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We use too many damn modals (2018)

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Re: We use too many damn modals (2018)

#91

Post by tobr »

lucasmullens wrote: post #56
grumple wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more important question: do the people paying you care if it’s good design? Because the people who have paid me thus far in my career have not cared.

Design is one of those things people often don't consciously notice, but affects their overall impression of a product. I think there's a pretty universal consensus that a good design matters.

A lot of people don’t understand design as something that goes beyond the surface layer, though. They see that someone picked a pleasing color palette and layout, but maybe they don’t imagine that a designer would come and tell them to stop using modals.

Re: We use too many damn modals (2018)

#92

Post by gindely »

tobr wrote: post #90
grumple wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more important question: do the people paying you care if it’s good design? Because the people who have paid me thus far in my career have not cared.

This is a good point, and often the reality - it’s unfortunate that it is being downvoted. But it’s a defeatist stance. It’s a central part of the designer’s job to contend that human factors are important, and explain what the effects of shortcuts and poor user experience are on the value of the product and the well-being of its users. If you’re lucky your client hired you because they, too, care and believe design…

Well yeah, but if the person who is in charge of the modal is the implementer, not the designer, then they may not have the expertise to design a good ui.

And many designers are artists ("designers") not ux engineers, so their main goal is to make something that shows their artistic skill - they're going to be trained in design packages, not designing a good ui.

(I mean, when was the last time you saw a clickable button on a modern user interface? nowadays it's just "guess what this shade of grey means")

Re: We use too many damn modals (2018)

#93

Post by gindely »

winrid wrote: post #80

I hate modals - I'll never add them to products I build. Edit: To provide a little more substance here - for example in one product of mine that actually has customers - confirmation is done via inline elements that slide into the page. So you want delete a comment for example. The delete/cancel buttons slide into the box for that comment. No weird context switch for your eyes.

Since you deny a weird context switch for your eyes, are these actually inline elements? That would imply the size of the containers is changing. Which would surely be a weird context switch. But at least I can have no doubt what my action is about to affect - I get frustrated on sites when it says "you're about to delete these items" and i have no idea whether it agrees with me about which items I'm about to delete or not.

But if they're overlaid elements, like a context sensitive menu that contains two options - delete, cancel - is there any substantive difference between a menu and a modal? The main advantage of a classic menu over a modal seems to be that it has a implicit cancel option that is uniformally implemented. But nowadays, menus are implemented without toolkit support - yay dom, yay - so even that is not consistent.

Re: We use too many damn modals (2018)

#94

Post by gindely »

post_below wrote: post #79
buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Considering that the target audience is other designers, why does the presentation matter I fail to see the logic here. Good design helps people learn easier. It's not like designers have some unique ability to learn equally well no matter how poor the design is.

Well context... the information the author is presenting is simple, right brain stuff. No one with UI experience is going to have a hard time digesting it. It's not like he used gifs or flashing colors. Now I kinda want gifs and flashing colors.

That isn't actually true. I think I have UI experience, but I would actually have preferred some mockup examples instead of 1 bit bmp pseudo-thumbnails to represent his ideas. Surely it would be better to show some good user interfaces.

Re: We use too many damn modals (2018)

#95

Post by [deleted] »

l0b0 wrote: post #21

There's a very simple rule of thumb: must the user give some feedback before it makes any sense to use the rest of the site? If so, it's fine to use a modal. Otherwise, don't. Some examples: Payment page: not a modal. The user might want to add more stuff to the cart, even when they are literally one click away from purchasing. Blanking out the rest of the page means they now have to work around the site to buy more…

[deleted]

Re: We use too many damn modals (2018)

#96

Post by tobr »

gindely wrote: post #92
tobr wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good point, and often the reality - it’s unfortunate that it is being downvoted. But it’s a defeatist stance. It’s a central part of the designer’s job to contend that human factors are important, and explain what the effects of shortcuts and poor user experience are on the value of the product and the well-being of its users. If you’re lucky your client hired you because they, too, care and believe design…

Well yeah, but if the person who is in charge of the modal is the implementer, not the designer, then they may not have the expertise to design a good ui. And many designers are artists ("designers") not ux engineers, so their main goal is to make something that shows their artistic skill - they're going to be trained in design packages, not designing a good ui. (I mean, when was the last time you saw a clickable but…

> if the person who is in charge of the modal is the implementer, not the designer, then they may not have the expertise to design a good ui

Isn’t the obvious fix there to let the designer design and the implementer implement? Obviously if the designer is kept out of the loop completely they may not even be in a position to argue for the importance of good design (or just any design process), but then it shouldn’t be surprising that the outcome is bad design.

Re: We use too many damn modals (2018)

#97

Post by gindely »

pvg wrote: post #38
seventh-chord wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression from seeing old windows version (never having used anything older than vista) was that in general using an extra window instead of a separate pane inside the window was more common. As far as I can tell, the old windows explorer would pop open a new window for each opened folder. Now it seems like most programs are run in half/full-screen; They arent really treated as windows. IDEs have their own window…

What I was getting at is that the important thing is the concept (which is about as old as GUIs), the other stuff is implementation detail. The 'modal' part of the a modal dialog is that it takes you out of the 'modeless' interaction state where you can take one of the many UI actions available to you to a state (mode!) where you can do very few things and nothing else. Making GUIs less modal is a similarly ancient U…

Yeah I think nowadays a lot of people think "modal" means "a dom element positioned with respect to the viewport that prevents interaction with the rest of the webpage".

The classical sense of "a collection of related controls that prevents interaction with the rest of the application (however the collection, controls and application are implemented)" is surprisingly rare now, particularly since the older sense were often called "dialogs" (and indeed, "modal" was short for "modal dialog") - intended to emphasise that this was communication between the user of the application and the developer of the application to decide how the application should behave.

Therefore, a modal dialog should be used when the communcation couldn't have happened before and cannot happen later, and the developer of the application cannot do something intelligent and allow the user to correct it later on. (For instance, just delete the thing and let them undo it - no interaction between the developer and the user actually needs to transpire.)

Re: We use too many damn modals (2018)

#98

Post by gindely »

Kaze404 wrote: post #72

This is only tangentially related, but one thing I'm absolutely sick of is rounded corners. I don't know why, and I don't know if it makes any sense, but opening a page and seeing literally everything with border-radius makes my blood boil. It feels like they're trying to protect me from sharp corners, as if they're dangerous. Come on, we're all adults here. We can take a few 90 degree angles.

> Come on, we're all adults here. We can take a few 90 degree angles.

I know that 90 degree angles on webpages are not more dangerous for children, parents, adults, or any other known subcategory of humans than for any other known subcategory of humans, but ... lots of people who use webpages and dev tools are actually children.

Didn't a lot of us get started as kids?

Have we collectively forgotten the olden days, when to print something, the solution was to ask the neighbor's next door kid? (who was probably you). Printers aren't any easier to use today than they were back then, but I guess that practice is over nowadays.

Re: We use too many damn modals (2018)

#99

Post by gindely »

ozaark wrote: post #54
runawaybottle wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll try to condense it more. If you play a video game and a modal pops up, it takes you out of the experience. It’s the same as (hypothetically) me having to go into my HN profile to find a list of comments I upvoted to then go ahead and downvote (versus just having the downvote button next to the post). Can’t teach this stuff, you basically need to be confronted by tons of bad UI in software, games, physical printe…

> Can’t teach this stuff There is literally a field of science called Human-Computer Interaction that teaches this stuff.

Yes but have you seen software - almost anything that's been developed since the growth of mobile platforms has basically done the exact opposite of what that field of science teaches.

This seems to confirm the op's point.

Re: We use too many damn modals (2018)

#100

Post by winrid »

gindely wrote: post #93
winrid wrote: post #80

I hate modals - I'll never add them to products I build. Edit: To provide a little more substance here - for example in one product of mine that actually has customers - confirmation is done via inline elements that slide into the page. So you want delete a comment for example. The delete/cancel buttons slide into the box for that comment. No weird context switch for your eyes.

Since you deny a weird context switch for your eyes, are these actually inline elements? That would imply the size of the containers is changing. Which would surely be a weird context switch. But at least I can have no doubt what my action is about to affect - I get frustrated on sites when it says "you're about to delete these items" and i have no idea whether it agrees with me about which items I'm about to delete…

This is what I mean: http://imgur.com/a/hY9eM77

Content size doesn't change in my case and I would highly advise against changing the sizing of elements on the page for something like this.

The buttons are sized vertical based on the content up to a limit.

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