Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

essays.johnloeber.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 385 posts

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#161

Post by gmueckl »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #95
jstanley wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a time and a place for it. If you already know exactly what the program needs to do, then sure, design a user interface. If you are still exploring the design space then it's better to try things out as quickly as possible even if the ui is rough.

The latter is an interesting mindset to advocate for. In almost every other engineering discipline, this would be frowned upon. I suspect wisdom could be gained by not discounting better forethought to be honest. However, I really wonder how formula 1 teams manage their engineering concepts and driver UI/UX. They do some crazy experimental things, and they have high budgets, but they're often pulling off high-risk id…

Racing like in Formula 1 is extremely different from normal product design: each Formula 1 car has a user base of exactly 1: the driver that is going to use it. Not even the cars from the same team are identical for that reason. The driver can basically dictate the UX design because there is never any friction with other users.

Also, turnaround times from idea to final product can be insane at that level. These teams often have to accomplish in days what normally takes months. But they can pull it off by having every step of the design and manufacturing process in house.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#162

Post by JoshTriplett »

nkrisc wrote: post #17
teeray wrote: post #12

> There are hundreds of ways that different websites ask you to pick dates Ugh, date pickers. So many of these violently throw up when I try to do the obvious thing: type in the damn date. Instead they force me to click through their inane menu, as if the designer wanted to force me into a showcase of their work. Let your power users type. Just call your user’s attention back to the field if they accidentally typed 0…

Is 03/04/2026 March 4th or the 3rd of April? If you have an international audience that’s going to mess someone up. Better yet require YYYY-MM-DD.

As they type it, start displaying what it is. If, as you type "03/", it says "March", and that's not what you want, you now know what format it wants.

(And yes, always accept YYYY-MM-DD format, please.)

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#163

Post by Izkata »

Nemi wrote: post #69
uhoh-itsmaciek wrote: post #58

In text boxes in some applications, enter submits the entered text, and ctrl-enter forces a newline (not at my computer, but I think Slack does this). In others, it's the other way around (pretty sure GitHub does this for comments). I don't know how we got here and I don't know how to fix it, but "bring back idiomatic design" doesn't help when we don't have enough idioms. I'm not even sure if those two behaviors are…

Thats funny because I thought it was shift-enter that creates a newline in a field where an enter submits. Just shows the fractured nature of this whole thing.

I've found Shift+Enter to do this pretty reliably across systems whatever they've chosen Enter / Ctrl+Enter to do.

It even works inside bullet points to add separate lines as part of the same bullet.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#164

Post by debugnik »

layer8 wrote: post #112
michaelmrose wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything which supports multi-line input shouldn't submit on enter it should submit on button press so anyone can use it instantly without learning or remembering anything. Then make it easier for users to learn that they can enter more quickly with control+enter which you can advertise via tooltip or adjacent text. Better that 100% find it trivially usable even if only 75% learn they can do it faster

That isn’t workable for chat apps, at the very least on mobile. And that’s the most-used text entry interface that users nowadays grow up with. So I think you need to make an exception for such applications.

Mobile makes this much easier actually, send can be a different button on the UI than the newline button on the touch keyboard without having to teach this to users. That's exactly how my phone is currently configured at least.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#166

Post by FergusArgyll »

teeray wrote: post #12

> There are hundreds of ways that different websites ask you to pick dates Ugh, date pickers. So many of these violently throw up when I try to do the obvious thing: type in the damn date. Instead they force me to click through their inane menu, as if the designer wanted to force me into a showcase of their work. Let your power users type. Just call your user’s attention back to the field if they accidentally typed 0…

There's a small rental car company I use sometimes whos date picker is meant for phones and you have to "grab" the wheel and push it up / down do get to your date

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#167

Post by cosmic_cheese »

JojoFatsani wrote: post #24

Most software is not designed by intelligent and thoughtful people anymore. It is designed by hastily promoted middle manager PM/Product type people who, as has been mentioned elsewhere, simply were not around when thoughtful human interface design was borderline mandatory for efficiency’s sake. There is incompetence and there is also malevolence in the encouragement of dark patterns by the revenue side of the busine…

Also, in the 2010s a lot of old guard UX designers got circulated out in favor of designers who either had backgrounds in other mediums (e.g. print) or were generalists with little understanding of user interfaces or technical capabilities. This didn't help matters.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#168

Post by tomjen3 »

uhoh-itsmaciek wrote: post #58

In text boxes in some applications, enter submits the entered text, and ctrl-enter forces a newline (not at my computer, but I think Slack does this). In others, it's the other way around (pretty sure GitHub does this for comments). I don't know how we got here and I don't know how to fix it, but "bring back idiomatic design" doesn't help when we don't have enough idioms. I'm not even sure if those two behaviors are…

This one has bitten me plenty of times, but the solution is what slack does: write underneath what you are supposed to do.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#169

Post by tomjen3 »

iamcalledrob wrote: post #39

As the author identifies, the idioms come from the use of system frameworks that steer you towards idiomatic implementations. The system UI frameworks are tremendously detailed and handle so many corner cases you'd never think of. They allow you to graduate into being a power user over time. Windows has Win32, and it was easier to use its controls than rolling your own custom ones. (Shame they left the UI side of win…

    Click me
Is how you do it on the web. The problem is that it means you app will not look as good as others and that it will look different on different platforms.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#170

Post by ninalanyon »

mbesto wrote: post #127
JojoFatsani wrote: post #24

Most software is not designed by intelligent and thoughtful people anymore. It is designed by hastily promoted middle manager PM/Product type people who, as has been mentioned elsewhere, simply were not around when thoughtful human interface design was borderline mandatory for efficiency’s sake. There is incompetence and there is also malevolence in the encouragement of dark patterns by the revenue side of the busine…

This is reductionist and myopic. I've personally been through building forms online and it's hell to try to find consensus on perhaps the most common forms used online. Let's take a credit card form: - Do I let the user copy and paste values in? - Do I let them use IE6? - Do I need to test for the user using an esotoric browser (Brave) with an esoteric password manager (KeePassXC)? - Do I make it accessible for someo…

The thing that winds me up about credit card input is that it won't let me enter it as it is written on my card, in groups of four digits.

The same applies to fields that expect telephone numbers. They should all accept arbitrary amounts of white-space.

If you don't allow me to paste a card number in I might well not buy from you.

Post reply on HN