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If you're a button, you have one job

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Re: If you're a button, you have one job

#101

Post by hypfer »

benj111 wrote: post #79
hypfer wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a valid opinion to hold, however, the question of "what is wrong with X? Y is outdated and over" is a) a different statement from "I prefer X" and b) pretty low effort, trivially to Google (or ask AI) and generally a bit on the ignorant side A better reply would not just have said what it said but contained actual wonder about the topic. Like this, it's just indistinguishable from engagement bait.

I think you're being overly hostile. The parents question seems reasonable to my non designy mind.

Yes in a vacuum.

No on the Internet.

Especially not on the sea-lion infested HR-world Internet, in which trolling has evolved to exploit good faith directly.

___

In fact, "being overly hostile" is exactly how you probe to see whether your suspicions are correct.

Sea lioning exploits the gap between what would be a real human thing to do and what still passes as what a real human would do.

So to get useful data, you need to modulate parameters so that people end up outside of that gap window.

Essentially you're probing for genuine Human-ness by creating a context in which the bad faith action space is no longer overlapping with the genuine human action space.

This works, because genuine humans have this amazing ability to reconcile and actually genuinely resolve misunderstandings. Something that is fundamentally impossible for bad faith actors.

(This should not be understood as "just be overly hostile" because simply being a dick doesn't provide any data at all.)

Re: If you're a button, you have one job

#102

Post by [deleted] »

Timwi wrote: post #99
mcv wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debouncing exists for a reason. Sometimes when a button is clicked twice, you want it executed twice, sometimes you don't. Distinguishing which is better in which situation is not trivial. At the very least, you should consider which is appropriate for which situation, what if, in your UI, for some buttons one is the obvious choice, for others it's the other, but for some it's not so clear, and both behaviours are de…

It seems somewhat clear to me. You want it executed twice if and only if the operation isn't idempotent. Can you give an example where you think both behaviors are equally defensible?

[deleted]

Re: If you're a button, you have one job

#103

Post by hypfer »

darkwater wrote: post #77
hypfer wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking entirely out of my ass here: FOMO for sure is one of the driving factors. "We cannot risk looking outdated". So weak management, probably. But also talent availability I suppose. If there's a new trend, the pool of people you can hire include many that are in on that trend. UI frameworks too, probably. The modern thing™ does the modern thing™ and you do want to be on the modern thing, because you fear that o…

If UIs today still looked exactly the same as Windows 2.0 or System 7 or CDE people will be bored to death. Aesthetics come and go and come back, it's part of how humanity worked for a few centuries already.

Do I need to be entertained by my butter knife, mop or screwdriver?

I really don't think that "keeping people entertained" is a sensible goal within the context of building software as tools and not software-adjacent Art.

Which is not to say that I would not want a great and polished experience, but that is not equivalent to "being entertained".

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It would be nice if not everything one interacts with would try to get some sort of emotion out of me. Bring back being bored.

Re: If you're a button, you have one job

#105

Post by lucumo »

mproud wrote: post #35

How about when users accidentally click too much, or they believe the first click didn’t register? I am still reminded of a keynote where Steve Jobs was demoing how much faster PDF documents would display on the newer macOS. So he had engineers put a button in for him to click that would scroll through the PDF on the screen, and he accidentally clicked it more than once. Steve wondered aloud if it would scroll all th…

> How about when users accidentally click too much, or they believe the first click didn’t register?

I was really confused at their mention of accessibility, because my mind jumped to people with hand tremors who would double press when they intended only one press.

And then, of course, there are the people that double-click every button. To handle that, disabling a submit button in the onclick is very common.

Re: If you're a button, you have one job

#106

Post by hadrien01 »

hypfer wrote: post #73
antihero wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren’t purely for that, they also contribute to how an application feels to use in a creative manner.

I don't want my image editor to feel like something in a creative manner though. I want it to rotate an image by 90° when I tap the button that does that. See, this is exactly my point when I say that animations are no end in themselves. They serve a supporting role to better get the actual job done. The actual job is not "feel" it is "do". For vibes, there are movies, Art, and AI hallucinations. Of course, "feel" ca…

I disable all animations everywhere (Android, Windows, Gnome) because I hate that they make me feel like I'm losing time waiting for something that could be instant, and they sometimes make me dizzy. I'm particularly exasperated that iOS doesn't offer that possibility.

But rotating an image is one of the rare use cases where I do want the animation. It makes me see what action happened, with which rotation angle, without having to think twice.

Re: If you're a button, you have one job

#107

Post by Telaneo »

xigoi wrote: post #95
Telaneo wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New people are born every day.

The newly born people grow up in a world where computers are already commonplace, so they don’t need to get used to them.

That fact that they are common doesn't mean they don't need to get used to them.

Re: If you're a button, you have one job

#108

Post by mrob »

atoav wrote: post #72
bloak wrote: post #50

I used to have a device with a physical button which, when you pressed it, would beep and add 30 seconds to the time. However, sometimes it would beep and not add 30 seconds, and sometimes it would add 30 seconds without beeping, so you always had to squint at the dim display to discover whether it had worked or not. I thought this must be a peculiarly bad design ... but since then I have lost count of the number of…

Bad programming. People who have experience with embedded programming knows that reading out a button usually means denouncing. At the speed a microcontroller can read out a button it will change it's state multiple times per press because of contact bounce. Meaning when a user presses a button the program sees off, on, off, off, on, on, off, on, on, on, on, on, on, etc. Now if you just naively read out the current s…

>averaging the last 50 reads and wait till the majority is either off or on.

This is a bad way to do it because it adds avoidable latency. A moving average is a low-pass filter. The switch bounce is better handled by hysteresis. Change state as soon as you see an edge, then ignore further edges until a timer expires, e.g. 5 ms, which should be enough for the bouncing to settle. A 5 ms timeout limits your repetition rate to 100 presses per second, which is beyond human capabilities.

You might want a tiny bit of hardware low-pass filtering too, for EMI resistance, but that's with microsecond-scale time constant, not milliseconds.

Re: If you're a button, you have one job

#109

Post by hypfer »

hadrien01 wrote: post #106
hypfer wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want my image editor to feel like something in a creative manner though. I want it to rotate an image by 90° when I tap the button that does that. See, this is exactly my point when I say that animations are no end in themselves. They serve a supporting role to better get the actual job done. The actual job is not "feel" it is "do". For vibes, there are movies, Art, and AI hallucinations. Of course, "feel" ca…

I disable all animations everywhere (Android, Windows, Gnome) because I hate that they make me feel like I'm losing time waiting for something that could be instant, and they sometimes make me dizzy. I'm particularly exasperated that iOS doesn't offer that possibility. But rotating an image is one of the rare use cases where I do want the animation. It makes me see what action happened, with which rotation angle, wit…

Huh, good point. True.

The motion itself indeed gets picked up intuitively by the brain.

Okay, I'm convinced that picture rotation should be animated to the exact degree that achieves this.

Re: If you're a button, you have one job

#110

Post by port11 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #53
mproud wrote: post #35

How about when users accidentally click too much, or they believe the first click didn’t register? I am still reminded of a keynote where Steve Jobs was demoing how much faster PDF documents would display on the newer macOS. So he had engineers put a button in for him to click that would scroll through the PDF on the screen, and he accidentally clicked it more than once. Steve wondered aloud if it would scroll all th…

I'm no longer the Apple/Mac/Jobs fan-boy I once was in my earlier days, but I do miss the Apple presentations that felt like they were run by a human being wanting to show off cool stuff. I couldn't even finish the last Apple presentations as it all feels so stiff, inhuman and run by suits, they all seem like robots scared of diverging from the holy script who will get fired if they display emotions and humanity. Off…

The scripted talks in front of fancy backgrounds do make it unpalatable, it’s just a fancier version of corporate slideshows. I suppose trillion-dollar companies aren’t as willing to take risks.
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