5 ms·

> We are in an era of individually well-designed, useful web applications, and they’re all unique. This sounds pretty great to me. If the applications are well

> We are in an era of individually well-designed, useful web applications, and they’re all unique. This sounds pretty great to me. If the applications are well designed, they can do their own thing. I don't see why we need to conform to a centralized idiom. It's great that you can immediately tell which app you're in just from a glance. And also it's more interesting when applications have their own character. I would say idioms should maybe play a role at a company level, i.e. it makes sense that Google products will share design principles. But I wouldn't impose the same principles to all applications just so it will be slightly more familiar to some people.

allarm 3y ago
> I don't see why we need to conform to a centralized idiom. Exactly for the same reason why humanity has come up with an idea of standards. Same set of reasons I would even say. > But I wouldn't impose the same principles to all applications just so it will be slightly more familiar to some people. This is because design choices are more important to you than users' comfort and productivity. Some argue that it should be the other way around, though.
- eviks 3y ago
  > same reason why humanity has come up with an idea of standards and the same reasons are there why humanity has come up with the idea of breaking or ignoring bad standards You can't resolve these type of issues in the abstract, some olden design paradigms are better than what we have now, but then there were plenty of awful decisions "standardized" as well
  - allarm 3y ago
    That’s not “breaking”, that’s “ignorant disregard without sufficient understanding of what the standard actually is”.
    - eviks 3y ago
      Nope, "smart disregard for bad UI practices standardized by ignorant people of the past" is also there
      - allarm 3y ago
        Nope, it is not. The only reason you can say things I quoted below is because you hate and disrespect your own users. You should not "innovate" just for the sake of innovation. Any change in the design and UX should be the least painful for the user. If you do it the other way around it's nothing but narcissism. > I don't see why we need to conform to a centralized idiom. > But I wouldn't impose the same principles to all applications just so it will be slightly more familiar to some people.
        eviks 3y ago
        Another reason is that you respect the users and want to offer them a superior UI even though something bad is more familiar > You should not "innovate" just for the sake of innovation But you can innovate to fix "bad UI practices standardized by ignorant people of the past"
        allarm 3y ago
        Also you can reiterate the same line over and over again without thinking. Also works for some.
kergonath 3y ago
> This sounds pretty great to me. If the applications are well designed, they can do their own thing. They are almost never well designed. Devs, particularly those who get excited about “clever” UX don’t care about usability. > I don't see why we need to conform to a centralized idiom. Because I don’t want to learn dozens of keyboard shortcuts to do the same thing just because a random dev thought it was clever to have their own thing. Because I don’t want to spend hours navigating “clever” menu layouts and figure out whether the settings I am after are behind a hamburger, in a sub-sub-submenu, in a contextual menu, or hidden behind arcane commands (hello, Chrome). I don’t want some stupid software forcing down on me metaphors from another stupid OS, either. I do want text fields to support the same operations everywhere; I want menus to be used the same way as well, and these are the most egregious. OS provided widgets offer baseline functionality the users expect to find. Re-implementing your own widgets is fucking stupid: you are spending a lot of time to re-invent the wheel, and in the end it does not even work. It’s just like cryptography. Don’t roll your own. Your users will thank you.
- stanjo 3y ago
  [dead]

allarm 3y ago

> I don't see why we need to conform to a centralized idiom. Exactly for the same reason why humanity has come up with an idea of standards. Same set of reasons I would even say. > But I wouldn't impose the same principles to all applications just so it will be slightly more familiar to some people. This is because design choices are more important to you than users' comfort and productivity. Some argue that it should be the other way around, though.

eviks 3y ago
> same reason why humanity has come up with an idea of standards and the same reasons are there why humanity has come up with the idea of breaking or ignoring bad standards You can't resolve these type of issues in the abstract, some olden design paradigms are better than what we have now, but then there were plenty of awful decisions "standardized" as well
- allarm 3y ago
  That’s not “breaking”, that’s “ignorant disregard without sufficient understanding of what the standard actually is”.
  - eviks 3y ago
    Nope, "smart disregard for bad UI practices standardized by ignorant people of the past" is also there
    - allarm 3y ago
      Nope, it is not. The only reason you can say things I quoted below is because you hate and disrespect your own users. You should not "innovate" just for the sake of innovation. Any change in the design and UX should be the least painful for the user. If you do it the other way around it's nothing but narcissism. > I don't see why we need to conform to a centralized idiom. > But I wouldn't impose the same principles to all applications just so it will be slightly more familiar to some people.
      - eviks 3y ago
        Another reason is that you respect the users and want to offer them a superior UI even though something bad is more familiar > You should not "innovate" just for the sake of innovation But you can innovate to fix "bad UI practices standardized by ignorant people of the past"
        allarm 3y ago
        Also you can reiterate the same line over and over again without thinking. Also works for some.

kergonath 3y ago

> This sounds pretty great to me. If the applications are well designed, they can do their own thing. They are almost never well designed. Devs, particularly those who get excited about “clever” UX don’t care about usability. > I don't see why we need to conform to a centralized idiom. Because I don’t want to learn dozens of keyboard shortcuts to do the same thing just because a random dev thought it was clever to have their own thing. Because I don’t want to spend hours navigating “clever” menu layouts and figure out whether the settings I am after are behind a hamburger, in a sub-sub-submenu, in a contextual menu, or hidden behind arcane commands (hello, Chrome). I don’t want some stupid software forcing down on me metaphors from another stupid OS, either. I do want text fields to support the same operations everywhere; I want menus to be used the same way as well, and these are the most egregious. OS provided widgets offer baseline functionality the users expect to find. Re-implementing your own widgets is fucking stupid: you are spending a lot of time to re-invent the wheel, and in the end it does not even work. It’s just like cryptography. Don’t roll your own. Your users will thank you.

stanjo 3y ago
[dead]