Someone should do a YouTube channel where they "sand" popular software products and point out these kinds of subtle UI bugs.
Sanding UI
231–240 of 414 posts
Re: Sanding UI
#232I'm always torn whether this is a good use of time or not. If you're an early stage startup, it feels like shipping features (that work) quickly is your biggest differentiator, not how nice your UI is. I guess this is true if you're doing something in a not so saturated field, but understand that if you're in a saturated space, you probably do need the design to be natural os as to set yourself apart.
The good use of time is that OP learned that labels should wrap their inputs, so the next 10,000 times they write a control on a form, they'll just do it off the bat.
That this post has 800 upvotes is just a reminder of the caliber of UI/UX experience the average HNer has, especially when you see them disparage UI development as something unworthy of their time / expertise.
Re: Sanding UI
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stop drinking the koolaid, will you? I didn't get into software development to spend my entire time focussed on fixing broken processes. I'd bet almost none of us did. I got into it because I like building software and, more than that, I like building high quality software. At the end of the day it comes down to this: I've worked a bunch of different places over 25 years. I've seen a lot of different processes but, c…
Every single time this gets brought up we see the Agile defenders come up with "It's not agile, it's literally anything else.". All I can say is if this is the common denominator...
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Re: Sanding UI
#234I'm always torn whether this is a good use of time or not. If you're an early stage startup, it feels like shipping features (that work) quickly is your biggest differentiator, not how nice your UI is. I guess this is true if you're doing something in a not so saturated field, but understand that if you're in a saturated space, you probably do need the design to be natural os as to set yourself apart.
Eliminating “friction” is a huge part of maximizing conversion and retention, both of which are important metrics for early stage startups. It’s only once you achieve significant momentum that you can afford to let these types of UX annoyances slide. The risk is that once you do that, the normalization of deviance makes your product end up like Jira.
Re: Sanding UI
#235I wonder what’s the most polished or “sanded” UI out there? You would think FAANG would have a half decent UI and UX with the amount of money they have. But anybody that has used Amazon.com or AWS, GCP, or even Azure would beg to differ. Personally, off the top of my head. The most polished UI/UX has to be “mcmaster.com”. I can find anything I need in what seems like a couple minutes. Compare this to big box stores l…
I wonder what’s the most polished or “sanded” UI out there? Windows 2000. Everything newer has been slowly downhill.
I really wish we had something resembling a "native" UI toolkit, but for the web. Just throw together a couple s or es with absolutely zero additional JS/CSS, but have it actually look & work moderately decent, the way SwiftUI does.
CSS is too powerful, OOB HTML is too basic/ugly.
Re: Sanding UI
#236I've been "sanding" my personal website ( https://dustinbrett.com ) for nearly 4 years now, and it feels like it could go on forever. Luckily I enjoy working on it.
This is really fun. A usability note, at least on Safari on iOS, you have to put the protocol for a web page to load. If you just put www.cnn.com without the https, it never loads.
Re: Sanding UI
#237I'm always torn whether this is a good use of time or not. If you're an early stage startup, it feels like shipping features (that work) quickly is your biggest differentiator, not how nice your UI is. I guess this is true if you're doing something in a not so saturated field, but understand that if you're in a saturated space, you probably do need the design to be natural os as to set yourself apart.
It's not about how nice the UI is is, but rather how responsive it is and if it's providing your users with enough feedback.
If it's not, it will lead to your users being confused and/or frustrated which will lead to them looking for an alternative tool.
If you're product is the only one in town, then they're just left to deal with it until a competitor pops up with a better (whether real or perceived) UI.
Re: Sanding UI
#238Is so important have people with that spark to see and fix those little UX issues, a good analogy used on UX design is papercuts for the user, not critical but it degrades user satisfaction. To the author I will add that that radio button is not following the convension of a dot for the selected state instead of a check. Users may think at first sight that multiple/no selection is possible.
One I've experienced on GitHub and Jira is dragging to select text on a dialog, if you release outside the dialog the mouse up event dismisses the pop up which is probably a side effect of being able to click outside the dialog to dismiss it.
That’s classic “web ui”, the consequence of lowering the absraction level without providing and forcing developers to use useful mechanisms. So everyone just goes mindlessly with events which are badly targeted by design.
I’d say that desktop is an order of magnitude better, but a kde installation I have to work with also doesn’t register clicks on buttons sometimes. Because for the sake of ui-ness they used flat elements instead of buttons and forgot making them down-upable anywhere within to click. So when you move-quick-and-click it registers (I guess) drag instead due to the movement, and drag is a no-op.
Allowing clueless developers to use lower level and normalizing lower level graphics is a huge mistake these platforms make. The web is basically built with this in mind, that’s why it sucks.
20 years ago you couldn’t even imagine clicking around in a desktop app to see if radio works. People would literally laugh at you.
Re: Sanding UI
#239I'm always torn whether this is a good use of time or not. If you're an early stage startup, it feels like shipping features (that work) quickly is your biggest differentiator, not how nice your UI is. I guess this is true if you're doing something in a not so saturated field, but understand that if you're in a saturated space, you probably do need the design to be natural os as to set yourself apart.
The good use of time is that OP learned that labels should wrap their inputs, so the next 10,000 times they write a control on a form, they'll just do it off the bat. That this post has 800 upvotes is just a reminder of the caliber of UI/UX experience the average HNer has, especially when you see them disparage UI development as something unworthy of their time / expertise.
Did they? My understanding is they replaced gap with padding, didn’t necessarily wrap the input with the label (which they should as you suggest)
Re: Sanding UI
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
One I've experienced on GitHub and Jira is dragging to select text on a dialog, if you release outside the dialog the mouse up event dismisses the pop up which is probably a side effect of being able to click outside the dialog to dismiss it.
This could probably be fixed by tracking whether the mousedown event was started inside or outside the dialog, and only close the dialog if the mousedown started outside it.
It’s called a cursor grab and in the web exists as el.setPointerCapture().
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/set...