4 ms·
He better not quit his day job as a graphics programmer. Act on press is a terrible design the vast majority of time and almost always has unintended consequenc
by bmitc 2y ago
He better not quit his day job as a graphics programmer. Act on press is a terrible design the vast majority of time and almost always has unintended consequences and is incompatible with other interactions, such as disambiguating something that can be clicked but also dragged.
> it reduces user errors
Act on press significantly increases user error because in most cases, it is not the norm, so when it shows up, users take actions they didn't mean to. I can't stand it when a button is act on press.
> and it is good UI design to favor them when possible
Saving tens of milliseconds in a button press does not automatically correlate to good UI design. Saving time is the only justification he gave, which is what you'd expect out of a graphics engine programmer. And he just suggested before this line that it would be good to have mixed behaviors, which makes no sense.
- Jtsummers 2y agoThat study makes sense given that it's about virtual keyboards, and most users expect keyboards to be act on press (since physical keyboards are). The issue, for me, is that he's extrapolating from that study that all (or nearly all) systems should be act on press, which doesn't actually follow. You'd need a study showing that subverting user expectations (act on release) by switching to act on press reduces error rates (or at least doesn't increase them). Take a web browser and make every click (even those intended to be a click and drag, like to a bookmark folder) act on press. See how much more often (or not) users use the back button for browser history, for instance.