13 ms·

Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

• foobarbecue 5mo ago
  Lately I've occasionally been running into round check boxes that look like radio buttons. Why????
  • LunicLynx 5mo ago
    UX want to put their own spin on things. I’ve noticed this repeatedly. UX has gotten from something with a cause to being the cause for something
    • hexasquid 5mo ago
      In 20 years of front-end web development I've never encountered a designer willing to use standard form controls. I assume they exist.
  • andai 5mo ago
    I think the answer is they just don't know.
  • iamcalledrob 5mo ago
    iOS decided square checkboxes were ugly, and design patterns are flowing from mobile->desktop these days.
    • suzzer99 5mo ago
      I think Apple does stuff like this because a) they can get away with it and b) they know countless competitors who can't get away with it will blindly follow their shitty new design paradigm.
      • Cthulhu_ 5mo ago
        And yet, Microsoft is still doing their own thing. It's a shame they didn't follow through with, and / or the industry didn't follow along with, Windows Phone because it was a pretty unique design. Google / Material Design also does their own thing still.
  • aspensmonster 5mo ago
    Squircles[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squircle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squircle
• amakhov 5mo ago
  ... and please stop doing paralax...
  • dxdm 5mo ago
    Such a nice way to give more depth to your content. </s>
• finghin 5mo ago
  > 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.
  • PhilipRoman 5mo ago
    ...except for HN "unvote"/"undown" feedback which is especially unfortunate due to the shared prefix. Every time I upvote something I squint at the unvote/undown to make sure I didn't misclick.
    • Terr_ 5mo ago
      I'm still shocked that the links are so dang close together on mobile. You don't even need the proverbial fat fingers.
  • tgv 5mo ago
    I am pretty sure icons are easier and faster to recognize, except when you make them (too) small. In particular, they probably are easier in the long run, as long as they don't change position. But in a context where things change or you need a lot of buttons, words probably win.
    • kevincox 5mo ago
      This is why you need both. Icons are faster to recognize, but words tell you what the icons need. So you need the words at first to discover the icons, then the icons serve as valuable tools for scanning and quickly locating the click target that you are looking for.
      • tgv 5mo ago
        That's what I tend to do too, but sometimes space requirements win. But of course, a good design is adapted to its user: frequent/infrequent is an important dimension, as is the time willing to learn the UI. E.g., many (semi) pro audio and video tools have a huge number of options, and they're all hidden under colorful little thingies and short-cuts. Space is important there, because you want as many tracks and Vu meters and whatever on your screen as possible. Their users are interested in getting the most out of them, so they learn it, and it pays off.
• pkphilip 5mo ago
  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
  • hermitcrab 5mo ago
    Hiding scrollbars is a deeply annoying trend. I don't understand the rationale. Because someone thought it looks aesthetically cooler?
    • trueno 5mo ago
      mobile first philosophies is my guess. ...curious who decided seeing scrollbars wasn't useful on mobile though. it's very useful knowing where i am in a long scrolling thing.
      • kalleboo 5mo ago
        On mobile it made sense on the original 320px wide iPhone screen. On the huge screens we have today, less so.
  • trueno 5mo ago
    i think material ui kicked design in the face in a broad multiple-industry-capturing way. it's gotta be the worst design language to interface with and it just unreasonably requires effort to navigate around gcp and lots of other google tooling. i'm glad it feels dated now and people are moving away to input boxes that are enclosed in, you know, a box... but i cannot stand what it brought to ux/ui.
  • augustk 5mo 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.
• xnx 5mo ago
  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.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • jonahx 5mo ago
    This is a good point, but there's usually a long tail on transitions like this.
• ufocia 5mo ago
  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.
  • jfengel 5mo ago
    I prefer to avoid customizing apps. I want to be able to sit down at a fresh install (or someone else's) and not spend time learning their preferences. When someone asks me for a checkbox so they can have my app work their way instead and everyone else can do theirs, the hair stands up on the back of my neck. The check boxes are hard to discover unless you put them front and center, in which case they remain there forever serving no purpose. I would rather redesign the entire interface, either to find the right answer that works for everyone, or to learn what makes one class of users different from another. The check box is a mode, and nodes are to be avoided if I possibly can. I realize that this puts me at odds with a whole class of users who want to make their box do their thing. It's your box and you should do what you want. And I really love style sheets for that. Rather than cobbling together my own set of possible preferences you should have something Turing complete. Go nuts with it.
    • carlosjobim 5mo ago
      I think most non-Linux users haven't made a fresh install in 5-10 years. Preferences files and apps get transferred when you buy a new computer or update your os.
      • jfengel 5mo ago
        I was pleased how much was passed over from my last phone. I got the same brand so it's not surprising, but wow it is so much better than The Good Old Days (tm).
        • kjkjadksj 5mo ago
          I remember the old days being surprisingly smooth. There was some verizon tool that transferred all my contacts from the dumb phone to my first smart phone.
• mcculley 5mo ago
  The web needs a HIG. 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.
  • dxdm 5mo ago
    I think HIG means "Human Interface Guidelines" here. Seems to be an Apple thing. I wish more people would avoid or at least introduce abbreviations that may be unfamiliar to the audience.
    • andai 5mo ago
      Microsoft had one too: WIG! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22475521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22475521
      • teddyh 5mo ago
        There are quite a number of them: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_interface_guidelines#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_interface_guidelines#Exa...>
    • marcosdumay 5mo ago
      I think it was a Xerox thing. But since the 90s, everybody has some since. Oh, and if you want to read one to learn, the Microsoft ones are better than the Apple's.
  • andai 5mo ago
    Yeah it would be nice if the web accessibility guidelines also focused on actually using the thing normally. For example: offsetting the scrollbar from the right edge of the screen by 1px should be punishable by death.
• satvikpendem 5mo ago
  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.
• teeray 5mo ago
  > 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.
  • nkrisc 5mo ago
    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.
    • andai 5mo ago
      I've seen some that had a drop-down for the month name. But since it was native, I could type the month name and my browser selected the right one.
    • anamexis 5mo ago
      Or: - Use localization context to show the right order for the user - Display context to the user that makes obvious what the order is - Show the month name during/immediately after input so the user can verify
    • cush 5mo ago
      This has a solved problem for a long time
    • RobotToaster 5mo ago
      <input type="date"> is automatically formatted based on the user's locale.
      • 8organicbits 5mo ago
        This is still a partial solution as the user needs to know that their locale is being used and know how their locale is configured to understand the format. This is most problematic on shared computers or kiosks, especially when traveling.
• andyfilms1 5mo ago
  And while we're at it, stop with the popups and notifications. 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.
  • bccdee 5mo ago
    I actually might want to subscribe to your newsletter, provided I read & enjoy your article. So why does the pop-up always interrupt me before the page has even finished loading? If you inset an unobtrusive newsletter button 60% of the way through the article, perhaps I'll actually click it (or, more realistically, follow your RSS feed).
• JojoFatsani 5mo ago
  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.
  • api 5mo ago
    Software is now media, not tooling. Media tends to come with a lot of baked in perverse incentives.
    • adityaathalye 5mo ago
      Feels like somebody has read their Marshall McLuhan :) I recently started reading Understanding Media, and every chapter delivers at least one mind-melting moment; something he draws attention to and/or frames in some way.
  • polkapie 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    • exe34 5mo ago
      Would it be better to bring this up in the retro? We're getting sidetracked here. We could set up a meeting with the stakeholders.
  • bfbf 5mo ago
    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 them for faster bikes.
• chapz 5mo ago
  This kinda hurt. The world is in a rush to be the ASAP, so nobodys interest is to do design good, it needs to be fast. And now we have this sh*tshow.
• kennywinker 5mo ago
  > 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.
  • davemp 5mo ago
    I’m a decade+ linux power user and I still do insane things like pipe outputs into vim so I can copy paste without having to remember tmux copy paste modes when I have vertical panes open.
  • skydhash 5mo ago
    Terminal UX existed before the CUA guidelines from IBM. People complains about Ctrl + Shift + C behavior when it exists only in one category of application, terminal emulators.
    • bitwize 5mo ago
      This is why Apple gave Macs a command key in 1984. Control is for sending control cides; command is for issuing commands!
    • eviks 5mo ago
      Age doesn't matter, usability and consistency does, so that's a valid complaint towards all those hostile apps that haven't changed the defaults
  • ux266478 5mo ago
    Plan 9 fixes this.
  • layer8 5mo ago
    This is the kind of thing why I still prefer Windows as a UI.
• hungryhobbit 5mo ago
  "Avoid JavaScript reimplementations of HTML basics, e.g. React Button components instead of styled <button> elements." Tell me you know nothing about web development without saying you know nothing about web dev ... 1. React is an irrelevant implementation detail. You can have a plain HTML button in a button component, or you can have an image or whatever else. React has nothing to do with the design choices. 2. React is also how you get consistent design across a major web app. Can you imagine if every button on every site was the same Windows button gray color, regardless of the site's color? It'd be awful! React components (with CSS classes) are a way for a site like Amazon to make all their buttons orange (although I don't actually know if Amazon uses React specifically). But again, whether they look and act like standard buttons comes down to Amazon's design choices ... not whether their tech stack includes React or not. Look idiomatic design is incredibly important to web design. One of the most popular web design/usability books, Don't Make Me Think, is all about idiomatic design! But ultimately it's a design choice, which has very little, if anything at all, to do with which development tools you use.
  • 201984 5mo ago
    > Can you imagine if every button on every site was the same Windows button gray color, regardless of the site's color? Not a webdev, but can't you just use CSS on the <button> element for that?
    • hungryhobbit 5mo ago
      Yes you can, on a small/simple site. But on a serious web application sticking to plain HTML/CSS will be far too limiting, in many ways. There's a reason why 99.9% of web apps use JavaScript, and with it a tool (framework) like React, Astro, Angular, or Vue. And if you're using such tools, you use them (eg. you use React "components") to create a consistent UI across the site. But again, which tool you use to develop a site has very little to do with what design choices you make. A React dev with no designer to guide him might pick the most popular date picker component for React, and have the React community influence design that way, but ... A) if everyone picks the most popular tool, it becomes more idiomatic (it's not doing this that creates divergence), and B) if there is a human designer, they can pick from 20+ date picker libraries AND they can ask the dev team to further customize them. It's designers (or developers playing at being designers) that result in wacky new UI that's not idiomatic. It has (almost) nothing to do with React and that layer of tooling, and if anything those tools lead to more idiomatic design.
• alienbaby 5mo ago
  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..
  • ako 5mo ago
    That is because they know the users. Users are very sensitive to this: if the outside wasn't changed then the internals cannot be much improved. You see this with cars, cars need a new design otherwise customer will think nothing much changed. Customer will usually buy newer over better because they think newer must have improvements, and styling signals new. Same with computers, all the disappointments when apple releases a new macbook without changing the exterior....
• DoneWithAllThat 5mo ago
  Idiomatic design will never come back. The reason being companies believe (correctly) that they design language is part of their brand. The uniqueness is, basically, the point.
  • strongpigeon 5mo ago
    That was one of the problem with the original Material framework: every app looked too similar making it hard to distinguish one from another. Google was concerned about people associating bad third party app with itself. They added more customizability in Material 2 (or was it 3?), but yeah at that point some of the damage was done.
• readitalready 5mo ago
  This is a really huge and a fundamental flaw in AI-driven design. AI-driven design is completely inconsistent. If you re-ran an AI generated layout, even with the same prompt, the output for a user interface will look completely different between two runs.
  • ceejayoz 5mo ago
    You can steer it towards reusable components, though. Find a run you like, and build off that.
    • userbinator 5mo ago
      You definitely need to filter if you use AI. Looking at all the vibe-coded creations that are showing up these days has changed my mind from "AI-generated code is bad" to "the one using the AI is doing a bad job of it".
      • readitalready 5mo ago
        I ended up writing a linter/validator that checks the AI-generated code for everything, including user interface style guidelines and preferences (not necessarily for hard errors)
• lxe 5mo ago
  Yall remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation 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.
  • the__alchemist 5mo ago
    Is this what the hamburger button is made of?
    • zahlman 5mo ago
      I mean, your guess is as good as mine as to what options the corresponding menu will actually contain, so....
• iamcalledrob 5mo ago
  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.
  • hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago
    The author may have identified that "the idioms come from the use of system frameworks", but they absolutely got wrong just about everything about why apps are not consistent on the web (e.g. I was baffled by their reasons listed under "this lack of homogeneity is for two reasons" section). First, what he calls "the desktop era" wasn't so much a desktop era as a Windows era - Windows ran the vast majority of desktops (and furthermore, there were plenty of inconsistencies between Windows and Mac). So, as you point out regarding the Win32 API, developers had essentially one way to do things, or at least the far easiest way to do things. Developers weren't so much "following design idioms" as "doing what is easy to do on Windows". The web started out as a document sharing system, and it only gradually and organically turned over to an app system. There was simply no single default, "easiest" way to do things (and despite that, I remember when it seemed like the web converged all at once onto Bootstrap, because it became the easiest and most "standard" way to do things). In other words, I totally agree with you. You can have all the "standard idioms" that you want, but unless you have a single company providing and writing easy to use, default frameworks, you'll always have lots of different ways of doing things.
    • namdnay 5mo ago
      Yeah the author conveniently ignores the fact that the UX of Mac apps was radically different to that of PC apps, so it’s not that designers/developers were somehow more enlightened back then, it’s just that they were “on rails”
• allthetime 5mo ago
  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.
  • SoftTalker 5mo ago
    They were not. Their own apps on iOS are wildly inconsistent.
    • allthetime 5mo ago
      I was thinking only of desktop/macos. I try to use my phone as little as possible.
• uhoh-itsmaciek 5mo ago
  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.
  • Nemi 5mo ago
    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.
    • lytedev 5mo ago
      This is my thinking. Ctrl-Enter is usually "submit the form this input is a part of" in my experience, especially if you're in a multilinear text input (or textarea).
    • ryandrake 5mo ago
      I've seen Enter, Shift-Enter, Ctrl-Enter, and Alt-Enter, (and on macOS, Cmd-Enter and Option-Enter), depending on the application. Total circus. I think this is actually a weakness of the standard keyboard: Keyboards should at the very least separate "submit form / enter" from "newline / carriage return" with different physical keys, but good luck changing that one, given the strong legacy of combining these functions.
    • Izkata 5mo ago
      I've found Shift+Enter to do this pretty reliably across systems whatever they've chosen Enter / Ctrl+Enter to do. It even works inside bullet points to add separate lines as part of the same bullet.
  • rightofcourse 5mo ago
• jcoq 5mo ago
  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)
• sph 5mo ago
  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.
• pilingual 5mo ago
  Interesting that Apple is praised. > 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.
  • wffurr 5mo ago
    I have a lot of gripes with Apple's various design decisions over the years, but they're at least consistent across their apps, which is the point of TFA. 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.
  • trueno 5mo ago
    PWA dudes that all want to use some variant of shadcn or whatever same but different flavor of what is effectively the same design language are the more critically dangerous influences on design in my eyes than say apple. apple is highly opinionated on their design frameworks and that, at least, brings consistency. even if it's a dumb change, at least you can expect it everywhere
  • bitwize 5mo ago
    I think that the best UI design language is somewhere between "flat" and "skeuomorphic". I want neither a UI with notes apps that have Moleskine leather and vellum paper textures, nor the Android 12-like vague shapes of current-day macOS. The Windows 9x, and even more so, its predecessor NEXTSTEP, look and feel was perfect. Widgets had depth and definition, were still abstract but readily identifiable to the eye.
• brycewray 5mo ago
  (2023)
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• zetanor 5mo ago
  Day-to-day usability doesn't bring much "wow" factor to a sales pitch.
• basilium 5mo ago
  Am I the only one who doesn't know what that "Keep me signed in" checkbox is for? I mean, I was a web developer for many years and I rarely encountered this checkbox in the wild, don't remember implementing it even once. I mean the choice itself is very ambiguous. It is supposed to mean that the login session will only live for the duration of the current browser session if I uncheck it. But for a user (and for me too) that does not mean much, what is the duration of the session if my browser runs open for weeks, what if we are on mobile where tabs never close and tabs and history is basically the same thing (UX-wise). If I decide to uncheck it for security reasons (for example when I'm on someone else's device) I want to at least know when exactly or after what action the session will be cleared out, and as a user I have zero awareness or control there. I don't advocate for removal of this checkbox but I would at least re-consider if that pattern is truly a common knowledge or not :)
  • ryandrake 5mo ago
    I've never seen one that actually works. It seems like whether or not I check them, the next time I log into [every site] I have to re log in.
    • zahlman 5mo ago
      Really? I don't think I've ever seen one that doesn't work. What sites are you using where you encounter this? Have you checked your cookie settings?
      • userbinator 5mo ago
        Seconded. Your browser is probably set to clear cookies on close.
  • userbinator 5mo ago
    It's basically the expiration date on the cookie that keeps you logged in. Very common on forums and the like, and some even let you select how long you want the session to last.
• layer8 5mo ago
  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.
  • embedding-shape 5mo ago
    > 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. 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.
    • tpmoney 5mo ago
      I would argue that behavior is idiomatic for macOS but not idiomatic for web browsers. Keyboard navigation of all elements has never been the default in macOS. Tab moves between input fields, but without turning on other settings, almost never moved between other elements because macOS was a mouse first OS from its earliest days. Web browsers often broke this convention, but Safari has from day one not used tab for full keyboard navigation by default. 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.
• kfse 5mo ago
  [dead]
• barrkel 5mo ago
  With some irony, one thing Substack doesn't afford is zooming in to images on mobile.
  • heftig 5mo ago
    Firefox on Android can override this via a toggle in the Accessibility settings. Maybe other browsers have something similar?
• msie 5mo ago
  That windows 2000/win 95 interface was peak windows design.
• Thorrez 5mo ago
  >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.
  • realityfactchex 5mo ago
    If GSuites was a typo for GSites (e.g., informal for Google Sites classic), then the sentence in TFA could work. IDK if such was the intent, of course.
• alentred 5mo ago
  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.
• robocat 5mo ago
  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.
  • augustk 5mo ago
    And knowing how to get the version of an application (which used to be in Help -> About).
  • godshatter 5mo ago
    Also having the cursor show up in the proper place on a new form and having tab order work.
    • robocat 5mo ago
      Oh yeah. Keyboard focus and focus indication on browsers is fundamentally broken. We often notice when focus is buggy. But there are many many hidden/unobvious edge cases. Previously I created a fix for the worst focusing issues on browsers by creating a fully custom framework (before modern HTML help with popovers/dialogs/overlays/viewports/anchors). No other framework at the time managed Internet Explorer's quirks very well (we served businesses who mostly used that browser).
• zahlman 5mo ago
  > 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.
• JoshTriplett 5mo ago
  > 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.
• jjcm 5mo ago
  Worked at Figma for 5 years. The author uses Figma as an example, but I think misses the point. They're so close though. Note these quotes: > Both are very well-designed from first principles, but do not conform to what other interfaces the user might be familiar with > The lack of homogeneous interfaces means that I spend most of my digital time not in a state of productive flow There are generally two types of apps - general apps and professional tools. While I highly agree with the author that general apps should align with trends, from a pure time-spent PoV Figma is a professional tool. The design editor in particular is designed for users who are in it every day for multiple hours a day. In this scenario, small delays in common actions stack up significantly. I'll use the Variables project in Figma as an example (mainly because that was my baby while I was there). Variables were used on the order of magnitude of billions. An increase in 1s in the time it took to pick a variable was a net loss of around 100 human years in aggregate. We could have used more standardized patterns for picking them (ie illustrator's palette approach), or unified patterns for picking them (making styles and variables the same thing), but in the end we picked slightly different behavior because at the end of the day it was faster. In the end it's about minimizing friction of an experience. Sometimes minimizing friction for one audience impacts another - in the case of Figma minimizing it for pro users increased the friction for casual users, but that's the nature of pro tools. Blender shouldn't try and adopt idiomatic patterns - it doesn't make sense for it, as it would negatively impact their core audience despite lowering friction for casual users. You have to look at net friction as a whole.
  • chupchap 5mo ago
    Good point, I think in case of Figma the idiomatic design was set by Sketch and other UI design apps, which in itself was a step away from the idiomatic design established by Photoshop.
• jmyeet 5mo ago
  I had to laugh when I read this: > 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". [1]: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design/ [2]: https://geekyants.com/blog/affordances-in-ui-design https://geekyants.com/blog/affordances-in-ui-design
• ErigmolCt 5mo ago
  But I'm not convinced the old consistency was purely a design victory... it was also a result of heavy constraints
• weitendorf 5mo ago
  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 https://i.imgur.com/OEMPJA8.png
  • Izkata 5mo ago
    You should talk the people behind the vanillajs framework, this sounds like it might work well over there. http://vanilla-js.com/ http://vanilla-js.com/
  • lmm 5mo ago
    > 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" I tried that and it was an absolute nightmare. There was no way to tell where a given style is used from, or even if it's used at all, and if the DOM hierarchy changes then your styles all change randomly (with, again, no way to tell what changed or where or why). Also "minimizes clientside processing" is a myth, I don't know what the implementation is but it ends up being slower and heavier than normal. Who ever thought this was a good idea?
    • skydhash 5mo ago
      > There was no way to tell where a given style is used from, or even if it's used at all It's pretty easy. Open the inspector, select an element and you will find all the styles that apply. If you didn't try to be fancy and use weird build tools, you will also get the name of the file and the line number (and maybe navigation to the line itself). In Firefox, there's even a live editor for the selected element and the CSS file. > if the DOM hierarchy changes then your styles all change randomly Also styles are semantics like: - The default appearance of links should be: ... - All links in the article section should also be: ... - The links inside a blockquote should also be: ... - If a link has a class 'popup' it should be: ... - The link identified as 'login' should be: ... There's a section on MDN about how to ensure those rules are applied in the wanted order[1]. This way, your styles shouldn't need updates that often unless you change the semantics of your DOM. [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Guides/Cascade/Specificity https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Guides/Casc...
• sminchev 5mo ago
  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.
• wffurr 5mo ago
  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!
  • trueno 5mo ago
    i've seen this critiqued as ugly by people who didn't want to use daisyui's original dropdown which just deferred to the built in controls. now in daisyui's latest release there is an additional dropdown that you can style, because utility is a second rate citizen in design
    • wffurr 5mo ago
      Usable has to come first. That's what all these designer types are missing. It's user interaction design, not visual design. The interaction is key.
  • hexasquid 5mo ago
    This needs to be built into figma and taught to product managers. FE devs are telling each other this all the time (mentioned in every single FE conference), but most of the time - they don't get to make this decision - they fail when pushing back - Hacker News eventually blames the FE dev
• robertoandred 5mo ago
  Now we’re blaming React for bad UX?
• nickcoury 5mo ago
  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.
  • marcosdumay 5mo ago
    As a tangent, he has so many really important pieces of advice, naming one as "Jakob's Law" is deeply impractical.
• userbinator 5mo ago
  button is clearly visually a button 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
  • suzzer99 5mo ago
    I like how it became uncool about 10 years ago for buttons to provide any feedback that they've been pressed. Thanks Tim Apple!
• johncch 5mo ago
  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?
  • _moof 5mo ago
    The Mac desktop era before its iOS-ification was, in fact, awesome. It was a triumph of consistency. The UI guidelines were excellent. Nearly every application worked in predictable ways. I appreciated it at the time and I miss it terribly.
• jgalt212 5mo ago
  See also: > The easiest programs to use are those that demand the least new learning from the user — or, to put it another way, the easiest programs to use are those that most effectively connect to the user's pre-existing knowledge. The Art of Unix Programming http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html#id2878339 http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html#id2...
• petee 5mo ago
  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
• stavros 5mo ago
  > The visuals feel a little ugly and dated It's... beautiful.
• kristianp 5mo ago
  > 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.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• glerk 5mo ago
  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.
  • nine_k 5mo ago
    To the opposite, I'm a heavy user of keyboard shortcuts everywhere they exist. OTOH taking over the browser shortcuts, and especially the search, is something that I very much dislike.
    • glerk 5mo ago
      I'm ok with them as long as they're not overriding what I have saved in my muscle memory (cmd+F for search, tab to change the focused element, cmd+L to go to the navbar, and a few others). I think the user should be able to customize/disable those as much as possible if you do provide them.
  • eviks 5mo ago
    What do you think about search override on some dysfunctional modern forums that can't display more than 3 replies, so if you used the built in browser search you wouldn't be able to find anything in a discussion? But also, Vivaldi is awesome here is allowing you to block overrides for specific shortcuts so you Ctrl F is always yours
    • glerk 5mo ago
      > dysfunctional modern forums that can't display more than 3 replies, I assume that's overzealous virtualization/infinite scroll pagination? I don't have a solution, I think fundamentally we're building a workaround for a workaround and the root cause for the performance issues should be fixed. Somehow, HN is able to show a lot of comments per page and page loads are always O(100ms). I'm wondering what kind of sorcery they're using to achieve this. But if you have to deal with this in your codebase, my instinct is still not to hijack the native Cmd+F, even if it only searches what's inside your viewport. You can expose some other command for full custom search (Cmd+K seems to be the standard, I think VSCode made that popular).
• beloch 5mo ago
  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.
  • Skeime 5mo ago
    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.)
    • beloch 5mo ago
      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.
    • _moof 5mo ago
      Yes, the Cmd key has been around since 1984.
• zephen 5mo ago
  Hell, I'd be happy if, when I started reading text, the websites would just let me keep reading text rather than popping up an interminable number of ads, video, alert/app/notification options, etc. I mean, you know that if they can't do that, any other idioms from last century are right out the window as well.
• shamcleren 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• hollowturtle 5mo ago
  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
• eviks 5mo ago
  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?
• ruslanguns 5mo ago
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• marcus_holmes 5mo ago
  It's not only the users that are frustrated. Developing a VB app in the 90's was simple; just drag'n'drop components around the place and boom, you're done. There were very little design choices to make, and most of those were about accessibility rather than style. It had to look like a Windows app, and that was it. A developer could (and we did) slap together screens in minutes, and while they would never win any prizes for best-looking application UI, they were instantly usable by users because they all shared a consistent UX. Making a web app means following a Figma thing where a designer tried a new experiment with some new thing they read about last week, and it kinda looks OK as a static screen design, but has huge problems as a User Interface because users don't understand it (and that's not even considering accessibility). And as a developer it's a pain in the arse to implement; lots of work to work around the standard way of things working because the designer thinks it looks good. My personal bugbear on this is scroll bars: just leave the fucking scroll bar alone. No, it's not "pretty", but it tells me how far down the page I am and it's useful. Removing it is actively making my life worse. You are spending effort making my life worse. Stop doing that.
• Narishma 5mo ago
  > 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.
• paulmooreparks 5mo 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. https://parkscomputing.com/content/tdl-reference.html https://parkscomputing.com/content/tdl-reference.html https://github.com/paulmooreparks/tela/blob/main/TELA-DESIGN-LANGUAGE.md https://github.com/paulmooreparks/tela/blob/main/TELA-DESIGN...
• einr 5mo ago
  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 http://toastytech.com/guis/nt351word.png
  • vladvasiliu 5mo ago
    This is funny because Teams on Windows uses its custom notifications instead of the system ones. But running it in a browser under Linux, I get my native notifications!
• graemep 5mo ago
  This is a feature, not a bug. By making your software different you make it harder for people to switch.
  • unsungNovelty 5mo ago
    You're confusing it with something else. You don't have to have the same things. But there are basic understanding for UI like how certain elements should work. People might tolerate cos its not on their hands. But the moment they can, they'll make sure to not use it. This also means more support tickets and internal escalations. Just like how you should drive predictably on road to avoid maximum accidents, predictable UI's are important for maximum productivity. People will use it more. And when they move to another software and don't get the same, they will talk sh*t about it. They will tell people how a certain software is soooo good. ClickUp for example is the most disastrous UI I've used in recent history. If you get angry while using software, you've done your job poorly. When someone discussed about ClickUp, I immediately shut it down. It's the same reason why people disliked Jira. AWS console Etc. They might tolerate for a while. But they will jump ship at the first opportunity. So can't figure out how it is a feature.
    • graemep 5mo ago
      I am basing it on what I have heard normal users say. The easiest thing is what they are used to. People mostly use UIs that are not idiomatic. Websites vary wildly, lots of mobile apps do not stick to conventions, and even some desktops apps do not. For example, what else uses a ribbon menu like MS Office? Most people switch between desktop and mobile. Some people like an app to be consistent across platforms - which means breaking with platform conventions. People do tolerate AWS Console though. Jira seems to be widely used.
• rho4 5mo ago
  A few of my favorites: - "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.
• arc_light 5mo ago
  [dead]
• nottorp 5mo ago
  > Apple is a great example. ... checks publication date ... ... right, 2023. I think the article needs an update.
• donatj 5mo ago
  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.
  • LaGrange 5mo ago
    I mean, looking at it in 2026 Word 2000 looks _amazing_. How far my standards have fallen. And yeah, I've met a lot of people who love Figma. I hate it so much, personally, getting around and finding what I need in it is so much pain.
• amadeuspagel 5mo ago
  > Study and follow HTML/CSS idioms whenever possible. For example, a link should be underlined, colorful, pointer on mouseover, and written as an <a> 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.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]