Discussion
Loeber on Substack
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.
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.
PhilipRoman: ...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.
teeray: > There are hundreds of ways that different websites ask you to pick datesUgh, 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: 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.
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.
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.
dxdm: 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: Microsoft had one too: WIG!https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22475521
jfengel: 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: 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.
anamexis: 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
foobarbecue: Lately I've occasionally been running into round check boxes that look like radio buttons. Why????
iamcalledrob: iOS decided square checkboxes were ugly, and design patterns are flowing from mobile->desktop these days.
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.
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.
201984: > 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?
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.
the__alchemist: Is this what the hamburger button is made of?
