Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

foobarbecue

Lately I've occasionally been running into round check boxes that look like radio buttons. Why????

amakhov

... and please stop doing paralax...

finghin

> 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.

pkphilip

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

xnx

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.

ufocia

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.

mcculley

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.

satvikpendem

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

> 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.

andyfilms1

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.

JojoFatsani

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.

chapz

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

> 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.

hungryhobbit

"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.

alienbaby

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..

DoneWithAllThat

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.

readitalready

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.

lxe

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.

iamcalledrob

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.

allthetime

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.