we started using Full Story at work. It tracks clicks on non clickable items. It is staggering that this is even a problem. Having to explain to people that links and buttons and radio boxes and checkboxes should look uniform has gone the way of the dodo and now we must instead have people clicking random items to hope something happens.

> It tracks clicks on non clickable items

This rattled my brain, that this is a feature now, says volumes about the quality decline in UI. I am a developer, and mainly use tools on the command line, or with TUIs.

But whenever I use android apps and websites, I constantly find myself longclicking or rightclicking things, hoping for stuff to happen, that just doesnt.

It is interesting to contemplate how much of this problem is artificially induced by executives in suits screaming at people to "innovate".

Strangely enough, we don't seem to mess around with steering wheels in cars.

If you really want to go against the grain, may I suggest radial menus, which allow the user to muscle-memory through menu selections:

https://bindpose.com/custom-marking-menu-maya-python/

Visually nice but it's almost always going to overlap the thing you've right clicked. Under any circumstance I still want to see the thing I've right clicked.

Interesting concept, but I would add keyboard shortcuts (underlined items) to the menu to make it more of a reminder than be forced to use the mouse all the time.

That was originally part of the IBM Common User Access style guide 80/90s, back when user interfaces for software valued function over form.

https://ia800200.us.archive.org/0/items/ibmsj2703E/ibmsj2703...

the figure on page 2 shows exactly what you are describing.

This and many variants of the idea has been explored in games a lot - in particular in point and click adventures and isometric (or at least top-down view) RPGs. Probably also in strategy games and anything else that has both a cursor and context-specific actions.

Fly-Pie, a radial menu for GNOME: https://github.com/Schneegans/Fly-Pie

Just go full-audacity and drown people in drop down menus lol at least I know what to click!

Audacity is a piece that made me learn its hotkeys. Once you do that, it’s pretty nice actually.

It works, I guess. But after I've worked with a proper DAW (Reaper in my case), Audacity felt like a toy

A toy with the best noise cancellation tool of any audio program out there though.