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Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

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Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#251

Post by iambateman »

layer8 wrote: post #97
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…

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…

Microsoft teams: not as bad as people say, except for this situation.

I have accidentally sent so many messages trying to get to a new line.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#252

Post by glerk »

nine_k wrote: post #245
glerk wrote: post #240

One trend that I can’t stand currently is the obsession with keyboard shortcuts everywhere even to the point of overriding browser defaults. Cmd+F focusing on the site’s search input instead of letting me search in the page with the browser’s search functionality (looking at you github and Linear). I generally don’t need any fancy keyboard shortcuts on a website. I have a mouse, I can just click around.

To the opposite, I'm a heavy user of keyboard shortcuts everywhere they exist. OTOH taking over the browser shortcuts, and especially the search, is something that I very much dislike.

I'm ok with them as long as they're not overriding what I have saved in my muscle memory (cmd+F for search, tab to change the focused element, cmd+L to go to the navbar, and a few others).

I think the user should be able to customize/disable those as much as possible if you do provide them.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#253

Post by zephen »

Hell, I'd be happy if, when I started reading text, the websites would just let me keep reading text rather than popping up an interminable number of ads, video, alert/app/notification options, etc.

I mean, you know that if they can't do that, any other idioms from last century are right out the window as well.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#254

Post by readitalready »

userbinator wrote: post #177
ceejayoz wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can steer it towards reusable components, though. Find a run you like, and build off that.

You definitely need to filter if you use AI. Looking at all the vibe-coded creations that are showing up these days has changed my mind from "AI-generated code is bad" to "the one using the AI is doing a bad job of it".

I ended up writing a linter/validator that checks the AI-generated code for everything, including user interface style guidelines and preferences (not necessarily for hard errors)

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#255

Post by thfuran »

powvans wrote: post #234
AgentEpsilon wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams does both - normally it’s Enter to submit and Shift+Enter for a new line, but when you open the formatting tools it switches. They at least do have a message indicating which key combo inputs a new line, but it still gets me on occasion.

Teams is insane. You want a new entry in a bulleted list? Hit the enter key. If you dare. I had managed to be on Slack exclusively for at least 10 years. Recent acquisition has me using Teams and it's hilarious to see for the first time what people have been complaining about. I thought surely people are exaggerating. No, no they are not. It only took a couple weeks for me to figure out that I would have to compose l…

Unfortunately, some markdown renders differently when copied in vs when typed directly in teams.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#256

Post by computerfriend »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #136
nkrisc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Better yet require YYYY-MM-DD This is the equivalent of requiring all your text to be in Esperanto because dealing with separate languages is a pain. "Normal" people never use YYYY-MM-DD format. The real world has actual complexity, tough, and the reason you see so many bugs and problems around localization is not that there aren't good APIs to deal with it, it's that it's often an after thought, doesn't always pro…

It's normal in Asia.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#257

Post by cfiggers »

wtetzner wrote: post #221
mbesto wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why would you ever disable paste? It can only make it more likely that the user will make a mistake (and hate you for making the form harder to fill out).

I have an AutoHotkey that just takes whatever is in my clipboard and sends it through as individual virtual keystrokes, specifically for defeating paste-disabled form fields.

It gets way more use than I wish it did.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#258

Post by abraxas »

dfxm12 wrote: post #220
jimbokun wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a very mild jolt of anxiety every time I want to enter a new line in Teams or Slack, wondering if it will send a half completed message I will need to edit after the recipient has seen the half completed message, or it will enter a new line like I want it to. The behavior also changes if you start editing a numbered or unordered list. Maybe that enters the "formatting tools" mode you mention?

If you're worried about this, consider a copy and paste from notepad.

Your advice beautifully reinforces OP's case. We now have to use auxiliary apps with more predictable behaviour because designers made such a mess of things.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#259

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

no-name-here wrote: post #232
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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").

I haven’t happened to have seen that - which web apps do it?

Hmm, at this point I think I might be imagining it ... I'll let you know if I can find it ...
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