On a page like this, the honest answer is: only if you are trying to make someone laugh — and then turn the sound down, if you can find the slider.
Inspired by Fabricio Teixeira’s uxdesign.cc article and r/badUIbattles; not affiliated.