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Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

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Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#311

Post by Cthulhu_ »

suzzer99 wrote: post #190
iamcalledrob wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS decided square checkboxes were ugly, and design patterns are flowing from mobile->desktop these days.

I think Apple does stuff like this because a) they can get away with it and b) they know countless competitors who can't get away with it will blindly follow their shitty new design paradigm.

And yet, Microsoft is still doing their own thing. It's a shame they didn't follow through with, and / or the industry didn't follow along with, Windows Phone because it was a pretty unique design.

Google / Material Design also does their own thing still.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#312

Post by mrob »

mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #104
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…

Cybernetic natural selection should take care of this over time, but the rate of random mutations in software systems is much higher than in biological systems. Would be interested in modeling the equilibrium dynamics of this

That would happen in a free market, but software is intentionally not a free market thanks to copyright/patent laws. In software, lock-in effects dominate. People will continue using bad software because it's necessary to interoperate with bad software other people are using. There's a coordination problem where everybody would be better off if they collectively switched to better software, but any individual is worse off if they're the first to switch.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#313

Post by iamcalledrob »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #103
strix_varius wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I partially agree with you, but additionally there's a whole set of employees who would be clearly redundant in any given company if that company decided to just use a simple, idiomatic, off the shelf UI system. Or even to implement one but without attempting to reinvent well understood patterns. One reason so many single-person products are so nice is because that single developer didn't have the time and resources…

But every company I worked at in the past 10 years or so eventually coalesced around a singular "design system" managed by one person or a small core team. But that just goes back to my original point - every company had their own design system, and there is not a single, industry-wide set of "rails". The bigger issue I see with "got to keep lots of designers employed" problem is the series of pointless, trend-follow…

> But every company I worked at in the past 10 years or so eventually coalesced around a singular "design system" managed by one person or a small core team.

As a designer, the issue I see is that desktop design requires knowledge and experience of the native toolkits.

This makes desktop the hardest platform to design (well) for.

For example, on macOS you need to know about where the customisation points are in NSMenu, you need to know a little about the responder chain etc.

Most designers only have web or mobile experience, and the nuances of the desktop get lost, even at th design stage. You end up with a custom and shallow system that is weird in the context of the OS.

You also end up with stuff like no context menus, weird hover states (hand cursors anyone?), weird font and UI sizing (why are Spotify's UI elements literally twice the size of native controls? The saving grace of it being an Electron app is that I can zoom out 3 steps to make the UI size sane). I digress...

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#314

Post by vladvasiliu »

einr wrote: post #309

It's a little interesting that they would pick Office 2000 as an example, since Office 97 and onwards do not use standard OS widgets -- it reimplements and draws them itself*. The menu bar in Office 2000 does not look like the standard OS menu bar, for instance. The colors, icons and spacing are non-standard. This is only slightly jarring, because it's pretty well done, but it's still inconsistent with every other ap…

This is funny because Teams on Windows uses its custom notifications instead of the system ones. But running it in a browser under Linux, I get my native notifications!

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#315

Post by vladvasiliu »

stephbook wrote: post #83
8organicbits wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is still a partial solution as the user needs to know that their locale is being used and know how their locale is configured to understand the format. This is most problematic on shared computers or kiosks, especially when traveling.

I don't even know my locale. Is is the device display language, the keyboard input language, my geo location, my browser language, my legal location, my browser-preferred website language, the language I set last time, the language of the domain (looking at amazon.co.uk), the language that was auto-selected last time for me on mobile or... something else entirely?

Exactly. Under Windows, this isn't even consistent across applications. I'm in France, with the location set to France, using English display language and "English (Europe)" formatting. This means that the expected date is DD/MM/YYYY. It's what shows up in the taskbar, for example. But many applications seem to do this based on language, so I sometimes get MM/DD/YYYY.

I don't normally run Windows, so I can't check right now, but I think it's mostly "modern" applications that mess this up. Like the MS Store, Teams (obviously).

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#316

Post by vladvasiliu »

embedding-shape wrote: post #109
8organicbits wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is still a partial solution as the user needs to know that their locale is being used and know how their locale is configured to understand the format. This is most problematic on shared computers or kiosks, especially when traveling.

I mean, once in a different country, you either experience the locale shock once then adapt, or you've seen it before and kind of know what to expect. And for the rest of the users who have no idea about locales, using whatever locale they have on their computer might be technically incorrect for some of them, but at least they're somewhat used to that incorrectness already, as it's likely been their locale for a whi…

Well, the issue is when the applications look at the wrong configuration to set this up.

Think about traveling to a different country for a limited time. I want my location, time zone, etc to be set to where I am. I traveled across the US a few years ago, and I would rather not have to mentally follow in which time zone I was. Heck, I don't even know where the limits are. Bonus points for DST happening on a different date than in Europe, and extra bonus for there being no DST in Arizona, except for Navajo Nation? I remember signs saying it was illegal to carry alcohol, but I don't recall anything about time zones.

But as a European, I don't want my date to suddenly appear in US format; I'm only there for a few weeks.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#317

Post by FinnKuhn »

Skeime wrote: post #303
8organicbits wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is still a partial solution as the user needs to know that their locale is being used and know how their locale is configured to understand the format. This is most problematic on shared computers or kiosks, especially when traveling.

I think modern browsers are actually quite good here. They show a template in the form TT.MM.JJJJ for me (so the German equivalent of MM/DD/YYYY, with the usual order and separator in German). I can just type the date, including the dots if I want (they're just ignored; there would be extra points for moving me to the next component when typing "2.", but the world's not perfect). If I'm confused about the format, or…

No, modern browsers are horrible at this as they are often ignoring your settings (at least Chrome and Edge on Windows do). They are basing the format entirely on the language instead of the date format configured in your Windows settings. Safari on iOS seems to not have this issue though as far as I can tell.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7372038/is-there-any-way...

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#318

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

iambateman wrote: post #251
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…

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.

I also sent a LOT of Slack messages prematurely for the same reason. Used to it now, though. The more an interface emphasises the single-line nature of a text input, the better. Multi-line should never submit on enter, single-line always should.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#319

Post by Findecanor »

QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #288
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Some older Apple keyboards had their backspace button labelled “delete” which to me made it sound like that was the “del” button and not the backspace button.

That was the convention on many older computing platforms.

A "Backspace" key on a typewriter did not actually delete: It merely moved the typing position back one space.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#320

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

abraxas wrote: post #258
dfxm12 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We've still yet to reach the "any textbox is just an embedded version of your EDITOR" nirvana.
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