Posted by phil294 8 hours ago
UX has gotten from something with a cause to being the cause for something
> that a link? Maybe!
When Apple transitioned from skeuomorphic to flat design this was a huge issue. It was difficult to determine what was a button on iOS and whether you tapped it (and the removal of loading gifs across platforms further aggravated problems like double submits).
Another absurdity with iOS is the number of ways you can gesture. It started simply, now it is complex to the point where the OS can confuse one gesture for another.
Mystery gesture navigation is also now on by default and terrible on Android, too. It's awful with children or older folks (or even me!) who trigger it by accident all the time. Some of it I was able to disable on my children's iPads. It's still frustrating that easy to accidentally trigger but impossible to discover gestures are the default and also frustrating that we have the very last iPad generation with a button.
Since then, the "idiomatic design" seems to have been completely lost.
> Avoid JavaScript reimplementations of HTML basics, e.g. React Button components instead of styled <button> elements.
I've been hearing that for the entire Internet era yet people continue to reinvent scrollbars, text boxes, buttons, checkboxes and, well, every input element. And I don't know why.
What this article is really talking about is conventions not idioms (IMHO). You see a button and you know how it works. A standard button will behave in predictable ways across devices and support accessibility and not require loading third-party JS libraries.
Also:
> Notwithstanding that, there are fashion cycles in visual design. We had skeuomorphic design in the late 2000s and early 2010s, material design in the mid 2010s, those colorful 2D vector illustrations in the late 2010s, etc.
I'm glad the author brought this up. Flat design (often called "material design" as it is here) has usability issues and this has been discussed a lot eg [1].
The concept here is called affordances [2], which is where the presentation of a UI element suggests how it's used, like being pressed or grabbed or dragged. Flat design and other kinds of minimalism tend to hide affordances.
It seems like this is a fundamental flaw in human nature that crops up everywhere: people feel like they have to do something different because it's different, not because it's better. It's almost like people have this need to make their mark. I see this all the time in game sequels that ruin what was liked by the original, like they're trying to keep it "fresh".
It might have started in an innocent way, all those A/B tests about call-to-action button color, etc. But it became a full scale race between products and product managers (Whose landing page is best at converting users?, etc.) and somewhere in this race we just lost the sense of why UX exists. Product success is measured in conversion rates, net promoter score, bounce rates, etc. (all pretty much short-term metrics, by the way), and are optimized with disregard to the end-user experience. I mean, what was originally meant by UX. It is now completely turned on its head.
Like I said, I wonder if there is way back of if we are stuck in the rat race. The question is how to quit it.
* 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.
As soon as UI design became a creative visual thing rather than a functional thing , everything started to go crazy in UI land..
Another annoyance is that many web forms (and desktop apps based on web tech) don’t automatically place the keyboard focus in an input field anymore when first displayed. This is also an antipattern on mobile, that even on screens that only have one or two text inputs, and where the previous action clearly expressed that you want to perform a step that requires entering something, you first have to tap on the input field for the keyboard to appear, so that you can start entering the requested information.
The other day I used Safari on a newly setup macOS machine for the first time in probably a decade. Of course wanted to browse HN, and eventually wanted to write a comment. Wrote a bunch of stuff, and by muscle memory, hit tab then enter.
Guess what happened instead of "submitted the comment"? Tab on macOS Safari apparently jumps up to the addressbar (???), and then of course you press Enter so it reloads the page, and everything you wrote disappears. I'm gonna admit, I did the same time just minutes later again, then I gave up using Safari for any sort of browsing and downloaded Firefox instead.
And this highlights something that I think the author glosses over a little but is part of why idioms break for a lot of web applications. A lot of the keyboard commands we're used to issue commands to the OS and so their idioms are generally defined by the idioms of the OS. A web application, by nature of being an application within an application, has to try to intercept or override those commands. It's the same problem that linux (and windows) face with key commands shared by their terminals and their GUIs. Is "ctrl-c" copy or interrupt? Depends on what has focus right now, and both are "idiomatic" for their particular environments. macOS neatly sidesteps this for terminals because "ctrl-c" was never used for copy, it was always "cmd-c".
Incidentally, what you're looking for in Safari is either "Press Tab to highlight each item on a webpage" setting in the Advanced settings tab. By default with that off, you would use "opt-Tab" to navigate to all elements.
I'm not sure why this isn't the default, but this allows for UI navigation via keyboard on macOS, including Safari.
G Suite (no s) was the old name for Google Workspace. Google Workspace includes GMail, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Calendar, etc., so it doesn't really make sense to say that Google Workspace has a different UX than Google Docs, if Google Docs is part of Google Workspace.
Disclosure: I work at Google, but not one of the listed products.
IDK if such was the intent, of course.
laughs in linux wouldn’t that be nice.