Are mobile native apps "idiomatic" then? Speaking of uis made with native frameworks of a specific platform. They surely share some patterns, especially on navigation, top bar, button bar, etc but it's been the death of design and ux. You can't use any app with one hand alone, everything is flat. I share the sentiment that some basic elements should behave the same, like inputs, but I miss the day where we experimented with uis, especially with early internet and flash. Sure many of these looked bad and were horrible to use, but in some ways each one had some character. We basically stopped doing any ui innovation on both the web and native desktop/mobile platforms and that's sad to me
Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)
261–270 of 385 posts
Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)
#262There are too many issues with those designs of the old, so instead of going regressing into them let’s instead progress towards the fantasy of universal user-centric configuration!
Who do I need 50 different “save” icons in different apps when I could set just one and have instant “idiomatic” recognition anywhere? I could even ditch the text because it’s one of the top 10 commonly used icons that require no text. Oh, and the web apps would also use it in their menus… Or not, I never need this icon in the first place since I always use a shortcut, so one config change, and now not a single app has the icon!
Can I have “Close” menu use X as an accelerator shortcut everywhere instead of C, and let it work on Windows and Mac and Linux?
Can I not waste the most ergonomic thumb modifier key Alt to open menus I rarely use? And if I waste it, can I also have it working on a Mac, where it would have the same physical position, ie, Cmd?
Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)
#263In 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…
> you're probably more likely to want fancier formatting in a PR review comment than a chat message.
Exactly, and that's how you keep track
Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)
#264I reference Jakob's Law at least once a week, which says users use not your site most of the time. So if it works like most other sites then users will intuitively understand it. And if you do something different users will struggle to learn it.
As a tangent, he has so many really important pieces of advice, naming one as "Jakob's Law" is deeply impractical.
Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)
#265The web needs a HIG. All of these people who keep saying that webapps can replace desktop applications were simply never desktop power users. They don’t know what they don’t know.
I think HIG means "Human Interface Guidelines" here. Seems to be an Apple thing. I wish more people would avoid or at least introduce abbreviations that may be unfamiliar to the audience.
I think it was a Xerox thing. But since the 90s, everybody has some since.
Oh, and if you want to read one to learn, the Microsoft ones are better than the Apple's.
Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)
#266Most 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…
Software is now media, not tooling. Media tends to come with a lot of baked in perverse incentives.
Feels like somebody has read their Marshall McLuhan :) I recently started reading Understanding Media, and every chapter delivers at least one mind-melting moment; something he draws attention to and/or frames in some way.
Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)
#267"Avoid JavaScript reimplementations of HTML basics, e.g. React Button components instead of styled elements." Tell me you know nothing about web development without saying you know nothing about web dev ... 1. React is an irrelevant implementation detail. You can have a plain HTML button in a button component, or you can have an image or whatever else. React has nothing to do with the design choices. 2. React is also…
> Amazon to make all their buttons orange
> It'd be awful!
Why do I care about their choice of a screaming color for my buttons?
> same Windows button gray
We don't need to go the other extreme, can there be no middle ground of letting users pick between the boring gray and the bright orange? You know, a good system could even offer you a choice of palette that takes the website color into account...
Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)
#268"Avoid JavaScript reimplementations of HTML basics, e.g. React Button components instead of styled elements." Tell me you know nothing about web development without saying you know nothing about web dev ... 1. React is an irrelevant implementation detail. You can have a plain HTML button in a button component, or you can have an image or whatever else. React has nothing to do with the design choices. 2. React is also…
> Can you imagine if every button on every site was the same Windows button gray color, regardless of the site's color?
Imagine how cool would it be if we had a pure, logical language where we could set properties in a page based on the properties of the objects around it!
Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)
#269UIs are inconsistent even in the same app. Nevermind plugins or suites. It would be great if menus were customizable so you could plug in your own template.
I prefer to avoid customizing apps. I want to be able to sit down at a fresh install (or someone else's) and not spend time learning their preferences. When someone asks me for a checkbox so they can have my app work their way instead and everyone else can do theirs, the hair stands up on the back of my neck. The check boxes are hard to discover unless you put them front and center, in which case they remain there fo…
> I want to be able to sit down at a fresh install (or someone else's) and not spend time learning their preferences.
This is impossible: someone else is also capable of customizing
But also, what 0% of your use cases are fresh installs with config wiped out and not restored?
Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)
#270One 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.
What do you think about search override on some dysfunctional modern forums that can't display more than 3 replies, so if you used the built in browser search you wouldn't be able to find anything in a discussion?
But also, Vivaldi is awesome here is allowing you to block overrides for specific shortcuts so you Ctrl F is always yours