11 ms·

I agree 100% with the author, the old GTK button was gorgeous, it will be missed. > I have had to explain to people tons of times that the random word in the U

I agree 100% with the author, the old GTK button was gorgeous, it will be missed. > I have had to explain to people tons of times that the random word in the UI somewhere in an application is actually a button they can press to invoke an action. This is one of my biggest complaints with the super flat modern designs. Many widgets lost their skeuomorphic depth, which encoded a lot if visual information (the clickability, the current status), but in many cases nothing was added to supplant the loss of those visual cues, so now it is just a label (or a label in a white or grey box) and there is no way of knowing if it is clickable or its current status.

Sunspark 5y ago
The flatness of some UIs along with the removal of some visual cues has happened that I have tapped on things that aren't actually a button thinking that they might be one. When I make my own apps one day, I am going to ignore design fads and only make intuitive interfaces.
- Forgeties79 5y ago
  Just go full-audacity and drown people in drop down menus lol at least I know what to click!
  - WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
    Audacity is a piece that made me learn its hotkeys. Once you do that, it’s pretty nice actually.
    - znowcone 5y ago
      It works, I guess. But after I've worked with a proper DAW (Reaper in my case), Audacity felt like a toy
      - Forgeties79 5y ago
        A toy with the best noise cancellation tool of any audio program out there though.
- calvinmorrison 5y ago
  we started using Full Story at work. It tracks clicks on non clickable items. It is staggering that this is even a problem. Having to explain to people that links and buttons and radio boxes and checkboxes should look uniform has gone the way of the dodo and now we must instead have people clicking random items to hope something happens.
  - totalkrill 5y ago
    > It tracks clicks on non clickable items This rattled my brain, that this is a feature now, says volumes about the quality decline in UI. I am a developer, and mainly use tools on the command line, or with TUIs. But whenever I use android apps and websites, I constantly find myself longclicking or rightclicking things, hoping for stuff to happen, that just doesnt.
    - Sunspark 5y ago
      It is interesting to contemplate how much of this problem is artificially induced by executives in suits screaming at people to "innovate". Strangely enough, we don't seem to mess around with steering wheels in cars.
- cout 5y ago
  If you really want to go against the grain, may I suggest radial menus, which allow the user to muscle-memory through menu selections: https://bindpose.com/custom-marking-menu-maya-python/ https://bindpose.com/custom-marking-menu-maya-python/
  - userbinator 5y ago
    Interesting concept, but I would add keyboard shortcuts (underlined items) to the menu to make it more of a reminder than be forced to use the mouse all the time.
    - smegger001 5y ago
      That was originally part of the IBM Common User Access style guide 80/90s, back when user interfaces for software valued function over form. https://ia800200.us.archive.org/0/items/ibmsj2703E/ibmsj2703E.pdf https://ia800200.us.archive.org/0/items/ibmsj2703E/ibmsj2703... the figure on page 2 shows exactly what you are describing.
  - RedShift1 5y ago
    Visually nice but it's almost always going to overlap the thing you've right clicked. Under any circumstance I still want to see the thing I've right clicked.
  - sph 5y ago
    Fly-Pie, a radial menu for GNOME: https://github.com/Schneegans/Fly-Pie https://github.com/Schneegans/Fly-Pie
  - account42 5y ago
    This and many variants of the idea has been explored in games a lot - in particular in point and click adventures and isometric (or at least top-down view) RPGs. Probably also in strategy games and anything else that has both a cursor and context-specific actions.
chillfox 5y ago
Had that experience before where I spent ages looking for how to do something and what I had tough was a label was actually a button. Now if I can't find anything then I just start clicking on random design elements in case they turn out to be a secret button to a hidden page.
HeckFeck 5y ago
I'm also really not sold on those new "tabs" which are just text with an underlined colour. It's low effort and dreadfully unclear. I can only vaguely guess what they are based on their upper placement, but what's to really distinguish that from a menu? or just a descriptive label? I don't like saying this because I want Linux desktop apps to have every success, but these small and pointless frustrations kill my enthusiasm.
dheera 5y ago
UIs go through 3D and 2D in phases. Windows 2.0 - 3.1: 2D Windows 95 - 7: 3D Windows 8 - 10: 2D MacOS 6 - 7: 2D MacOS 8 - 10: 3D MacOS 11: 2D As a side point, I predict Sheriff and Sans-Sheriff fonts to also go into similar phases too though over a longer time scale. We're in a very long Sans-Sheriff phase now but I think Sheriff will be "in" in 20 years.
- mceachen 5y ago
  FWIW, Macintosh System 6 was just black and white (and only 640x480px), so 3D wasn't really tenable. System 7 and 8 had support for color, and was as 3D as it could muster, like highlight and shadow treatment on buttons and other widgets, and embossed, draggable thumbs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7#/media/File:Mac_OS_7.6.1_emulated_inside_of_SheepShaver.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7#/media/File:Mac_OS_7.... Mac OS X brought Aqua, which was a pinnacle of 3D and skeuomorphic design. You know you're going hard for 3D when you add a drop shadow on all the text in your menubar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_10.0#/media/File:MacOSX10-0screenshot.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_10.0#/media/File:MacO... (and that IE logo in the dock wasn't there as a joke: it really was the best browser for OS X until Safari was a thing, years later)
  - rayiner 5y ago
    Those pinstripes.
  - RuggedPineapple 5y ago
    512×342 actually, at least for the compact macs with the built in screen.
- ejolto 5y ago
  Sheriff? I think you mean serif, partner.
  - bdefore 5y ago
    Deputy. Perfect name for a new Sans-Sheriff typeface.
capdeck 5y ago
A couple of times i found myself clicking on various text labels just to see if it is a title or a button. All these flat minimalist designs are a step in a horribly wrong direction.
- userbinator 5y ago
  I've seen all 4 combinations of "looks like" vs "is actually" {button,static text} on a web app I was once forced to use. Some of the plain text was actually a clickable button (with NO hover effect), and some of the "buttons" (or more precisely, short actionable text with a rectangle around it) were actually just labels. Imagine the word "Order" presented in both styles, and my astonishment when I figured out which one I actually had to click.
- hulitu 5y ago
  And sometimes a text label hides a menu. The best i've seen was a web page with a hamburger menu which had no action.
adhesive_wombat 5y ago
I spend far too long in GTK apps looking for the right menu to do basic stuff. It's like someone once saw an iPad from across a room and tried to implement what they remembered of it.
- eptcyka 5y ago
  Funny, I usually have the same opinion of iOS user interfaces.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - hackmiester 5y ago
    You would benefit from the “Button Shapes” option in accessibility! It underlines or outlines text-only “buttons.”
- berkes 5y ago
  This is really not the best place to throw condescending anecdotes around to insult FLOSS. What, on an iPad, should a designer look at in detail to improve the GTK app, for example?
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    The first step is them realizing they have a problem.
  - adhesive_wombat 5y ago
    Where did I say GTK should follow iOS? All I said was that it looks like they did, and did it badly.
Schroedingersat 5y ago
But at least they spread out all the unnecessary fluff elements and then made the clickable portions tiny and close together
librarylinux 5y ago
baybal2 5y ago
ghosty141 5y ago
I too hate the material design kind of flatness. For me, only apple somehow gets UI right (at least for me) and it feels very intuitive for me while also looking very good. The new "flat" design that pops up everywhere sometimes just feels like a lazy version of UI design, where you basically don't need proper styles anymore and just make everything b/w with maybe a border here and there.
- kjeetgill 5y ago
  My understanding of material design is that it tries not to be too flat. Material design reduces the 3d roundedness and gradients of many elements but still relies heavily on drop shadows to indicate hierarchy and overlapping.
- lelanthran 5y ago
  > I too hate the material design kind of flatness. For me, only apple somehow gets UI right (at least for me) and it feels very intuitive for me while also looking very good. I dunno about that (both Apple using flat, and the "gets it right" part). I'm looking at activity monitor now, under memory pressure, and the table of memory types has "Memory used" row expanded, and yet none of the rows are actually clickable. I spent a few seconds yesterday trying to click the other rows. Then I looked at system preferences, and it's not actually flat widgets - they have relief for those things that can be interacted with. Things that are clickable are visually marked as such.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    >I'm looking at activity monitor now, under memory pressure, and the table of memory types has "Memory used" row expanded, and yet none of the rows are actually clickable. I spent a few seconds yesterday trying to click the other rows. I can see why you might get confused there but it feels like nitpicking. I never expected to click on any of those elements because they don't look like a traditional table or outline view.
RachelF 5y ago
> I have had to explain to people tons of times that the random word in the UI somewhere in an application is actually a button they can press to invoke an action. Exactly this. I often help others use computers and phones. In the old days it was easy to see what could be clicked. Now input and output look the same. It makes it harder to use. In many ways it is a victory of style over substance - UI's are now designed by the same crowd who designs high fashion, that is clothes not designed to be worn but to be gawked at.
- bobthechef 5y ago
  > In many ways it is a victory of style over substance - UI's are now designed by the same crowd who designs high fashion, that is clothes not designed to be worn but to be gawked at. Is it? Style is no style at all if the thing in question does not fulfill its function. The whole point of something stylish is that it accomplishes its end so well and respects the appropriate constraints that is pleases the intellect when it recognizes this perfection. So if someone is designing a UI that is difficult to use, that is a failure of both style and substance since there is no style without substance.
  - JasonFruit 5y ago
    Fine, a Pyrrhic victory of style over substance.
  - HstryrsrBttn 5y ago
- lenkite 5y ago
  We probably need to start paying UI folks NOT to change stuff. They can do all their flat-experimenting in custom themes.
  - berkes 5y ago
    In the case of the article, that is somewhat unfair. > GTK4 has been in development for a bit and has improved a lot of the internals. One of the great upsides is that it can take more advantage of the GPU when rendering the UI. So there was a clear need to rewrite parts to fix internals. > The Adwaita theme has also been nicely carried over and looks very similar to the GTK3 counterpart. ... > When I want to make a gtk4 application for mobile I would need libhandy, but libhandy for gtk4 is not a thing. The "solution" is libadwaita. This provides the widgets I need but it comes with the downside of having some of the worst decisions in application theming. So, there we have it: it's not "UI folks just changing stuff", its a ground-up rebuild of a UI-language. Now, whether or not that ground-up should be flat, modern, or just copy the old, is another discussion.
Pxtl 5y ago
This. The author dumps on ms for going flat, but MS did it with rock solid consistency. I had a win phone 7 device. It was the pinnacle of consistent Gui. Is it colored? Then it's a button. Is it white? It's a Text box. Is it a giant title? It's tabbed horizontal scroll. Are you a "designer" who wants to color something non-clickable? Piss off, you don't get to do that.
silisili 5y ago
100% agreed. I want buttons to, at minimum, indicate that my click or touch was successful. Even a little wiggle. Flat design has me wondering with no visual indication, and I hit this all the time.
grishka 5y ago
Borderless buttons to have the right to exist, but you should be very careful with their use. For example, take this UI I made recently: https://mastodon.social/@grishka/107998100334356147 https://mastodon.social/@grishka/107998100334356147, 2nd screenshot. The button to decline invitation looks like a link (same color) and it's next to a real button. No one would ever get confused by this, it's pretty clear it's clickable. But a black word in a larger font among black text would definitely NOT be recognized as a button by most people. Context matters a lot.
- happymellon 5y ago
  It's bold, so that helps. I assume you are able to click the group name and test user since they are also bold? I would still prefer a border around the button as I'm not sure what you gain by removing it, but at least you provide hints.
- spoils19 5y ago
  I disagree. I had to sit and think for a few minutes as it was extremely unintuitive - my first impressions were that I couldn't decline the invitation at all, and the button was disabled or missing for some reason (I've seen some bad CSS in my career so it no longer surprises me when it goes missing).
  - sph 5y ago
    The button and link next to each other is a common pattern that has been used for decades at this point. It's core to Google's material design. I agree that it might not be ideal, but when it is used literally everywhere I do not believe it's that hard to read.
    - amatecha 5y ago
      Decades? Any examples of this? Material Design has only been around since 2014, so that's not really a good example to cite.
- swiftcoder 5y ago
adhesive_wombat 5y ago
Misuse (or no use) of affordances is so, so annoying, both in software and real life. Things like having pull handles on both sides of a door that has to be pushed from one side. Or having no push plate on either side of a glass door. Do I push? Is it a sliding door that's not working? Don't know! My car has the climate controls hidden behind a graphic of the current state on the stupid touch screen. It used to be buttons that had three zones for head, body and feet, a wheel for fan and a wheel for temp[1]. Volvo used to pride themselves on having controls you could use with gloves on, so all the buttons had 3D features and a positive press feel. Now it's not even obvious the graphic is a button at all (it's also incredibly dangerous as you cannot do anything without a multi-click modal process with only visual feedback that you have to look at to use). Thankfully the window demister is still a physical button because that would be incredibly dangerous to hide behind a soft screen interface: when you need it you need it. However, it's lost its 3D profile and is now just a flat button. My office has an amusing one: there's a door at each end of the building. The building is the same on both sides, neither side looks more "fronty" than the other, and the doors are the same. Only one of these is the main entrance. The door next to the car park (i.e. where anyone unfamiliar with the site will arrive) is not the main door. Therefore there are no call buttons. However, there's also no indication that there is another door on the other side. A whole building basically has no obvious start menu. Just...why do that? [1] https://bparts-eu.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/ftp/azor_2/000/000/526/000000526730.jpeg https://bparts-eu.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/ftp/azor_2/000/...
nanochad 5y ago

Sunspark 5y ago

The flatness of some UIs along with the removal of some visual cues has happened that I have tapped on things that aren't actually a button thinking that they might be one. When I make my own apps one day, I am going to ignore design fads and only make intuitive interfaces.

Forgeties79 5y ago
Just go full-audacity and drown people in drop down menus lol at least I know what to click!
- WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
  Audacity is a piece that made me learn its hotkeys. Once you do that, it’s pretty nice actually.
  - znowcone 5y ago
    It works, I guess. But after I've worked with a proper DAW (Reaper in my case), Audacity felt like a toy
    - Forgeties79 5y ago
      A toy with the best noise cancellation tool of any audio program out there though.
calvinmorrison 5y ago
we started using Full Story at work. It tracks clicks on non clickable items. It is staggering that this is even a problem. Having to explain to people that links and buttons and radio boxes and checkboxes should look uniform has gone the way of the dodo and now we must instead have people clicking random items to hope something happens.
- totalkrill 5y ago
  > It tracks clicks on non clickable items This rattled my brain, that this is a feature now, says volumes about the quality decline in UI. I am a developer, and mainly use tools on the command line, or with TUIs. But whenever I use android apps and websites, I constantly find myself longclicking or rightclicking things, hoping for stuff to happen, that just doesnt.
  - Sunspark 5y ago
    It is interesting to contemplate how much of this problem is artificially induced by executives in suits screaming at people to "innovate". Strangely enough, we don't seem to mess around with steering wheels in cars.
cout 5y ago
If you really want to go against the grain, may I suggest radial menus, which allow the user to muscle-memory through menu selections: https://bindpose.com/custom-marking-menu-maya-python/ https://bindpose.com/custom-marking-menu-maya-python/
- userbinator 5y ago
  Interesting concept, but I would add keyboard shortcuts (underlined items) to the menu to make it more of a reminder than be forced to use the mouse all the time.
  - smegger001 5y ago
    That was originally part of the IBM Common User Access style guide 80/90s, back when user interfaces for software valued function over form. https://ia800200.us.archive.org/0/items/ibmsj2703E/ibmsj2703E.pdf https://ia800200.us.archive.org/0/items/ibmsj2703E/ibmsj2703... the figure on page 2 shows exactly what you are describing.
- RedShift1 5y ago
  Visually nice but it's almost always going to overlap the thing you've right clicked. Under any circumstance I still want to see the thing I've right clicked.
- sph 5y ago
  Fly-Pie, a radial menu for GNOME: https://github.com/Schneegans/Fly-Pie https://github.com/Schneegans/Fly-Pie
- account42 5y ago
  This and many variants of the idea has been explored in games a lot - in particular in point and click adventures and isometric (or at least top-down view) RPGs. Probably also in strategy games and anything else that has both a cursor and context-specific actions.

chillfox 5y ago

Had that experience before where I spent ages looking for how to do something and what I had tough was a label was actually a button. Now if I can't find anything then I just start clicking on random design elements in case they turn out to be a secret button to a hidden page.

HeckFeck 5y ago

I'm also really not sold on those new "tabs" which are just text with an underlined colour. It's low effort and dreadfully unclear. I can only vaguely guess what they are based on their upper placement, but what's to really distinguish that from a menu? or just a descriptive label? I don't like saying this because I want Linux desktop apps to have every success, but these small and pointless frustrations kill my enthusiasm.

dheera 5y ago

UIs go through 3D and 2D in phases. Windows 2.0 - 3.1: 2D Windows 95 - 7: 3D Windows 8 - 10: 2D MacOS 6 - 7: 2D MacOS 8 - 10: 3D MacOS 11: 2D As a side point, I predict Sheriff and Sans-Sheriff fonts to also go into similar phases too though over a longer time scale. We're in a very long Sans-Sheriff phase now but I think Sheriff will be "in" in 20 years.

mceachen 5y ago
FWIW, Macintosh System 6 was just black and white (and only 640x480px), so 3D wasn't really tenable. System 7 and 8 had support for color, and was as 3D as it could muster, like highlight and shadow treatment on buttons and other widgets, and embossed, draggable thumbs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7#/media/File:Mac_OS_7.6.1_emulated_inside_of_SheepShaver.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7#/media/File:Mac_OS_7.... Mac OS X brought Aqua, which was a pinnacle of 3D and skeuomorphic design. You know you're going hard for 3D when you add a drop shadow on all the text in your menubar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_10.0#/media/File:MacOSX10-0screenshot.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_10.0#/media/File:MacO... (and that IE logo in the dock wasn't there as a joke: it really was the best browser for OS X until Safari was a thing, years later)
- rayiner 5y ago
  Those pinstripes.
- RuggedPineapple 5y ago
  512×342 actually, at least for the compact macs with the built in screen.
ejolto 5y ago
Sheriff? I think you mean serif, partner.
- bdefore 5y ago
  Deputy. Perfect name for a new Sans-Sheriff typeface.

capdeck 5y ago

A couple of times i found myself clicking on various text labels just to see if it is a title or a button. All these flat minimalist designs are a step in a horribly wrong direction.

userbinator 5y ago
I've seen all 4 combinations of "looks like" vs "is actually" {button,static text} on a web app I was once forced to use. Some of the plain text was actually a clickable button (with NO hover effect), and some of the "buttons" (or more precisely, short actionable text with a rectangle around it) were actually just labels. Imagine the word "Order" presented in both styles, and my astonishment when I figured out which one I actually had to click.
hulitu 5y ago
And sometimes a text label hides a menu. The best i've seen was a web page with a hamburger menu which had no action.

adhesive_wombat 5y ago

I spend far too long in GTK apps looking for the right menu to do basic stuff. It's like someone once saw an iPad from across a room and tried to implement what they remembered of it.

eptcyka 5y ago
Funny, I usually have the same opinion of iOS user interfaces.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- hackmiester 5y ago
  You would benefit from the “Button Shapes” option in accessibility! It underlines or outlines text-only “buttons.”
berkes 5y ago
This is really not the best place to throw condescending anecdotes around to insult FLOSS. What, on an iPad, should a designer look at in detail to improve the GTK app, for example?
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  The first step is them realizing they have a problem.
- adhesive_wombat 5y ago
  Where did I say GTK should follow iOS? All I said was that it looks like they did, and did it badly.

Schroedingersat 5y ago

But at least they spread out all the unnecessary fluff elements and then made the clickable portions tiny and close together

librarylinux 5y ago

baybal2 5y ago

ghosty141 5y ago

I too hate the material design kind of flatness. For me, only apple somehow gets UI right (at least for me) and it feels very intuitive for me while also looking very good. The new "flat" design that pops up everywhere sometimes just feels like a lazy version of UI design, where you basically don't need proper styles anymore and just make everything b/w with maybe a border here and there.

kjeetgill 5y ago
My understanding of material design is that it tries not to be too flat. Material design reduces the 3d roundedness and gradients of many elements but still relies heavily on drop shadows to indicate hierarchy and overlapping.
lelanthran 5y ago
> I too hate the material design kind of flatness. For me, only apple somehow gets UI right (at least for me) and it feels very intuitive for me while also looking very good. I dunno about that (both Apple using flat, and the "gets it right" part). I'm looking at activity monitor now, under memory pressure, and the table of memory types has "Memory used" row expanded, and yet none of the rows are actually clickable. I spent a few seconds yesterday trying to click the other rows. Then I looked at system preferences, and it's not actually flat widgets - they have relief for those things that can be interacted with. Things that are clickable are visually marked as such.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  >I'm looking at activity monitor now, under memory pressure, and the table of memory types has "Memory used" row expanded, and yet none of the rows are actually clickable. I spent a few seconds yesterday trying to click the other rows. I can see why you might get confused there but it feels like nitpicking. I never expected to click on any of those elements because they don't look like a traditional table or outline view.

RachelF 5y ago

> I have had to explain to people tons of times that the random word in the UI somewhere in an application is actually a button they can press to invoke an action. Exactly this. I often help others use computers and phones. In the old days it was easy to see what could be clicked. Now input and output look the same. It makes it harder to use. In many ways it is a victory of style over substance - UI's are now designed by the same crowd who designs high fashion, that is clothes not designed to be worn but to be gawked at.

bobthechef 5y ago
> In many ways it is a victory of style over substance - UI's are now designed by the same crowd who designs high fashion, that is clothes not designed to be worn but to be gawked at. Is it? Style is no style at all if the thing in question does not fulfill its function. The whole point of something stylish is that it accomplishes its end so well and respects the appropriate constraints that is pleases the intellect when it recognizes this perfection. So if someone is designing a UI that is difficult to use, that is a failure of both style and substance since there is no style without substance.
- JasonFruit 5y ago
  Fine, a Pyrrhic victory of style over substance.
- HstryrsrBttn 5y ago
lenkite 5y ago
We probably need to start paying UI folks NOT to change stuff. They can do all their flat-experimenting in custom themes.
- berkes 5y ago
  In the case of the article, that is somewhat unfair. > GTK4 has been in development for a bit and has improved a lot of the internals. One of the great upsides is that it can take more advantage of the GPU when rendering the UI. So there was a clear need to rewrite parts to fix internals. > The Adwaita theme has also been nicely carried over and looks very similar to the GTK3 counterpart. ... > When I want to make a gtk4 application for mobile I would need libhandy, but libhandy for gtk4 is not a thing. The "solution" is libadwaita. This provides the widgets I need but it comes with the downside of having some of the worst decisions in application theming. So, there we have it: it's not "UI folks just changing stuff", its a ground-up rebuild of a UI-language. Now, whether or not that ground-up should be flat, modern, or just copy the old, is another discussion.

Pxtl 5y ago

This. The author dumps on ms for going flat, but MS did it with rock solid consistency. I had a win phone 7 device. It was the pinnacle of consistent Gui. Is it colored? Then it's a button. Is it white? It's a Text box. Is it a giant title? It's tabbed horizontal scroll. Are you a "designer" who wants to color something non-clickable? Piss off, you don't get to do that.

silisili 5y ago

100% agreed. I want buttons to, at minimum, indicate that my click or touch was successful. Even a little wiggle. Flat design has me wondering with no visual indication, and I hit this all the time.

grishka 5y ago

Borderless buttons to have the right to exist, but you should be very careful with their use. For example, take this UI I made recently: https://mastodon.social/@grishka/107998100334356147 https://mastodon.social/@grishka/107998100334356147, 2nd screenshot. The button to decline invitation looks like a link (same color) and it's next to a real button. No one would ever get confused by this, it's pretty clear it's clickable. But a black word in a larger font among black text would definitely NOT be recognized as a button by most people. Context matters a lot.

happymellon 5y ago
It's bold, so that helps. I assume you are able to click the group name and test user since they are also bold? I would still prefer a border around the button as I'm not sure what you gain by removing it, but at least you provide hints.
spoils19 5y ago
I disagree. I had to sit and think for a few minutes as it was extremely unintuitive - my first impressions were that I couldn't decline the invitation at all, and the button was disabled or missing for some reason (I've seen some bad CSS in my career so it no longer surprises me when it goes missing).
- sph 5y ago
  The button and link next to each other is a common pattern that has been used for decades at this point. It's core to Google's material design. I agree that it might not be ideal, but when it is used literally everywhere I do not believe it's that hard to read.
  - amatecha 5y ago
    Decades? Any examples of this? Material Design has only been around since 2014, so that's not really a good example to cite.
swiftcoder 5y ago

adhesive_wombat 5y ago

Misuse (or no use) of affordances is so, so annoying, both in software and real life. Things like having pull handles on both sides of a door that has to be pushed from one side. Or having no push plate on either side of a glass door. Do I push? Is it a sliding door that's not working? Don't know! My car has the climate controls hidden behind a graphic of the current state on the stupid touch screen. It used to be buttons that had three zones for head, body and feet, a wheel for fan and a wheel for temp[1]. Volvo used to pride themselves on having controls you could use with gloves on, so all the buttons had 3D features and a positive press feel. Now it's not even obvious the graphic is a button at all (it's also incredibly dangerous as you cannot do anything without a multi-click modal process with only visual feedback that you have to look at to use). Thankfully the window demister is still a physical button because that would be incredibly dangerous to hide behind a soft screen interface: when you need it you need it. However, it's lost its 3D profile and is now just a flat button. My office has an amusing one: there's a door at each end of the building. The building is the same on both sides, neither side looks more "fronty" than the other, and the doors are the same. Only one of these is the main entrance. The door next to the car park (i.e. where anyone unfamiliar with the site will arrive) is not the main door. Therefore there are no call buttons. However, there's also no indication that there is another door on the other side. A whole building basically has no obvious start menu. Just...why do that? [1] https://bparts-eu.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/ftp/azor_2/000/000/526/000000526730.jpeg https://bparts-eu.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/ftp/azor_2/000/...

nanochad 5y ago