Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023) • Hacker News Board

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#381

Post by Shorel » Tue, Apr 14, 2026, 2:23 PM UTC

mbesto wrote: post #127

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…

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…

You can just do nothing and it will work. It's also the easiest and cheapest option.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#382

Post by flohofwoe » Tue, Apr 14, 2026, 2:33 PM UTC

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…

> In text boxes in some applications, enter submits the entered text...

On Mac it's also not unusual that the Enter key is linked to the outer window's Ok button even when an a text input field is active (for instance in the "new" settings panel when trying to enter a DNS server address - pressing Enter closes the entire DNS panel, infuriating if you want to add more than one DNS server).

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#383

Post by allthetime » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 6:54 PM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #49

allthetime wrote: post #46

Apple was doing a pretty good job until whatever happened with v 26. On the web, the rise of component libraries and consistent theming is promising.

They were not. Their own apps on iOS are wildly inconsistent.

I was thinking only of desktop/macos. I try to use my phone as little as possible.

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#384

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 2:27 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

#385

Post by bryankaplan » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 11:07 AM UTC

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.

Ctrl-k focuses the Search bar unless a website hijacks it, which became regrettably common after the Search bar got hidden by default. But Firefox allows one to reënable it, and some of us continue to rely upon it.