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Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

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Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#321

Post by FinnKuhn »

computerfriend wrote: post #256
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm not in Asia though.

It's also normal to speak Chinese in China. That doesn't mean that I should be speaking Chinese as well.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#322

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

darrylb42 wrote: post #111
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.

Slack is similar Shift enter in normal text. Enter in a code block, shift enter sends in a code block.

I just tested this on Slack (macOS) and it's not the case. Pressing Enter in a code block submits the message, just as it does for any message.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#323

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

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…

> Infuriatingly, some apps try to be smart — only one line, return submits

Tbf, this is almost certainly what the vast majority of people want, most of the time, from chat apps like Slack. It would be much more frustrating to have to click a button after each thought.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#324

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

layer8 wrote: post #181
debugnik wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one uses the UI button to send a message on the desktop though. Everyone just presses Return to send, which is the most common need, and then once in a while realise they need to enter a newline without sending, for which there isn't a button so they need to learn how. Mobile doesn't necessarily have this issue because it can show the send button and the newline button at the same time and they're equally accessib…

Actually, I do. Or at least I do in very similar situations where for some reason there is no keyboard shortcut to submit from the input field, so I press Tab (which moves the keyboard focus to the submit button next to the text field) and then press Return or Space to press the UI button. Regarding on mobile, I’m familiar with chat apps that require a UI button press to send, and consider it unnecessary friction. It…

> so I press Tab

Now you have a bonus problem: how do you insert a Tab in a multi-line text box?

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#325

Post by Findecanor »

zahlman wrote: post #141
bfbf wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s amazing how many blank stares I get when I, as mobile engineer, tell stakeholders that we shouldn’t just implement some random interface idea they thought up in the shower and we instead need design input! “But why can’t you just do it?” Because I recognise the importance of consistent UX and an IA that can actually be followed. Just like developers, (proper) designers solve problems, an we need to stop asking t…

> “But why can’t you just do it?” The answer should be "because users will hate it and use a competing product that's better designed". A shame that it isn't actually true any more.

How about: It's too easy for users to use the product wrong, leading to unnecessary tech support calls, and doing tech support costs us money.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#326

Post by Findecanor »

RobotToaster wrote: post #52
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.

is automatically formatted based on the user's locale.

That can get messy and confusing if the user's locale is different from the language of the web page.

When I write in English, I of course also want to edit dates and numbers using English conventions. But instead, I am forced to use decimal comma and day/month order because those are the default locale for Swedish, which is my default locale. I have never encountered an OS that doesn't work that way. On the web you'll often don't know: it could be anything.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#327

Post by trashb »

smokel wrote: post #289
falcor84 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What lower turtles were there? My impression was that teletypes were the first proper keyboard-based interfaces.

Mechanical typewriters have different physical mechanisms to feed forward a line or make the carriage return. I think it doesn't turtle much further back than that.

Well around the time of the first typewriters (late 19th century) there where mechanical typesetters, automating the laborious task of typesetting for the printing press. Of course the mechanics of printing where different but as far as I know this is the source of the "keyboard with buttons" type interface for producing literature.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#328

Post by Findecanor »

computerfriend wrote: post #256
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And Sweden. And probably lots of other countries too. It's a world standard, and there are very few places that use hyphens in dates that are not ISO dates.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#330

Post by beloch »

Skeime wrote: post #306
beloch wrote: post #243

The solution to this kind of problem is standards. For most of the history of computation, things were moving too fast for anyone to really worry about standardization. Computing environments were also somewhat Balkanized. Standard keyboard shortcuts, for just one example, weren't. They still aren't. e.g. If you fingers are accustomed to hitting Ctrl-C to copy on most computers, they'll hit Fn-C on a Apple keyboard,…

Isn't the Macintosh desktop (with Cmd as the modifier for standard shortcuts) older than Windows and Linux desktops? So historically, it's not Apple that deviated but the others? (I did not do an extensive search into this, so there might be Ctrl-based standard shortcuts that predate Apple.)

Apple moved the Ctrl key around at least a couple times. On the Apple II it was next to the A key, the same as it was on the Xerox Star. The CMD key was a later addition.

At this point, I'd say let history be history. It'd be better to standardize on what most people are using.

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