6 ms·

To my taste this is totally wrong. Web is web and not desktop. Some web designers try to draw web as a desktop for years and that confuses even more because the

• neogodless 6y ago
  > Web is web and not desktop. Have you ever watched users try to interact with the web, their phone, and their desktop? Many do not differentiate, and why should they have to? They all should be built using intuitive, unambiguous paradigms.
  • AndrewOMartin 6y ago
    Every time I see someone double click a link.
    • Kye 6y ago
      I convince people not to do this by making it potentially cost them: get out of the habit or end up double charged some day. Not true for the majority of ecommerce sites that handle doubled requests sensibly, but there's one poorly coded site out there just waiting to blow their bank account out.
• Silhouette 6y ago
  Hyperlinks are underlined, blue or purple if already visited. Sounds boring and does not fit your favorite orange-lime color theme, I understand that. But that is also an actual standard users are used to. It might have been 20 or 30 years ago, but not any more, and Jakob's Law is as relevant as ever.
  • adontz 6y ago
    Do Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex count as other sites?
    • Silhouette 6y ago
      I don't know what you see when you visit Google, but I get one of those pop-over hassle boxes with some buttons, and then having cleared that, a search bar with some buttons and a few links across the top and bottom of the page. None of those items has any underline visible unless you hover over them. None of them is blue or purple. None of them changes colour when the link has been visited.
      • adontz 6y ago
        I see search results, because Google as well as other web-sites I have mentioned, is a search engine.
        • Silhouette 6y ago
          The links aren't underlined by default even on the search results page. And obviously those aren't being used as menus or controls in the web app sense anyway.
• jeswin 6y ago
  > All texts in the examples are hyperlinks, but none are underlined and that is confusing in the first place. One reason is that underlines are quite distracting when you have so many of them. Even Wikipedia avoids underlines for better readability.
  • layer8 6y ago
    Color or other styling can replace underlining. But it should always be made visually unambiguous what is a hyperlink/button and what isn’t.
    • jeswin 6y ago
      That's true for some sites, and that's what Wikipedia does. But in apps, I don't mind if some discoverabilty (such as for non-essential links) is sacrificed - people will eventually learn if the app matters to them. Take the case of HN. The "15 minutes ago" and the username are both clickable for a topic. But not underlining or differentiating them makes the text more readable. Most of these things are opinions of course.
• masswerk 6y ago
  However, in the click-configuration top menu items are buttons. Which are legitimate control elements, as well. The author also makes this distinction (a link navigates, a button controls) quite clear. As for menus, these have been around for longer than the web itself. (In the beginning, these were just an alternative way to display an array of related buttons, compare the Xerox Star.) Regarding the ellipsis, while it's true and recommended for menu items, this is not applicable to menu bars (or similar horizontally stacked items, like a bar of tab-options – mind that these are in principle just an array of buttons, as well).
• preommr 6y ago
  > Want to know if menu parent is a hyperlink? Easy, it is, if underlined. Period. No confusion. 'Comment#1':: There's more to UI design than disambiguity through explicitness. 'Comment#3':: Follows 'Comment#1' : Sometimes it's about things like simplicity `Comment#2`:: Follows `Comment#3' : Other times, it's about things like removing redundancy, e.g. knowing a navigation menu is a special ui element and shouldn't be over-complicated with underlines, and changing colors. A navigation menu is not a text body which is usually against a simple backdrop like white, and is far more standardized. It also has do things like show child elements, which is what the whole article is about. `Comment#5`:: Follows `Comment#2' : It's also about establishing brand identity that has a direct impact on market performance - like having custom color themes
• DangitBobby 6y ago
  Sorry, that's not going to happen. People are people, not machines, and if you tell them all the discovery and excitement of UI design has already been had by past designers, and that all future work should be purely derivitive, you won't have that many people staying in UI design. You're going to have to learn to live with the fact that creative people don't want to paint by numbers. Same applies to every complaint about new generations of people reinventing any wheel that applies to their field.
  • still_grokking 6y ago
    You mean, you would just need to tell the people that they have to do their jobs proper, and the ones that don't like to would leave? This would be so great! Or to put it more clearly: There is not space for any "creativity" when doing the job proper means to follow the text-book by word. If those people don't want to "paint by numbers" they should try to make money with art. But there is no space for them in product design. Form follows function! Point.
    • DangitBobby 6y ago
      This may be the way you want the world to be, but it is not.
  • thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > People are people, not machines, and if you tell them all the discovery and excitement of UI design has already been had by past designers, and that all future work should be purely derivitive, you won't have that many people staying in UI design. What's the problem? We want those people to get out of UI design because they're making things worse by trying to be in it.
• Daho0n 6y ago
  >Web is web and not desktop. Says who? If a standard had to be forced I'd vote for desktop on web over your kind of web any day.