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Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

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Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#361

Post by omer_balyali »

lelanthran wrote: post #301
squidsoup wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Design is more than styling, it is also behaviour and state, which is what react helps you encapsulate in a component.

> Design is more than styling, it is also behaviour and state, Maybe I need an example of this for buttons: what behaviour on buttons should be consistent? What about state - what state on buttons should be consistent?

The core value of front-end JavaScript frameworks is state management. You don't need to use a framework, but the need to manage complex application state doesn't go away.

Take this example: when a checkout button on an ecommerce website/application is triggered, the button should reflect that state and prevent re-triggering the same action so the button has to be disabled, then ideally a loading state has to be shown. When that action fails, an error may need to be displayed. Ideally you would use native DOM states first, ARIA states may be used if no native DOM states can be used, and if that's not enough then custom data states may be necessary.

Styling should be reacting to application state, preventing impossible states and bugs to create predictable UIs. Thus, styling is also a state management concern. UI=fn(state).

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#362

Post by cubefox »

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…

It's even worse on some websites. For example, Grok sends on enter. Even on mobile. Where you can't even press ctrl+enter, because mobile software keyboards don't have a control key. So you can't include line breaks at all when talking to Grok. You can merely accidentally send a message prematurely. (Maybe they have fixed it by now.)

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#363

Post by augustk »

pkphilip wrote: post #6

UX has really gone downhill. This is particularly true of banking websites. Also, the trend of hiding scrollbars, huge wasted spaces, making buttons look really flat, confusing icons, confusing ways of using drop downs rather than using the select/option html controls etc have all made the whole experience far inferior to where desktop UI was even decades ago

For group chats in Microsoft Teams with more than seven participants, if you click on "View and add participants" (an icon with two people and a plus sign) you see a list of seven participants. At first I didn't know that you could scroll in this list.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#364

Post by augustk »

robocat wrote: post #135

We've lost some common features: * Undo & redo * Help files & context sensitive F1 * Hints on mouse hover * Keyboard shortcuts & shortcut customisation * Main menus * Files & directories * ESC to close/back * Drag n drop Revelation features when they first became common. Now mostly gone on mobile and websites.

And knowing how to get the version of an application (which used to be in Help -> About).

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#365

Post by suzzer99 »

abustamam wrote: post #356
suzzer99 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An underrated senior engineer skill is saving stakeholders from their own worst impulses.

Agreed, but I think it's underrated because the trait could also get someone fired or laid off.

Yeah you don't walk into the job doing it. But once your position is secure and you've built some stuff to where you can make changes in 5 minutes that might take someone else a day, then you can start pushing back on craziness.

There's also an art to how you do it. It's important to build up trust that you won't tell the client something is impossible or really hard just because you don't want to do it. You try to explain to them how much complexity this is going to add, how that will make it harder to add new features in the future, and most importantly offer some alternatives that get them 90% of what they're trying to do. Most clients will appreciate that approach IME, especially if you've already thrilled them a few times.

This is one of the reasons I'm not so worried about Claude taking my job in the immediate future. But I am still extremely worried about the industry as a whole and by extension the future of the middle class.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#366

Post by abustamam »

suzzer99 wrote: post #365
abustamam wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but I think it's underrated because the trait could also get someone fired or laid off.

Yeah you don't walk into the job doing it. But once your position is secure and you've built some stuff to where you can make changes in 5 minutes that might take someone else a day, then you can start pushing back on craziness. There's also an art to how you do it. It's important to build up trust that you won't tell the client something is impossible or really hard just because you don't want to do it. You try to e…

Yeah I agree. I've worked with my boss in various capacities for the last ten years. When he says "can we do X" my answer is always like "we can do anything, the question is does the company want to allocate Y resources to get X done." Claude, being a yes-man, will always say "you're absolutely right!" to any idea you throw at it, not knowing (and, perhaps more crucially, not caring) if it's the right fit for your product/business.

I think part of the problem is that many engineers don't stick around long enough to build that rapport, which isn't a problem of AI in itself but is certainly exacerbated by it.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#367

Post by studog »

fireflash38 wrote: post #343
iambateman wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's because enter does different things at different times in the exact same text box. Write a code snippet/block text. Does [enter] insert a newline, exit the block, or send the message? What about in a bulleted or numbered list? And my 2 biggest pet peeves with MS Teams: 1. trying to edit the first letter in a `preformat block`. It's not possible. It will either exit the block or go to the second letter. 2. Consis…

I have a very small Kevin Bacon number to the "guy who runs Teams". The message from them is "please use the built-in feedback tool to tell us about these things".

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#368

Post by amadeuspagel »

> Study and follow HTML/CSS idioms whenever possible. For example, a link should be underlined, colorful, pointer on mouseover, and written as an tag.

Moreover, if you change the color, you should also change the color of visited links, otherwise they will be the same color. And ideally, you should use a shade of blue for links, and purple for visited links.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#369

Post by phil294 »

andrepd wrote: post #132
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.

The Signal desktop app does both too, I guess, but in a way that actually makes sense . Enter sends a message since IMs tend to be short one-liners. Shift-Enter inserts a line break. But if you click an arrow on the top of the text box, it expands to more than half of the height of the window, and now Enter does a line break and Shift-Enter sends. Which makes a lot of sense because now you're in "message composer" /…

I would say it mirrors common behavior in the Web, which in turn was largely influenced by old desktop software: Enter in a `` inserts a line break, while enter in an `` submits the surrounding form (or does nothing). It is an established idiom after all, many apps just get it wrong.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#370

Post by godshatter »

robocat wrote: post #135

We've lost some common features: * Undo & redo * Help files & context sensitive F1 * Hints on mouse hover * Keyboard shortcuts & shortcut customisation * Main menus * Files & directories * ESC to close/back * Drag n drop Revelation features when they first became common. Now mostly gone on mobile and websites.

Also having the cursor show up in the proper place on a new form and having tab order work.
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