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 wrong to be inconsistent: you're probably more likely to want fancier formatting in a PR review comment than a chat message. But as a user, it's frustrating to have to keep track of which is which.
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 case, tend to reverse this. Good apps make this configurable.
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.
If you turn on Markdown formatting, shift+enter adds a new line, unless you’re in a multi-line code block started with three backticks, and then enter adds a new line and shift+enter sends the message.
I can see why someone thought this was a good idea, but it’s just not.
Thats funny because I thought it was shift-enter that creates a newline in a field where an enter submits. Just shows the fractured nature of this whole thing.
I have a suspicion — it has to do with instant messaging clients. The idea being that you want to type short one-line messages and send them as quickly as possible in most cases, but in a rarer case when you do want a line break, that's Ctrl+Enter or Shift+Enter. Probably the first one where I personally encountered "enter is send" is ICQ, but I'm sure it's older than that, I would be surprised if no IRC clients did that.
Anything which supports multi-line input shouldn't submit on enter it should submit on button press so anyone can use it instantly without learning or remembering anything.
Then make it easier for users to learn that they can enter more quickly with control+enter which you can advertise via tooltip or adjacent text.
Better that 100% find it trivially usable even if only 75% learn they can do it faster
Today I’m thoroughly confident that if I sit in front of an AI chatbot/TUI/whatever. I will invariably fail at knowing which key combo sends the input and which enters a new line. It’s maddening.
I don’t understand why we ever let plain Enter send a prompt out.
For Slack at least you have the option to change that back to use Enter for new line (which is what I do), but other software is not that generous. I think Grafana introduced yet another way, Shift-Enter to submit, that I alway mix up.
It is very easy to fix. Add button somewhere around text box. Which turns it into multiline text edit control, increases its height. Now works as line feed and to submit the text user have to click "send" button. Most of chat messages are not multi-line, but few are and for them, proper edit UI is essential.
I, personally, just use separate text editor like Gnome Text Edit to compose my message and then Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V to send it.
I think this one is easy to explain: it's a clash between chat idioms and forum idioms. Chats since IRC have had Enter=Send because messages were supposed to be single line, while web forums have had multiline text editors from the start so Ctrl+Enter=Send made the most sense. As the two merged, confusion and conflict was inevitable.
We can easily fix this by just letting everyone choose, but no one wants to make configurable UX.
Slack requires shift+enter to create a new-line, while in JIRA shift+enter creates a new-line instead of new paragraph, creates all sorts of confusing layout issues, and because the difference is invisible, it's hard to to figure out where/when you've made this mistake of using shift+enter instead of just enter.
Nearly drove me insane, until I developed separate muscle memory between the two apps/sites.
Win32 standard multiline edit controls use Ctrl+Enter to insert a newline (instead of pushing the default button or "submit" action on a dialog), so that may be where the idiom came from.
For me, Enter to send and Ctrl+Enter for newline is the norm in an IM application, while longer and more asynchronous communication (like this textbox on HN for commenting, or a forum post, or an email client) implies that Enter inserts a newline and something more substantial (Alt+S is common, or Tab,Enter to move to and press the submit button) submits.
>"bring back idiomatic design" doesn't help when we don't have enough idioms
One must always research and find the dominant or most applicable idioms for whatever they're doing. Are you building a command line tool? For which platform? What other similar tools are you basing its design on? You have to check yourself and see whether your software conforms to the idioms of the platforms, communities, etc that you're targeting.
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.)
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 reaching for the mouse when I need to be clear about my intent
So much is solved when developers just use the provided UI controls, so much well-studied and carefully implemented behavior comes for free
PSA: CJK input frameworks(IMEs) use both Space and Enter for doing Hanzi/Kanji. Naively rigging Enter in JS to send causes wrong homonyms and/or raw phonetic scripts to get sent. There are few ways to resolve this issue, of which the easiest is to just leave Enter to the operating system.
> and ctrl-enter forces a newline (not at my computer, but I think Slack does this)
Slack also has the option to invert this in settings. I always have it inverted, so that I can freely type multiline messages, and require the more intentional ctrl-enter to actually send.
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 business.
As the author identifies, the idioms come from the use of system frameworks that steer you towards idiomatic implementations.
The system UI frameworks are tremendously detailed and handle so many corner cases you'd never think of. They allow you to graduate into being a power user over time.
Windows has Win32, and it was easier to use its controls than rolling your own custom ones. (Shame they left the UI side of win32 to rot)
macOS has AppKit, which enforces a ton. You can't change the height of a native button, for example.
iOS has UIKit, similar deal.
The web has nothing. You gotta roll your own, and it'll be half-baked at best. And since building for modern desktop platforms is horrible, the framework-less web is being used there too.
> There are hundreds of ways that different websites ask you to pick dates
Ugh, date pickers. So many of these violently throw up when I try to do the obvious thing: type in the damn date. Instead they force me to click through their inane menu, as if the designer wanted to force me into a showcase of their work. Let your power users type. Just call your user’s attention back to the field if they accidentally typed 03/142/026.
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
Thank you so much for writing this. I'm also from the desktop era and I can't STAND all the reinvention going on, or the fact that I have to move the mouse all over the screen or randomly stab my phone with my finger to find out what I can interact with.
I'm working on a GUI app and a web app in concert right now. They work in the same niche, but at different levels (one is desktop-level management, the other is enterprise-level management). I stepped back and developed a unified design language (Tela Design Language, or TDL) which has saved my sanity and made the apps actually usable again.
> Prefer words to icons. Use only icons that are universally understood.
Underrated. Except for dyslexic people, and the most obvious icon forms, I am pretty sure most people are just better and faster at recognising single words at a glance than icons.
> Every single button is clearly visually a button and says exactly what it does. And each one has a little underline to indicate its keyboard shortcut. Isn’t that nice?
Something not mentioned here (that came from the Mac world as I understand it): everywhere that the text ends with an ellipsis, choosing that action will lead to further UI prompts. The actions not written this way can complete immediately when you click the button, as they already have enough information.
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.
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 app.
This was kind of the beginning of the end for Windows consistency -- when even Microsoft thought that their own toolkit and UX standards were insufficient for their flagship application. Things have only become worse since then.
* This becomes very obvious when you run Office 97 on NT 3.51, which generally looks like Windows 3.1, but since Office 97 renders itself and does not care about OS widgets, it looks like this: http://toastytech.com/guis/nt351word.png
I had the pleasure of using a web app a few years ago that somehow managed to have buttons that looked like buttons, buttons that looked like static text, static text that looked like static text, and static text that looked like buttons, all on the same page. It was very memorable and extremely confusing to use.
Checkboxes are square,
Radiobuttons are round,
Beware those who dare
To switch them around
At some point UX became a synonym of manipulating users into doing things, and I wonder if it can ever go back.
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.
Yall remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation? Back in 2004-ish era, there was an explosion of very creative interaction methods due to flash and browser performance improvements, and general hardware improvements which led to "mystery meat navigation" and the community's pushback.
Since then, the "idiomatic design" seems to have been completely lost.
Much of this is foisted upon us by visual designers who wandered into product design. It's a category error the profession has never quite corrected. (maybe more controversially, it's caused by having anyone with the word "designer" in their title on a project that doesn't need such a person - this category is larger than anyone thinks)
Guys, I found out about this technology called Cascading Style Sheets recently and I think it's the missing piece we've been looking for. It lets you declaratively specify layout in a composable, hierarchical system based on something called the Document Object Model in a way that minimizes both clientside and serverside processing, based on these things called "stylesheets".
The best part is, it's super easy to customize them, read others for inspiration or to see how they did something, or even ship multiple per site to deal with different user preferences. Through this "forms" api, and little-known browser features like url-fragments, target/attribute selector, and style combinators, plus "the checkbox hack" you can build extremely responsive UIs out of it by "cascading" UI updates through your site! When do you think they're going to add it to next.js?
I'm tentatively calling this new UI paradigm "no-framework" or "no package manager", not sure yet https://i.imgur.com/OEMPJA8.png
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.
The number of JavaScript dropdown replacements that don't work correctly with the keyboard is stunning. It always amazes me how many forms fail at this basic usability aspect. The browser has homogeneous form controls built in, just use them!
designers are creatives and will always believe the visual elements of a design need to be updated, refreshed, modernized etc.. then we get flavour of the month nand new trends in visual language and ui design that things must be updated to.
As soon as UI design became a creative visual thing rather than a functional thing , everything started to go crazy in UI land..
My hope is that since tools like Google Stitch have made fancy looking design free that it will become obvious how functionally worthless fancy looking design always was. It used to signal that a site paid a lot of money and was therefore legitimate. Now it signals nothing.
I’m not sure the core thesis is correct for two reasons. I’ve been around the block a few times now and I don’t think I’ve ever lived in an era where people were like “the current state of design is awesome”. There are always rose-tinted think pieces with some dubious stats about how things are awesome in the past.
Secondly, idiomatic is good if it matches your mental model. However, what does idiomatic mean in the context of billions of people coming from various computing starting point. Just as a simple thought exercise, how do you design idiomatically for people who are most familiar with Windows era computers and people who start with touchscreens, both generations who are still alive today?
I reference Jakob's Law at least once a week, which says users use not your site most of the time. So if it works like most other sites then users will intuitively understand it. And if you do something different users will struggle to learn it.
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, which isn't Copy.
Today, things are moving slower and web interfaces have largely taken over. Your choice of OS mostly just affects how you get into a browser or some other cross-platform program... and what keys you hit for Copy and Paste.
Now would be a reasonable point in the history of computation for us to seriously consider standards. I'm not talking about licenses, inspectors, and litigation if you get it wrong. I'm just talking about some organization publishing standards that say, "This is how you build a standard login form. These are the features it should have. This is how they should be laid out. These are the icons to use or not use. These are the what keyboard shortcuts should be implemented." The idea is that people who sit down and start building a common bit of interface, instead of picking and choosing others to copy, should have a clear and simple set of standards to follow.
And yes, Apple needs to fix their #$%@ing keyboards.
> You can enter ALT+F to open the File menu, then hit N
Some developers raised on Macs don't understand the need for this behaviour in the Windows version of their software. Most do, but it's frustrating when the windows version of a multi platform framework doesn't afford for this.
Also the arrival of windows 8 which put controls and buttons at top and bottom of the screen was a big step backwards in consistency. Mobile interfaces (Android) still do this and it slows down interactions.
>using GMail is nothing like using GSuites is nothing like using Google Docs
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.
> Suppose you’re logging into a website, and it asks: “do you want to stay logged in?”
Then the website has made its first mistake, and should delete that checkbox entirely, because the correct answer is always "yes". If you don't want to be logged in, either hit the logout button, or use private browsing. It is not the responsibility of individual websites to deal with this.
There are too many issues with those designs of the old, so instead of going regressing into them let’s instead progress towards the fantasy of universal user-centric configuration!
Who do I need 50 different “save” icons in different apps when I could set just one and have instant “idiomatic” recognition anywhere? I could even ditch the text because it’s one of the top 10 commonly used icons that require no text. Oh, and the web apps would also use it in their menus…
Or not, I never need this icon in the first place since I always use a shortcut, so one config change, and now not a single app has the icon!
Can I have “Close” menu use X as an accelerator shortcut everywhere instead of C, and let it work on Windows and Mac and Linux?
Can I not waste the most ergonomic thumb modifier key Alt to open menus I rarely use? And if I waste it, can I also have it working on a Mac, where it would have the same physical position, ie, Cmd?
Are mobile native apps "idiomatic" then? Speaking of uis made with native frameworks of a specific platform. They surely share some patterns, especially on navigation, top bar, button bar, etc but it's been the death of design and ux. You can't use any app with one hand alone, everything is flat. I share the sentiment that some basic elements should behave the same, like inputs, but I miss the day where we experimented with uis, especially with early internet and flash. Sure many of these looked bad and were horrible to use, but in some ways each one had some character. We basically stopped doing any ui innovation on both the web and native desktop/mobile platforms and that's sad to me
One of my pet peeves is that increasingly frequently, pressing Enter to submit a web form doesn’t even universally work anymore. Instead you have to tab to the submit button, and (depending on the web page) have to press Space or Enter to actuate it.
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 behavior science also changed a lot of things. People study behavior, patterns, what can sell more, what looks more intuitive. If something looks a bit different from the others, it will sell better. If something look the same way as the previous one, why should the client buy it? The client needs to see a difference, it can be only a little bit more flashy, but it must be different.
20 years, later, this is the result.
Especially now, in the AI era, where each person can make a relatively working app from the sofa, without any knowledge of UI/UX principles.
The examples chosen are particularly interesting to me.
In particular Microsoft Word 2000 was panned at the time for not following native conventions. Its inputs, buttons, and File/Edit menus actually do not match the underlying OS.
Do developers who came from Photoshop or Fireworks days actually like Figma? Maybe it's just down to how our designers are using it but I find pawing around a giant 2 dimensional document awkward as hell versus just opening a well named PSD in a folder.
- "Not-Boxes": Negatively formulated text (disable... / don't...)
- "Button-Checkboxes": Checkboxes with verbs that trigger actions
- "Radio-Checkboxes": Radios that are actually checkboxes (not mutually exclusive)
- "Toggle-Checkboxes": Checkboxes that are actually toggle buttons and can't decided wheter the text should show the current state or the state that will happen when you click.
UIs are inconsistent even in the same app. Nevermind plugins or suites. It would be great if menus were customizable so you could plug in your own template.
All of these people who keep saying that webapps can replace desktop applications were simply never desktop power users. They don’t know what they don’t know.
Shows a picture of Office 2000 and says "The visuals feel a little ugly and dated: it’s blocky, the font isn’t great, and the colors are dull."
Are you serious? Nothing has come close to it. Yeah we have higher resolution screens, but everything else is much less legible and accessible than that screenshot.
My health provider recently changed their homepage UI to have a human 'profile' icon to mean "register", a lock icon to sign-in, and 'box-arrow-in-right" to logout. No tooltips
Not sure how you can put the genie back in the bottle, every app wants to have its own design so how can you enforce them to all obey the same design principles? You simply can't.
371 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 wrong to be inconsistent: you're probably more likely to want fancier formatting in a PR review comment than a chat message. But as a user, it's frustrating to have to keep track of which is which.
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 case, tend to reverse this. Good apps make this configurable.
If you turn on Markdown formatting, shift+enter adds a new line, unless you’re in a multi-line code block started with three backticks, and then enter adds a new line and shift+enter sends the message.
I can see why someone thought this was a good idea, but it’s just not.
Ctrl+Enter: Always submits
Shift+Enter: Always newline (if supported)
Enter: Reasonable default, depending on context
> I don't know how we got here
I have a suspicion — it has to do with instant messaging clients. The idea being that you want to type short one-line messages and send them as quickly as possible in most cases, but in a rarer case when you do want a line break, that's Ctrl+Enter or Shift+Enter. Probably the first one where I personally encountered "enter is send" is ICQ, but I'm sure it's older than that, I would be surprised if no IRC clients did that.
Then make it easier for users to learn that they can enter more quickly with control+enter which you can advertise via tooltip or adjacent text.
Better that 100% find it trivially usable even if only 75% learn they can do it faster
I don’t understand why we ever let plain Enter send a prompt out.
It is very easy to fix. Add button somewhere around text box. Which turns it into multiline text edit control, increases its height. Now works as line feed and to submit the text user have to click "send" button. Most of chat messages are not multi-line, but few are and for them, proper edit UI is essential.
I, personally, just use separate text editor like Gnome Text Edit to compose my message and then Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V to send it.
We can easily fix this by just letting everyone choose, but no one wants to make configurable UX.
Nearly drove me insane, until I developed separate muscle memory between the two apps/sites.
For me, Enter to send and Ctrl+Enter for newline is the norm in an IM application, while longer and more asynchronous communication (like this textbox on HN for commenting, or a forum post, or an email client) implies that Enter inserts a newline and something more substantial (Alt+S is common, or Tab,Enter to move to and press the submit button) submits.
>"bring back idiomatic design" doesn't help when we don't have enough idioms
One must always research and find the dominant or most applicable idioms for whatever they're doing. Are you building a command line tool? For which platform? What other similar tools are you basing its design on? You have to check yourself and see whether your software conforms to the idioms of the platforms, communities, etc that you're targeting.
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 reaching for the mouse when I need to be clear about my intent
So much is solved when developers just use the provided UI controls, so much well-studied and carefully implemented behavior comes for free
> and ctrl-enter forces a newline (not at my computer, but I think Slack does this)
Slack also has the option to invert this in settings. I always have it inverted, so that I can freely type multiline messages, and require the more intentional ctrl-enter to actually send.
> you're probably more likely to want fancier formatting in a PR review comment than a chat message.
Exactly, and that's how you keep track
There is incompetence and there is also malevolence in the encouragement of dark patterns by the revenue side of the business.
The system UI frameworks are tremendously detailed and handle so many corner cases you'd never think of. They allow you to graduate into being a power user over time.
Windows has Win32, and it was easier to use its controls than rolling your own custom ones. (Shame they left the UI side of win32 to rot)
macOS has AppKit, which enforces a ton. You can't change the height of a native button, for example.
iOS has UIKit, similar deal.
The web has nothing. You gotta roll your own, and it'll be half-baked at best. And since building for modern desktop platforms is horrible, the framework-less web is being used there too.
> There are hundreds of ways that different websites ask you to pick dates
Ugh, date pickers. So many of these violently throw up when I try to do the obvious thing: type in the damn date. Instead they force me to click through their inane menu, as if the designer wanted to force me into a showcase of their work. Let your power users type. Just call your user’s attention back to the field if they accidentally typed 03/142/026.
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
I'm working on a GUI app and a web app in concert right now. They work in the same niche, but at different levels (one is desktop-level management, the other is enterprise-level management). I stepped back and developed a unified design language (Tela Design Language, or TDL) which has saved my sanity and made the apps actually usable again.
https://parkscomputing.com/content/tdl-reference.html
https://github.com/paulmooreparks/tela/blob/main/TELA-DESIGN...
> Prefer words to icons. Use only icons that are universally understood.
Underrated. Except for dyslexic people, and the most obvious icon forms, I am pretty sure most people are just better and faster at recognising single words at a glance than icons.
> Every single button is clearly visually a button and says exactly what it does. And each one has a little underline to indicate its keyboard shortcut. Isn’t that nice?
Something not mentioned here (that came from the Mac world as I understand it): everywhere that the text ends with an ellipsis, choosing that action will lead to further UI prompts. The actions not written this way can complete immediately when you click the button, as they already have enough information.
> 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.
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 app.
This was kind of the beginning of the end for Windows consistency -- when even Microsoft thought that their own toolkit and UX standards were insufficient for their flagship application. Things have only become worse since then.
* This becomes very obvious when you run Office 97 on NT 3.51, which generally looks like Windows 3.1, but since Office 97 renders itself and does not care about OS widgets, it looks like this: http://toastytech.com/guis/nt351word.png
I had the pleasure of using a web app a few years ago that somehow managed to have buttons that looked like buttons, buttons that looked like static text, static text that looked like static text, and static text that looked like buttons, all on the same page. It was very memorable and extremely confusing to use.
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.
Since then, the "idiomatic design" seems to have been completely lost.
The best part is, it's super easy to customize them, read others for inspiration or to see how they did something, or even ship multiple per site to deal with different user preferences. Through this "forms" api, and little-known browser features like url-fragments, target/attribute selector, and style combinators, plus "the checkbox hack" you can build extremely responsive UIs out of it by "cascading" UI updates through your site! When do you think they're going to add it to next.js?
I'm tentatively calling this new UI paradigm "no-framework" or "no package manager", not sure yet https://i.imgur.com/OEMPJA8.png
I generally don’t need any fancy keyboard shortcuts on a website. I have a mouse, I can just click around.
> Avoid JavaScript reimplementations of HTML basics, e.g. React Button components instead of styled
As soon as UI design became a creative visual thing rather than a functional thing , everything started to go crazy in UI land..
Secondly, idiomatic is good if it matches your mental model. However, what does idiomatic mean in the context of billions of people coming from various computing starting point. Just as a simple thought exercise, how do you design idiomatically for people who are most familiar with Windows era computers and people who start with touchscreens, both generations who are still alive today?
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, which isn't Copy.
Today, things are moving slower and web interfaces have largely taken over. Your choice of OS mostly just affects how you get into a browser or some other cross-platform program... and what keys you hit for Copy and Paste.
Now would be a reasonable point in the history of computation for us to seriously consider standards. I'm not talking about licenses, inspectors, and litigation if you get it wrong. I'm just talking about some organization publishing standards that say, "This is how you build a standard login form. These are the features it should have. This is how they should be laid out. These are the icons to use or not use. These are the what keyboard shortcuts should be implemented." The idea is that people who sit down and start building a common bit of interface, instead of picking and choosing others to copy, should have a clear and simple set of standards to follow.
And yes, Apple needs to fix their #$%@ing keyboards.
> The visuals feel a little ugly and dated: it’s blocky, the font isn’t great, and the colors are dull.
I don't get this at all. I find the screenshot clear and beautiful if anything.
> You can enter ALT+F to open the File menu, then hit N
Some developers raised on Macs don't understand the need for this behaviour in the Windows version of their software. Most do, but it's frustrating when the windows version of a multi platform framework doesn't afford for this.
Also the arrival of windows 8 which put controls and buttons at top and bottom of the screen was a big step backwards in consistency. Mobile interfaces (Android) still do this and it slows down interactions.
> You don’t want to have to remember to use CTRL + Shift + C in certain circumstances or right-click → copy in others, that’d be annoying.
laughs in linux wouldn’t that be nice.
>using GMail is nothing like using GSuites is nothing like using Google Docs
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.
> Suppose you’re logging into a website, and it asks: “do you want to stay logged in?”
Then the website has made its first mistake, and should delete that checkbox entirely, because the correct answer is always "yes". If you don't want to be logged in, either hit the logout button, or use private browsing. It is not the responsibility of individual websites to deal with this.
Who do I need 50 different “save” icons in different apps when I could set just one and have instant “idiomatic” recognition anywhere? I could even ditch the text because it’s one of the top 10 commonly used icons that require no text. Oh, and the web apps would also use it in their menus… Or not, I never need this icon in the first place since I always use a shortcut, so one config change, and now not a single app has the icon!
Can I have “Close” menu use X as an accelerator shortcut everywhere instead of C, and let it work on Windows and Mac and Linux?
Can I not waste the most ergonomic thumb modifier key Alt to open menus I rarely use? And if I waste it, can I also have it working on a Mac, where it would have the same physical position, ie, Cmd?
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.
Especially now, in the AI era, where each person can make a relatively working app from the sofa, without any knowledge of UI/UX principles.
In particular Microsoft Word 2000 was panned at the time for not following native conventions. Its inputs, buttons, and File/Edit menus actually do not match the underlying OS.
Do developers who came from Photoshop or Fireworks days actually like Figma? Maybe it's just down to how our designers are using it but I find pawing around a giant 2 dimensional document awkward as hell versus just opening a well named PSD in a folder.
- "Not-Boxes": Negatively formulated text (disable... / don't...)
- "Button-Checkboxes": Checkboxes with verbs that trigger actions
- "Radio-Checkboxes": Radios that are actually checkboxes (not mutually exclusive)
- "Toggle-Checkboxes": Checkboxes that are actually toggle buttons and can't decided wheter the text should show the current state or the state that will happen when you click.
> 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.
I don't care about the new features in a browser update. Ideally, nothing at all has changed.
I don't want a "tour" of the software I just installed. I, presumably, installed it to do something, and I just want to do that thing.
I don't want to have to select a preference for how a specific action is performed in your software. If it's not what I expected, I will learn it.
And for the love of GOD, nobody wants to subscribe to your newsletter.
All of these people who keep saying that webapps can replace desktop applications were simply never desktop power users. They don’t know what they don’t know.
Are you serious? Nothing has come close to it. Yeah we have higher resolution screens, but everything else is much less legible and accessible than that screenshot.