Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023) • Hacker News Board

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#191

Post by trueno » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 9:38 PM UTC

wffurr wrote: post #157

The number of JavaScript dropdown replacements that don't work correctly with the keyboard is stunning. It always amazes me how many forms fail at this basic usability aspect. The browser has homogeneous form controls built in, just use them!

i've seen this critiqued as ugly by people who didn't want to use daisyui's original dropdown which just deferred to the built in controls. now in daisyui's latest release there is an additional dropdown that you can style, because utility is a second rate citizen in design

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#192

Post by gib444 » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 9:39 PM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #106

One of my pet peeves is that increasingly frequently, pressing Enter to submit a web form doesn’t even universally work anymore. Instead you have to tab to the submit button, and (depending on the web page) have to press Space or Enter to actuate it. Another annoyance is that many web forms (and desktop apps based on web tech) don’t automatically place the keyboard focus in an input field anymore when first displayed…

> Another annoyance is that many web forms (and desktop apps based on web tech) don’t automatically place the keyboard focus in an input field anymore when first displayed

Well, the keyboard takes up so much space. IMO it's important to view the form and the context of the inputs before you start typing.

Is it really consensus in the UX world that it's an antipattern?

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#193

Post by trueno » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 9:41 PM UTC

pkphilip wrote: post #6

UX has really gone downhill. This is particularly true of banking websites. Also, the trend of hiding scrollbars, huge wasted spaces, making buttons look really flat, confusing icons, confusing ways of using drop downs rather than using the select/option html controls etc have all made the whole experience far inferior to where desktop UI was even decades ago

i think material ui kicked design in the face in a broad multiple-industry-capturing way. it's gotta be the worst design language to interface with and it just unreasonably requires effort to navigate around gcp and lots of other google tooling. i'm glad it feels dated now and people are moving away to input boxes that are enclosed in, you know, a box... but i cannot stand what it brought to ux/ui.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#194

Post by numpad0 » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 9:43 PM UTC

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…

PSA: CJK input frameworks(IMEs) use both Space and Enter for doing Hanzi/Kanji. Naively rigging Enter in JS to send causes wrong homonyms and/or raw phonetic scripts to get sent. There are few ways to resolve this issue, of which the easiest is to just leave Enter to the operating system.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#195

Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 9:46 PM UTC

cratermoon wrote: post #131

layer8 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decades ago, Return and Enter were two different keys for that reason: Return to insert a line break, Enter to submit your input. Given the reduction to a single key, the traditional GUI rule is that Enter in a multiline/multi-paragraph input doesn’t submit like it does in other contexts, but inserts a line break (or paragraph break), while Ctrl+Enter submits. Chat apps, where single-paragraph content is the typical…

don't get me started on backspace vs delete...

not just that ... plenty of web apps (and maybe desktop native ones too, though I don't notice it as much there) use "smart-delete" - if the cursor has a character after it, the delete key deletes it, but if not, it operates like backspace (which ought to be labelled "delete prev").

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#196

Post by johncch » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 9:57 PM UTC

I’m not sure the core thesis is correct for two reasons. I’ve been around the block a few times now and I don’t think I’ve ever lived in an era where people were like “the current state of design is awesome”. There are always rose-tinted think pieces with some dubious stats about how things are awesome in the past.

Secondly, idiomatic is good if it matches your mental model. However, what does idiomatic mean in the context of billions of people coming from various computing starting point. Just as a simple thought exercise, how do you design idiomatically for people who are most familiar with Windows era computers and people who start with touchscreens, both generations who are still alive today?

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#197

Post by ahartmetz » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 10:09 PM UTC

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #167

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.

UX is often done by graphic designers IME. They aren't the worst people to do it (generally better than developers), but not the best neither.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#198

Post by jgalt212 » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 10:14 PM UTC

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#199

Post by bccdee » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 10:23 PM UTC

andyfilms1 wrote: post #23

And while we're at it, stop with the popups and notifications. I don't care about the new features in a browser update. Ideally, nothing at all has changed. I don't want a "tour" of the software I just installed. I, presumably, installed it to do something, and I just want to do that thing. I don't want to have to select a preference for how a specific action is performed in your software. If it's not what I expected…

I actually might want to subscribe to your newsletter, provided I read & enjoy your article. So why does the pop-up always interrupt me before the page has even finished loading?

If you inset an unobtrusive newsletter button 60% of the way through the article, perhaps I'll actually click it (or, more realistically, follow your RSS feed).

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#200

Post by sheept » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 10:24 PM UTC

jmbwell wrote: post #121

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…

macOS is slightly more consistent among apps that use system controls, but the more custom the app, or the more React Native or Electron it is, the less predictable it is Infuriatingly, some apps try to be smart — only one line, return submits; more than one line, return is a new line, and command-return submits; but command-return on just one line beeps an error. Years of muscle memory are useless, so now I’m reachi…

Using provided UI controls is consistent with how today's apps behave on mobile:

- For single-line text fields, pressing enter is an alias for submitting the form. - For multi-line text fields, pressing enter inserts a new line. There is no shortcut for submitting the form.

In mobile chat apps, the enter key inserts a new line, so you have to press the non-keyboard submit button to send a message. In mobile browser address bars, since they are single-line text fields, the enter key becomes a submit button on the virtual keyboard.