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In 2017, a design roundup described Redditors competing to invent the worst possible volume slider—not a better audio control, but the most confusing, inconvenient, or overengineered one. The joke worked because the proposed interfaces were absurd while still looking just plausible enough to ship.
The available source confirms the headline, premise, and a June 19, 2017 publication date, while attributing the item to The Verge. It does not reliably establish a formal contest, a specific subreddit, official rules, or a complete list of entries, so this is best understood as a retrospective on a design-humor thread or collection of posts—not a documented competition with winners and prizes.
Why volume sliders are perfect targets for bad UI jokes
A volume slider is one of the most familiar interface objects. People expect a visible track, a movable thumb, a continuous range from quiet to loud, immediate audio feedback, and a clear indication of the current level. Those expectations make small violations instantly funny.
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A slider becomes “asinine” when it remains recognizable but breaks one or more of those conventions: it moves in the wrong direction, hides its value, uses a tiny touch target, changes the wrong audio channel, disappears while being used, or forces several steps for a task that should take one.
The original design-blog item framed the premise as a contest in intentionally bad UI and emphasized the central gag: almost any absurd control can look legitimate if it borrows enough familiar interface language. The June 2017 roundup is the clearest available source for that context.
Anatomy of an asinine slider
Familiar appearance, hostile behavior
The funniest mockups would not look like nonsense. They would use a speaker icon, a polished pill-shaped track, minimalist spacing, or the placement associated with a phone or media player. The absurdity would emerge only when someone tried to use the control.
That contrast matters. A completely alien control is merely unusable. A polished control that appears obvious but behaves strangely creates a more recognizable—and more accurate—kind of design satire.
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Spatially hostile controls
A slider can be bad because it is difficult to reach: placed in a distant corner, squeezed into a narrow target, layered over another control, or oriented vertically when users expect a horizontal adjustment. Touchscreen interfaces make this especially consequential because they lack the tactile location and resistance of a physical knob.
Semantically misleading controls
The control may resemble brightness, playback progress, temperature, or mute rather than volume. Its filled region may not clearly identify the current level, or a muted state may look identical to minimum volume. Multiple controls for media, calls, alarms, notifications, balance, or output devices can create the same confusion when labels and hierarchy are missing.
Interaction-hostile controls
Some designs technically respond but make the pointer or finger do the wrong thing. Dragging may begin only after an unnecessary click; tapping may jump the level unexpectedly; or the overlay may vanish before the user reaches it. A later Reddit discussion about a disappearing media-player volume control illustrates how quickly a small interaction flaw becomes a practical failure.
Overengineered controls
A simple adjustment can be buried in a menu, require calibration, or use a novel gesture without teaching it. Such a design may be technically functional while imposing enough friction that users wonder why a button or ordinary slider was not sufficient. That is often the most believable form of bad design.
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The design principles underneath the joke
The mockups can be judged with ordinary usability criteria:
- Discoverability: Can a first-time user find the control?
- Affordance: Does it look interactive?
- Mapping: Does movement clearly correspond to louder or quieter sound?
- Precision: Can a user select the desired level reliably?
- Feedback: Does the interface show what changed?
- Consistency: Does it behave like other sliders in the same system?
- Error recovery: Can an accidental mute or volume spike be corrected quickly?
- Accessibility: Is it usable with touch, keyboard, screen reader, and alternate input?
- Context: Does it avoid covering important content?
- Proportionality: Is the interaction appropriate for such a simple task?
The distinction between appearance and behavior is crucial. An ugly slider can work perfectly well, while a beautiful minimalist control can hide its range, provide no numerical feedback, or make precise adjustment a matter of trial and error. Those concerns recur in Android UI discussions, where users have criticized unclear range indication and missing numeric feedback.
Why volume exposes bad design so quickly
Volume adjustment is frequent, time-sensitive, and conceptually simple. People often make the change while watching a video, driving, presenting, listening in a shared space, or trying not to disturb someone. The interface therefore has little tolerance for ambiguity.
Errors are also immediately noticeable. A control that jumps to maximum volume, mutes when the user intended to lower it, or changes the wrong output channel is not merely inconvenient. It produces an instant and sometimes startling consequence.
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At the same time, volume is not always a single value. Devices may expose media, call, alarm, notification, balance, and output-device levels. A design that presents all of them without clear labels is confusing; a design that hides too much may be clean but imprecise. Good UI makes that complexity legible without turning a one-second adjustment into a configuration task.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.The real-world versions are less funny
The Reddit joke exaggerates problems that appear in ordinary products. In a OnePlus discussion, users disagreed about an on-screen audio control: some considered it redundant or awkward because physical volume buttons already existed, while others found it useful when hardware buttons were inconvenient or inaccessible. The disagreement shows why unconventional controls should not be judged in isolation.
Automotive interfaces create a similar trade-off. A discussion of touchscreen vehicle controls criticized designs that cover navigation content or replace physical knobs with screen interactions. Touchscreens offer flexibility and contextual controls, but physical controls are often faster to locate without looking and easier to operate by feel.
These later discussions are parallel examples, not evidence that they belonged to the original 2017 Reddit event. They do, however, show why the premise remains recognizable: the worst interfaces are often not impossible fantasies, but exaggerated versions of real product decisions.
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Would an unconventional slider actually be bad?
Not automatically. A vertical control may be appropriate in a narrow layout. An on-screen slider may help someone whose hardware buttons are inaccessible. A gesture may save space for experienced users. Minimal visual treatment may be reasonable when a system provides other clear feedback.
The better question is whether the design preserves the user’s ability to discover, operate, understand, and recover from the control. A novel interaction can succeed when it is taught, consistent, accessible, and supported by clear feedback. It fails when novelty is mistaken for clarity.
The lasting lesson of the 2017 joke
The most effective “asinine” sliders are not random. They preserve enough conventional visual language to earn trust, then violate expectations at the moment of use. That is why they work as comedy and as design criticism.
The 2017 Reddit phenomenon was therefore less about inventing impossible interfaces than about recognizing familiar failures: controls that look obvious but behave strangely, polished surfaces that hide poor interaction, unnecessary duplication, disappearing overlays, and minimalism that removes useful information. A volume slider is a tiny interface, but it is also a compact test of whether a product understands its users.
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