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> your website or webapp should care significantly more about visually fitting in with the user's system, settings, and preferences than it should about express
by joemi 4y ago
> your website or webapp should care significantly more about visually fitting in with the user's system, settings, and preferences than it should about expressing your corporate branding and looking the same on every device in the world.
I think it greatly depends on the website. For instance, I wouldn't expect a store's website to try to fit in with the user's system. Why should it? In that case, looking unique and standing out is a benefit. But if it's more of an app-type website, like a web mail client or some other utility that the user is likely to leave open for a while while working on stuff, then I think that's the type of site that should consider trying to fit in with the user's system. (Though I've never personally been of the opinion that I'd stop using an webapp just because it doesn't have darkmode or whatever.)
- xp84 4y ago> In that case, looking unique and standing out is a benefit. In case of a store, having say, a share button that matches the Android standard for it, rather than the Apple version, makes more sense to Android users. It makes your site easier to learn which is a benefit. I am not saying all pages should be 100% "CanvasText" on "Canvas," and use the browser default font. There's so much room for customization that can be done. Splashes of color. One or two judiciously-chosen fonts that aren't jarring. However, the fact that we have at least 100,000 separate implementations of a 'dropdown/popup menu,' is not worth the downsides. Each of these custom controls has its unique bugs and accessibility flaws and they usually are inferior in many ways to the real UI elements that have been tuned for literal decades to work in all scenarios for all types of users.