6 ms·
Just Let Me Write Digits
- kleiba2 3mo agoReading this makes me feel like we have not learned any lessons at all in software engineering and UI design since the 1980s.
- bux93 3mo agoIBM CUA (1987) should be required reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
- Someone 3mo agoMaybe, but I’ve searched for it many times out of curiosity, but have never managed to locate it online, and wouldn’t know if paper copies exist. From Wikipedia, I get to https://web.archive.org/web/20010204033600/http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr/Shelves/CEESL002 https://web.archive.org/web/20010204033600/http://publib.bou... That has one live link: https://web.archive.org/web/20010107084700/http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr/BOOKS/F29BDG00/CCONTENTS https://web.archive.org/web/20010107084700/http://publib.bou..., but from there, the trail runs dead. Do you have a link?
- kleiba2 3mo agoThis one maybe? https://archive.org/details/ibm-saa-cua-basic-interface-design-guide/page/n131/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/ibm-saa-cua-basic-interface-desi... PDF link in the box on the right.
- benji-york 3mo agoThis appears to be a successor document: https://archive.org/details/common-user-access-basic-interface-design-ibm-corp https://archive.org/details/common-user-access-basic-interfa...
- acheron 3mo agoThere were lots of very in-depth UI studies in the 90s, which were implemented in the second half of the 90s and early 00s. Then someone let “designers” in the door and it was all thrown out.
- kleiba2 3mo agoYes. It was around the time when "UI design" changed to "UX design".
- jandrese 3mo agoWhile it started beforehand, it was really smartphones and especially the iPhone that gave so many UI guys an excuse to discard all of the studies of the past and start from scratch. "Oh, but it's a touch interface, these lessons are about mouse users, certainly discoverability and clearly differentiating UI elements don't apply anymore. Our users are so smart they will just know that a half swipe from the middle of the object is different than a half swipe from the edge, and they don't have to be told about functionality that is infused at birth now."
- pjc50 3mo agoWeb developer classic: use Javascript to replace the native, working, internationally supported standard inputs with a different input mechanism that doesn't work. (saving you a click: AZERTY has digits on the shift key, and for some reason the JS is handling raw keys rather than processed characters)
- khalic 3mo agoFormer web dev here, you’re… right :-/ the only thing that angers me more than this pattern is when they decide to fuck up scrolling
- LoganDark 3mo agoSame. Whenever I visit a website and it has that ridiculous scroll-smoothing JavaScript, I get so annoyed because I have pixel-level trackpad scrolling on macOS and they're just making it feel terrible.
- firmretention 3mo agoMy most hated one is not allowing me to right-click to open a context menu, or even worse, making right-click act the same as left-click, redirecting me to some page I never intended to go to.
- Affric 3mo agoThese are all great nominations. Crazy to add complexity like this.
- dreamcompiler 3mo agoLikewise usurping Ctrl-F with their own shitty global search function rather than the perfectly good page search provided by the browser. Looking at you, Confluence.
- jandrese 3mo agoUsually Ctrl-F still works for me, but / almost always gets consumed by the stupid search that never works properly. But then that's usually because you're on a site with infinite scroll so even the Ctrl-F search is going to be limited, even if you are in the correct thread. One thing is really dislike about modern UI design is where you see a headline that seems kinda interesting but you don't click on it right away. Come back a bit later and it's just gone. There was some A/B testing on the headline and now it's completely different, probably now all clickbaity so I won't be inclined to check it out.
- soneil 3mo agoI'm curious if there's a reason this six-cell mechanism has become the defacto? It seems this should just be a single input field styled appropriately, but it feels like there must be an underlying reason I'm missing.
- RobotToaster 3mo agoI'm guessing someone at some point thought that preventing copy and paste would stop bots, then everyone copied them.
- TonyTrapp 3mo ago> It seems this should just be a single input field styled appropriately Anecdotally, this seems to be the case on the majority of websites where I have to use such 2FA codes.
- abanana 3mo agoSantander's banking website uses both in some places, e.g. confirming a new payment. "Enter your 5-digit PIN and the 6-digit 2FA code we've just sent you", with 5 little input fields for the former, and a single standard input field for the latter. Perhaps a deliberate decision to make them look different, but it just looks like they couldn't make up their mind.
- 3mo ago
- janeway 3mo agoOn their website, when I enter a digit, the cursor advances to the next input box automatically. Deleting a digit with backspace also jumps back to the previous box. Seems to work perfectly for me. Maybe fixed since yesterday?
- llm_nerd 3mo agoRead a bit further and the reason they had the issue was their uncommon keyboard layout, which is one that requires holding the shift key to access numeric digits. This broke the input filtering logic.
- K0nserv 3mo agoIt's not uncommon it's used in France, which has a population of 66M (also Belgium). This is just a classic case of a developer situated firmly at the first peak of the Dunning Kruger graph.
- llm_nerd 3mo agoFrom a worldwide perspective, it is incredibly uncommon, and just from the basics of this issue it is clearly uncommon in Switzerland as well. The standard keyboard layout in Switzerland is QWERTZ (across all of its language speakers). This website is generally only used by the Swiss. I mean, if a basic authentication mechanism of a critical government website doesn't work with a keyboard layout, odds are incredibly likely that said keyboard layout is uncommon. Like not one of the developers, testers, stakeholders, or even other users had a problem -- and this isn't a problem you can just ignore -- so it probably isn't that big of a deal.
- abanana 3mo agoI'd understand a developer in e.g. America not being aware of it, but to one in Switzerland, France is right next door. A developer working on something as important as their government login system should be well aware of different keyboard layouts surrounding, and leaking into, their country.
- theoli 3mo agoI have two products in the wild with PIN entry for kiosk users that have a regular text input field. I have been asked if it could be the typical single digit boxes thing like this, but _never_ by the actual kiosk users. The kiosk users don’t celebrate my input type choice either. It just goes to show that most users won’t even see the details unless they are impacted by those choices.
- Retr0id 3mo agoAnother peeve I have with this type of input is when entering the last digit automatically submits the form. Once I fat-fingered the last digit and was about to hit backspace, but it was too late, the form submitted and verification failed. I had to wait an excruciating amount of time for the SMS send rate limit to expire before I could try again (I no longer remember which service this was for).
- moring 3mo ago> So statistically speaking I’m surprised that this bug hasn’t been noticed and fixed yet! I'm not so surprised, given that you cannot write support tickets if the bug prevents you from registering... Also, I don't think people have high hopes that a broken government website will ever get fixed.
- Ajedi32 3mo agoYes, for every time a bug like this is discovered and reported, there are probably hundreds of times when someone else just gave up or found a work around after much frustration. I'm frequently astonished by how terrible and buggy modern software can get away with being and still survive. Working around bugs to accomplish what I need to accomplish is so normal to me now that I sometimes don't even notice how terrible the software is until I see someone less technically skilled than me try to use it.
- AlienRobot 3mo agoOne problem I notice with FLOSS is this. If you have an issue with an open source software, you need to register on a website that is made for developers, that will try to sell you a git hosting service, write a bug following a technical format, and you are expected to given information in a reproducible way. If you have an issue with a closed source freeware, you just use a contact form on their website or leave a comment on their blog or whatever. The amount of friction to report a bug that FLOSS puts on users is absolutely insane. It's almost like it's trying to deny anyone who isn't a technical person from reporting problems they are having.
- nvme0n1p1 3mo agoGitHub is meant for developers. Plenty of OSS has forums or Zulip/Discord chats for ordinary users to get support in a more casual way. Sometimes not, but there's just as much closed source software with poor support too.
- jandrese 3mo agoIt's been noticed, but nobody with access to the website has been told or cares. The author is almost certainly the first person to do a root cause analysis and come up with the solution though.
- fer 3mo agoSame, but for dates. There's <input type="date">; it's literally a solved problem ffs. Forcing to scroll through years, months and days in your remarkably creative date selection widget is extremely user hostile.
- ralferoo 3mo agoMy pet peeve is in the "create a report" section of InvestEngine (useful for doing reports aligned to tax year). If you try to type a date at all, the year always ends up as 000n and no amount of typing numbers will get it to accept a 4 digit year (or even a 2 digit year starting 20). The only way to undo this state is to click today and then page through the years and months using the arrows on their stupid date widget.
- psd1 3mo agoIs this a browser app? Have you tried greasemonkey/tampermonkey?
- ralferoo 3mo agoNot investigated what framework it's using, but it looks like a mobile app compiled to WASM. It's just something I need to put up with I guess, it's just annoying when I need to generate a bunch of reports every year for my company end-of-year accounts, so it's not worth wasting time on trying to automate.
- abanana 3mo agoWe had a discussion about this one not too long ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45887957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45887957 Unfortunately, with the mobile OS's datepickers being so bad from a usability perspective, it's a long way from being a solved problem. Typing the date directly into a single textbox is great for some of us but not for others, so an alternative has to be provided. Yes, some date selection widgets can be poorly designed and user hostile, but the well-designed ones tend to be fine. The ideal, based on real user research by gov.uk, appears to be to use 3 separate textboxes, instead of <input type="date">.
- barrenko 3mo agoOn X.com on my Chrome browser I am unable to correct digits if I entered a wrong number. Very nice blog layout btw.
- frou_dh 3mo agoI've always found it weird when a form admonishes you for writing spaces or dashes in e.g. a phone number or credit card number. Hey, implementation, you're a computer! Strip them out automatically on the backend if you don't like them!
- ralferoo 3mo agoEspecially in the UK, bank sort codes are typically presented to the user as e.g. 04-00-04 by every banking app or website, but whenever you have to enter them (e.g. to pay someone else) they usually require you to not enter the dashes. Some of the most annoying sites limit the input to 6 characters but don't strip out the dashes, so you'd end up with 04-00- and then it complains. And then there are the ones that implement it as 6 separate boxes, and these are the only fields in the form that auto advance to the next field on input and also often break delete if you want to undo the previous digit.
- dreamcompiler 3mo agoAnd of course you often cannot paste a 6-digit number into these fields. You have to type all 6 digits by hand.
- mulquin 3mo agoThis is a common frustration in Australia with the ABN (business numbers), they are 11 digits but commonly shown with spaces, including on the ABN registry. However many sites have the 11 character limit.
- kn100 3mo agoHey, Monzo's Sort code, the first one to my knowledge to start with a zero. I spent six months unable to pay my council tax bill because their stupid system was treating the sort code as an integer and therefore dropping the leading zero, on the backend, before
- kn100 3mo agoHey, Monzo's Sort code, the first one to my knowledge to start with a zero. I spent six months unable to pay my council tax bill because their stupid system was treating the sort code as an integer and therefore dropping the leading zero, on the backend, before validating that it had six digits. At one point they asked me if I'd be willing to sign up for a different bank.
- zitterbewegung 3mo agoFWIW In the Apple ecosystem this usually gets filled in automatically based on the source.
- summarybot 3mo agoAs someone who uses Programmer Dvorak I often encounter pages where the js uses `event.code` instead of correct `event.key`. Silent discards of the shift key also affect Programmer Dvorak as the numbers require it.
- thaumasiotes 3mo ago> Silent discards of the shift key also affect Programmer Dvorak as the numbers require it. That sounds... aggressively unergonomic. Are programmers not expected to frequently use numbers?
- boredatoms 3mo agoWe use the ( ) [ ] { } keys more often than numbers, so it works out nice
- summarybot 3mo agoActually programmers use the symbols far more frequently than the numbers. The number row on Programmer Dvorak is, from left-to-right, & [ { } ( = * ) + ] ! # Looks really weird at first glance! but if you try it out, [square brackets] and (parens) are symmetrical fingers on opposing hands. By hand, [] is the ring fingers (2,0 on a qwerty). {} is (3,4 on the left-hand) and () is 5,8 aka your pointing fingers, left hand then right. Having the luxury of the parens and frequent symbols (especially if you code Clojure or a Lisp) on the tippy-top row is awesome. Plus, the numbers are also split by hand! From middle-going-out: Left hand: 91357 Right hand: 02468 Which lets you type numbers without looking for them by eye :)
- jandrese 3mo ago> Plus, the numbers are also split by hand! > From middle-going-out: > Left hand: 91357 Right hand: 02468 What is the advantage of this order vs. numerical order? If I'm reading your post correctly the numbers are arranged 7531902468 on the keyboard, with maybe a space in the middle? Is there some mathematical property where odd and even numbers are more likely to alternate than for odds or evens to be found side by side? Maybe 0 is more likely to appear so they want it on an index finger? It just seems unlikely that the next most common digit is 9, unless this was developed by people who set prices on items.
- burntcaramel 3mo agoYet another example where using <form method="post"> and <input> with zero JavaScript would be a better user experience. If you are going to write custom code you have to clear the minimum bar of what the browser provides.