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What's funny is that it pisses off a large number of those 1% of users who swap OSs frequently as well. So it isn't even for the benefit of that 1% either. Whe

by Nadya 4y ago

What's funny is that it pisses off a large number of those 1% of users who swap OSs frequently as well. So it isn't even for the benefit of that 1% either. When operating a Mac I expect Mac-specific behaviors. When operating a Windows PC I expect Windows-specific behaviors. I LOATHE programs that decide to do away with OS-isms that I am accustomed to and require me to learn how to "do things their way" because they wanted cross-OS consistency. Sometimes this means conforming everything to a single platform which is partially evil but just as often it means conforming to _none of them_ which is pure evil. But I understand this - as a web developer I've experienced pressure from Project Managers and the "decision makers" to make things consistent across browsers/devices even if doing so goes against how the users of said browsers/devices would expect things to operate - breaking user expectations and creating a worse UX for many users. I fight against it when I can but I'm not always successful.

mjevans 4y ago
Games are the peak of this, since consoles lack anything resembling a filesystem, natural fits for that (like inventory management) tend to differ for every single game... and then they get ported back out to PCs of various flavors with zero adaptation for new peripherals. (Or old ones, as most of those consoles COULD in theory support a keyboard and mouse or touchpad input of some sort too.)
- dataangel 4y ago
  What do you mean by inventory management? Like each item in the characters inventory is a file? There are lots of reasons to not do that.
zigzag312 4y ago
Could you give an example which inconsistencies are the most offending to you? I agree that some platform specific behavior is important. But only behavior that relates to OS, like window management, system dialogs, accessibility etc. IMHO we are focusing too much on what does and doesn't look like platform UI. Big part of native widgets is also about branded UI. Arguing weather Apple or Adobe is more important brand for the UI is kind of pointless. Consistent UI across multiple platforms affects more than just people who are using multiple OSes. For example, user watching a tutorial, expects to be able to replicate instructors actions. Imagine the joy of discovering in-app menus on his machine are different, because instructor was using the app on a different OS. Also, greater cost of designing and developing widgets for different platforms means there is less budget left to design custom task-specific UIs with better UX. For UI "inside" the app, we should be focusing on what is a best possible UX of human-computer interaction for a task at hand. Just blindly using native widgets for everything can actually lead to bad user experience. For example, I hate it when an app uses Win32 Color Dialog for color selection. It's a widget with a bad UX for 99% of use cases. To me, as a user, UI with good human-computer interaction experience is much more important that use of branded platform-native widgets.

by Nadya 4y ago

mjevans 4y ago

Games are the peak of this, since consoles lack anything resembling a filesystem, natural fits for that (like inventory management) tend to differ for every single game... and then they get ported back out to PCs of various flavors with zero adaptation for new peripherals. (Or old ones, as most of those consoles COULD in theory support a keyboard and mouse or touchpad input of some sort too.)

dataangel 4y ago
What do you mean by inventory management? Like each item in the characters inventory is a file? There are lots of reasons to not do that.

zigzag312 4y ago

Could you give an example which inconsistencies are the most offending to you? I agree that some platform specific behavior is important. But only behavior that relates to OS, like window management, system dialogs, accessibility etc. IMHO we are focusing too much on what does and doesn't look like platform UI. Big part of native widgets is also about branded UI. Arguing weather Apple or Adobe is more important brand for the UI is kind of pointless. Consistent UI across multiple platforms affects more than just people who are using multiple OSes. For example, user watching a tutorial, expects to be able to replicate instructors actions. Imagine the joy of discovering in-app menus on his machine are different, because instructor was using the app on a different OS. Also, greater cost of designing and developing widgets for different platforms means there is less budget left to design custom task-specific UIs with better UX. For UI "inside" the app, we should be focusing on what is a best possible UX of human-computer interaction for a task at hand. Just blindly using native widgets for everything can actually lead to bad user experience. For example, I hate it when an app uses Win32 Color Dialog for color selection. It's a widget with a bad UX for 99% of use cases. To me, as a user, UI with good human-computer interaction experience is much more important that use of branded platform-native widgets.