3 ms·

Product designers should definitely favor local OS norms in most cases. Using one design for all OSs might be organizationally easier in many ways, inter-OS vis

Product designers should definitely favor local OS norms in most cases. Using one design for all OSs might be organizationally easier in many ways, inter-OS visual consistency offers little benefit to users and doesn't leverage their familiarity with similar idioms in their environments. > Another important change is the introduction of a skeleton screen to make the start feel fast Yeah. Sometimes you do have to make users wait— e.g. parsing a huge cache to put in a dialog or making shaky network calls— and most designers mental model for addressing that frustration is the slow elevator problem†. Skeletons seemed like a good way to address it. We don't parse screens instantly: we first interpret structure/visual hierarchy so we know where to scan for titles, ordinals, controls, or whatever else we need. Skeletons theoretically let us do that while content loads. More recent research doesn't corroborate claims of silver-bullet efficacy: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326858669_The_effect_of_skeleton_screens_Users%27_perception_of_speed_and_ease_of_navigation https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326858669_The_effec... † The related anecdote goes something like this: Tenants of an NYC office tower complained of slow elevator service during peak use. The property manager consulted with experts to evaluate the algorithmic efficiency and mechanical components, but it resulted in little improvement. The property manager then turned the exterior elevator doors int mirrors. Most riders were sufficiently emotionally engaged by a life-sized version of themselves long enough to make the wait seem much shorter.

eek2121 5y ago
Except a browser should load things in the following order: 1) Create Window 2) Create UI (based on native controls for OS) 3) Load drop downs, top level down. 4) If you design your application this way, you won't have to build a skeleton. Mozilla is not using native UI/UX components to build their UI, so they have to go through several extra steps. I'm sure they do this in the name of customizability, but that, IMO, should be optional.
- chefandy 5y ago
  I was talking about skeletons generally because the commenter to which I replied said they’d never heard the term before.
saurik 5y ago
FWIW, I personally really like it when a product is consistent across different devices. Most of learning to use a new product is learning a million details about that product and once I learn them I don't want to have to find they look super different or are in a radically different place just because I happen to be using a different computer for a day. The operating system doesn't really matter: it is a commodity at this point; but I want everything from Word to Facebook to look and function as much the same as possible on every single computer / device... which, BTW, also means I want it to largely look and work the same across different versions of the operating system, as if I am sitting down today at an old computer in a library I don't want Word to be some seemingly unrelated experience to when I use it on my newer computer. I thereby will claim that cross-platform UI toolkits (which includes "the web") actually affords me--as a user--tremendous value, and I am always pretty happy when I see a product start to figure out their house brand. I do appreciate the other side of this, and I even have sometimes argued it myself to engineering teams I work with as--if nothing else--using the local style is certainly better than being bad at style, and I frankly would rather avoid having to work with a designer. But is it really so shocking to appreciate mine? I always feel like people jus let casually dismiss the idea that users might actually prefer software to look the same everywhere, and yet I feel like it is only particularly snobby tech people (which does include me: I hate poorly done UI) that seem to want the fully unified toolkit, and I think the success of bespoke UI in games really demonstrates this.
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  People use dozens of applications but only two or three devices, often from the same OS family. Just by the numbers, consistency across applications will better suit that pattern than consistency across platforms.
- chefandy 5y ago
  I’ve done more dev work than design, but I’m educated as a designer and do both professionally. A big part of good design practice is studying what your users do and making decisions based in that. Assuming your use case is representative enough to reason about your users’ needs and that interface design is unnecessary with a solid enough UI kit is exactly why designers need to be involved. It’s also why almost all FOSS UIs are garbage. Most users don’t use the same app on many devices and operating systems. That you consider the OS a constantly changing fungible component in your daily tool chain is incredibly unusual. Outside of some dev and IT tools, optimizing for that use case just doesn’t make sense and even most IDEs don’t try. Most device UI kits are more carefully designed to suit their users interaction needs than any app could hope to achieve, especially considering accessibility.

eek2121 5y ago

Except a browser should load things in the following order: 1) Create Window 2) Create UI (based on native controls for OS) 3) Load drop downs, top level down. 4) If you design your application this way, you won't have to build a skeleton. Mozilla is not using native UI/UX components to build their UI, so they have to go through several extra steps. I'm sure they do this in the name of customizability, but that, IMO, should be optional.

chefandy 5y ago
I was talking about skeletons generally because the commenter to which I replied said they’d never heard the term before.

saurik 5y ago

FWIW, I personally really like it when a product is consistent across different devices. Most of learning to use a new product is learning a million details about that product and once I learn them I don't want to have to find they look super different or are in a radically different place just because I happen to be using a different computer for a day. The operating system doesn't really matter: it is a commodity at this point; but I want everything from Word to Facebook to look and function as much the same as possible on every single computer / device... which, BTW, also means I want it to largely look and work the same across different versions of the operating system, as if I am sitting down today at an old computer in a library I don't want Word to be some seemingly unrelated experience to when I use it on my newer computer. I thereby will claim that cross-platform UI toolkits (which includes "the web") actually affords me--as a user--tremendous value, and I am always pretty happy when I see a product start to figure out their house brand. I do appreciate the other side of this, and I even have sometimes argued it myself to engineering teams I work with as--if nothing else--using the local style is certainly better than being bad at style, and I frankly would rather avoid having to work with a designer. But is it really so shocking to appreciate mine? I always feel like people jus let casually dismiss the idea that users might actually prefer software to look the same everywhere, and yet I feel like it is only particularly snobby tech people (which does include me: I hate poorly done UI) that seem to want the fully unified toolkit, and I think the success of bespoke UI in games really demonstrates this.

KarlKemp 5y ago
People use dozens of applications but only two or three devices, often from the same OS family. Just by the numbers, consistency across applications will better suit that pattern than consistency across platforms.
chefandy 5y ago
I’ve done more dev work than design, but I’m educated as a designer and do both professionally. A big part of good design practice is studying what your users do and making decisions based in that. Assuming your use case is representative enough to reason about your users’ needs and that interface design is unnecessary with a solid enough UI kit is exactly why designers need to be involved. It’s also why almost all FOSS UIs are garbage. Most users don’t use the same app on many devices and operating systems. That you consider the OS a constantly changing fungible component in your daily tool chain is incredibly unusual. Outside of some dev and IT tools, optimizing for that use case just doesn’t make sense and even most IDEs don’t try. Most device UI kits are more carefully designed to suit their users interaction needs than any app could hope to achieve, especially considering accessibility.