5 ms·

The real problem is that companies seem to think that users hate toggles. It's extremely hard for me to understand how valid this might be since I have techy pe

The real problem is that companies seem to think that users hate toggles. It's extremely hard for me to understand how valid this might be since I have techy people around me most often, but even when I don't, I've never heard someone complain about excess toggles. Ever. Is this a thing people do? I hear orders of magnitude more complaints about lack of toggles.

chx 7y ago
Then bury them so deep they will never see it. There's already a Preferences // Advanced tab. Do whatever you need to appease the wide population. It appears only in desktop app or browser even though it's under advanced? Deal! I will still be happy. Is it a CLI option? Fine. I have been using Unix-ish command lines since 1993. I can deal with an option or two. Yeah that wouldn't work on mobile but the primary audience here is not mobile -- and I could see that toggle saved and applied across platforms as well. Make it a slash command. If need to be, I will hexedit the living shit out of your Electron app, I have first written assembly code in 1987 and while it's been a very, very long time since I've done so, I am on good terms with hex editors still. Whatever. Just give us the options, 'mkay?
- hunter2_ 7y ago
  Agreed. chx from Drupal? If so, thanks for your contributions.
  - chx 7y ago
    > chx from Drupal? There is no other. (Thank God, one is enough of me. Too much, oftentimes :P) > If so, thanks for your contributions. YW!
hyperdimension 7y ago
I don't have any justification for this, but my gut feeling is that this trend was started by Chrome. They (compared to, say, Firefox) offer the bare minimum of settings, and even the feature flags they do offer are deprecated and removed in a couple versions at most. It just reeks of a paternalistic "we know what you want better than you do" attitude to have about your user-base. You can tell that this is the Chrome team's philosophy when you go onto their bug tracker and see the vast ocean of WONTFIXes. You might even extend the philosophy to all of Google, when I think of things like "ignoring" "even" "words" "in" "quotes" come to think of it...
cwilkes 7y ago
Most of the time toggles are done poorly in that I can’t tell if they are on or off. There’s no consensus on if that is left or right. Or lit up or darkened. It is maddening. In my opinion the right way to do toggles is to have area below it that is either enabled / expanded for On or grayed out / collapsed for Off. That way I can also read what the toggle implies. I suppose that can be done in mouse over if there are space constraints.
- craftinator 7y ago
  Or just use a labeled toggle. "On" and "off" are both very short words, take hardly any space, and remove ambiguity. No reason not to use them.
  - labster 7y ago
    15 and 17 characters when translated to German or whatever. The best layouted plans of mice and men gang aft i18n-ly.
    - lstodd 7y ago
      I bet unicode already has codepoints for 'on' and 'off'
    - shkkmo 7y ago
      "yes" and "no" are short in just about every language I know of
- hunter2_ 7y ago
  Oops, I didn't mean to imply a particular interface widget. Should have said "setting" (not necessarily binary, either).
climb_stealth 7y ago
I'd say one problem is that toggles make your code more complicated and harder to test. And the more toggles there are the more combinations for potential issues to pop up. As a user I'd prefer to see more toggles, but if I had to maintain a product I'd probably try to make good decisions instead of leaving things open.
- tomc1985 7y ago
  I hear this time and time again and it is the biggest fucking cop-out. We write code for all stakeholders, not just for us. A product manager's (or worse, a focus group's) "good decisions" are more-often-than-not lowest-common-denominator drivel that has lead us to the current reality of terrible software -- it's like a tragedy of the commons where everyone acting in their own rational self-interest ends up overfishing the lake and then suddenly the town is facing starvation. Boo-fucking-hoo, write the extra test case. I'd be less bitter if I didn't feel this sentiment was almost single-handedly responsible for the death of "options for power users"
  - sarah180 7y ago
    It's not "the extra test case." It's literal exponential growth in the number of test cases as you add more and more toggles. It can still be justified to add configuration options, but you can't safely test one feature in isolation and assume that it will never interact with any others.
    - tomc1985 7y ago
      We don't necessarily need every case to be testable, and even so thoughtful use of occams razor or something can prevent the kind of exponential worst-case scenarios that almost nobody wants. My problem is that contemporary software design seems to draw that line at a place that allows for few use-cases. It seems to be especially prevalent in modern enterprise stuff like Slack or Skype -- with the latter being a very good example of the old ways (e.g. original skype clients) regressing into the new ways (e.g. latest skype version).
    - 7y ago

chx 7y ago

Then bury them so deep they will never see it. There's already a Preferences // Advanced tab. Do whatever you need to appease the wide population. It appears only in desktop app or browser even though it's under advanced? Deal! I will still be happy. Is it a CLI option? Fine. I have been using Unix-ish command lines since 1993. I can deal with an option or two. Yeah that wouldn't work on mobile but the primary audience here is not mobile -- and I could see that toggle saved and applied across platforms as well. Make it a slash command. If need to be, I will hexedit the living shit out of your Electron app, I have first written assembly code in 1987 and while it's been a very, very long time since I've done so, I am on good terms with hex editors still. Whatever. Just give us the options, 'mkay?

hunter2_ 7y ago
Agreed. chx from Drupal? If so, thanks for your contributions.
- chx 7y ago
  > chx from Drupal? There is no other. (Thank God, one is enough of me. Too much, oftentimes :P) > If so, thanks for your contributions. YW!

hyperdimension 7y ago

I don't have any justification for this, but my gut feeling is that this trend was started by Chrome. They (compared to, say, Firefox) offer the bare minimum of settings, and even the feature flags they do offer are deprecated and removed in a couple versions at most. It just reeks of a paternalistic "we know what you want better than you do" attitude to have about your user-base. You can tell that this is the Chrome team's philosophy when you go onto their bug tracker and see the vast ocean of WONTFIXes. You might even extend the philosophy to all of Google, when I think of things like "ignoring" "even" "words" "in" "quotes" come to think of it...

cwilkes 7y ago

Most of the time toggles are done poorly in that I can’t tell if they are on or off. There’s no consensus on if that is left or right. Or lit up or darkened. It is maddening. In my opinion the right way to do toggles is to have area below it that is either enabled / expanded for On or grayed out / collapsed for Off. That way I can also read what the toggle implies. I suppose that can be done in mouse over if there are space constraints.

craftinator 7y ago
Or just use a labeled toggle. "On" and "off" are both very short words, take hardly any space, and remove ambiguity. No reason not to use them.
- labster 7y ago
  15 and 17 characters when translated to German or whatever. The best layouted plans of mice and men gang aft i18n-ly.
  - lstodd 7y ago
    I bet unicode already has codepoints for 'on' and 'off'
  - shkkmo 7y ago
    "yes" and "no" are short in just about every language I know of
hunter2_ 7y ago
Oops, I didn't mean to imply a particular interface widget. Should have said "setting" (not necessarily binary, either).

climb_stealth 7y ago

I'd say one problem is that toggles make your code more complicated and harder to test. And the more toggles there are the more combinations for potential issues to pop up. As a user I'd prefer to see more toggles, but if I had to maintain a product I'd probably try to make good decisions instead of leaving things open.

tomc1985 7y ago
I hear this time and time again and it is the biggest fucking cop-out. We write code for all stakeholders, not just for us. A product manager's (or worse, a focus group's) "good decisions" are more-often-than-not lowest-common-denominator drivel that has lead us to the current reality of terrible software -- it's like a tragedy of the commons where everyone acting in their own rational self-interest ends up overfishing the lake and then suddenly the town is facing starvation. Boo-fucking-hoo, write the extra test case. I'd be less bitter if I didn't feel this sentiment was almost single-handedly responsible for the death of "options for power users"
- sarah180 7y ago
  It's not "the extra test case." It's literal exponential growth in the number of test cases as you add more and more toggles. It can still be justified to add configuration options, but you can't safely test one feature in isolation and assume that it will never interact with any others.
  - tomc1985 7y ago
    We don't necessarily need every case to be testable, and even so thoughtful use of occams razor or something can prevent the kind of exponential worst-case scenarios that almost nobody wants. My problem is that contemporary software design seems to draw that line at a place that allows for few use-cases. It seems to be especially prevalent in modern enterprise stuff like Slack or Skype -- with the latter being a very good example of the old ways (e.g. original skype clients) regressing into the new ways (e.g. latest skype version).
  - 7y ago