4 ms·

1a. As a bonus, offer coarse undo and granular undo (where granular undo always undoes an atomic operation, and coarse undo undoes the “multi-step” operation if

by GuiA 7y ago

1a. As a bonus, offer coarse undo and granular undo (where granular undo always undoes an atomic operation, and coarse undo undoes the “multi-step” operation if applicable, to the user. You can imagine a lot of quality of life improvements built on top of that depending on your application: eg if the user holds granular undo and there are many combinable operations (eg the user drew a single stroke that is represented by hundreds of single pixel additions), you may snap to a single coarse undo. Or you can offer a visualization of the underlying operations and what they map to, etc. (see sibling comment by ‘reificator)

munificent 7y ago
That's a viable solution too, though it comes at the price of UX complexity. HN folks tend to undervalue simplicity because they love learning new features and want all the things. But often, the best user experience for the most people means sacrificing some operations that are technically useful but not enough to carry their weight.
- GuiA 7y ago
  Yup, ultimately the balance between simplicity and technical operations available will depend on one’s own specific use case. That said, for technical applications, I think it makes sense to expose as much of your features as possible in terms of composable, atomic units and operations. If Cmd-Z maps to a black box “undo” command, then anything on top of that will seem like it comes at an interface complexity cost. If, however, Cmd-Z is a configurable shortcut like any other that, by default, happens to send a “undo 1 user operation” message to a “history” module, that’s a different story. Now your users can modify it to be “undo one high level operation” instead, or “undo all consecutive operations that are the same in kind”. Or perhaps they want Cmd-Z to undo the last discrete operation, and Cmd-Alt-Z to undo the last logical operation. Or maybe there’s a strong temporal dimension to their work and they want the undo logic to take that into account. Likely not the kind of thing you’d want for a mobile photo sharing app meant for a wide audience; but maybe the kind of thing you’d want for a complex, specialized data processing tool on the desktop.

by GuiA 7y ago

munificent 7y ago

That's a viable solution too, though it comes at the price of UX complexity. HN folks tend to undervalue simplicity because they love learning new features and want all the things. But often, the best user experience for the most people means sacrificing some operations that are technically useful but not enough to carry their weight.

GuiA 7y ago
Yup, ultimately the balance between simplicity and technical operations available will depend on one’s own specific use case. That said, for technical applications, I think it makes sense to expose as much of your features as possible in terms of composable, atomic units and operations. If Cmd-Z maps to a black box “undo” command, then anything on top of that will seem like it comes at an interface complexity cost. If, however, Cmd-Z is a configurable shortcut like any other that, by default, happens to send a “undo 1 user operation” message to a “history” module, that’s a different story. Now your users can modify it to be “undo one high level operation” instead, or “undo all consecutive operations that are the same in kind”. Or perhaps they want Cmd-Z to undo the last discrete operation, and Cmd-Alt-Z to undo the last logical operation. Or maybe there’s a strong temporal dimension to their work and they want the undo logic to take that into account. Likely not the kind of thing you’d want for a mobile photo sharing app meant for a wide audience; but maybe the kind of thing you’d want for a complex, specialized data processing tool on the desktop.