There is incompetence and there is also malevolence in the encouragement of dark patterns by the revenue side of the business.
“But why can’t you just do it?” Because I recognise the importance of consistent UX and an IA that can actually be followed.
Just like developers, (proper) designers solve problems, an we need to stop asking them for faster bikes.
However, I really wonder how formula 1 teams manage their engineering concepts and driver UI/UX. They do some crazy experimental things, and they have high budgets, but they're often pulling off high-risk ideas on the very edge of feasibility. Every subtle iteration requires driver testing and feedback. I really wonder what processes they use to tie it all together. I suspect that they think about this quite diligently and dare I say even somewhat rigidly. I think it quite likely that the culture that led to the intense and detailed way they look at process for pit-stops and stuff carries over to the rest of their design processes, versioning, and iteration/testing.
The system UI frameworks are tremendously detailed and handle so many corner cases you'd never think of. They allow you to graduate into being a power user over time.
Windows has Win32, and it was easier to use its controls than rolling your own custom ones. (Shame they left the UI side of win32 to rot)
macOS has AppKit, which enforces a ton. You can't change the height of a native button, for example.
iOS has UIKit, similar deal.
The web has nothing. You gotta roll your own, and it'll be half-baked at best. And since building for modern desktop platforms is horrible, the framework-less web is being used there too.
First, what he calls "the desktop era" wasn't so much a desktop era as a Windows era - Windows ran the vast majority of desktops (and furthermore, there were plenty of inconsistencies between Windows and Mac). So, as you point out regarding the Win32 API, developers had essentially one way to do things, or at least the far easiest way to do things. Developers weren't so much "following design idioms" as "doing what is easy to do on Windows".
The web started out as a document sharing system, and it only gradually and organically turned over to an app system. There was simply no single default, "easiest" way to do things (and despite that, I remember when it seemed like the web converged all at once onto Bootstrap, because it became the easiest and most "standard" way to do things).
In other words, I totally agree with you. You can have all the "standard idioms" that you want, but unless you have a single company providing and writing easy to use, default frameworks, you'll always have lots of different ways of doing things.
One reason so many single-person products are so nice is because that single developer didn't have the time and resources to try to re-think how buttons or drop downs or tabs should work. Instead, they just followed existing patterns.
Meanwhile when you have 3 designers and 5 engineers, with the natural ratio of figma sketch-to-production ready implementation being at least an order of magnitude, the only way to justify the design headcount is to make shit complicated.
The Windows I remember was in some ways actually less consistent than what we have now. It was common for apps to be themeable, to use weirdly shaped windows, to have very different icon themes or button colors, etc. Every app developer wanted to have a strong brand, which meant not using the default UI choices. And Microsoft's UI guidelines weren't strong enough to generate consistency - even basic things like where the settings window could be found weren't consistent. Sometimes it was Edit > Preferences. Sometimes File > Settings. Sometimes zooming was under View, sometimes under Window.
The big problem with the web and the newer web-derived mobile paradigms is the conflation between theme and widget library, under the name "design system". The native desktop era was relatively good at keeping these concepts separated but the web isn't, the result is a morass of very low effort and crappy widgets that often fail at the subtle details MS/Apple got right. And browsers can't help because every other year designers decide that the basic behaviors of e.g. text fields needs to change in ways that wouldn't be supported by the browser's own widgets.
Most people only uses one computer. Inconsistency between platforms have no bearing on users. But inconsistency of applications on one platform is a nightmare for training. And accessibility suffers.
As a sibling commenter put it, previously developers had "rails" that were governed by MS and Apple. The very nature of the web means no such rails exist, and saying "hey guys, let's all get back to design idioms!" is not going to fix the problem.
This feels like the root cause to me as well. Or more specifically, the web does have idioms, the problem is that those idioms are still stuck in 1980 and assume the web is a collection of science papers with hyperlinks and the occasional image, data table and submittable form.
This is where the "favourites" list and the ability to select any text on a web pages came from.
Web apps not only have to build an application UI completely from scratch, they also have to do it on top of a document UI that "wants" to do something completely different.
Modern browsers have toned down those idioms and essentially made it "easier to fight them", but didn't remove or improve them.
You can definitely do so, it's just not obvious or straightforward in many contexts.
> building for modern desktop platforms is horrible, the framework-less web is being used there too.
I think it's more related to PM wanting to "brand" their product and developers optimizing things for themselves (in the short term), not for their users.
Ugh, date pickers. So many of these violently throw up when I try to do the obvious thing: type in the damn date. Instead they force me to click through their inane menu, as if the designer wanted to force me into a showcase of their work. Let your power users type. Just call your user’s attention back to the field if they accidentally typed 03/142/026.
If you have an international audience that’s going to mess someone up.
Better yet require YYYY-MM-DD.
Is is the device display language, the keyboard input language, my geo location, my browser language, my legal location, my browser-preferred website language, the language I set last time, the language of the domain (looking at amazon.co.uk), the language that was auto-selected last time for me on mobile or... something else entirely?
- Use localization context to show the right order for the user
- Display context to the user that makes obvious what the order is
- Show the month name during/immediately after input so the user can verify
Also, the trend of hiding scrollbars, huge wasted spaces, making buttons look really flat, confusing icons, confusing ways of using drop downs rather than using the select/option html controls etc have all made the whole experience far inferior to where desktop UI was even decades ago
Underrated. Except for dyslexic people, and the most obvious icon forms, I am pretty sure most people are just better and faster at recognising single words at a glance than icons.
> that a link? Maybe!
When Apple transitioned from skeuomorphic to flat design this was a huge issue. It was difficult to determine what was a button on iOS and whether you tapped it (and the removal of loading gifs across platforms further aggravated problems like double submits).
Another absurdity with iOS is the number of ways you can gesture. It started simply, now it is complex to the point where the OS can confuse one gesture for another.
I don't advocate for removal of this checkbox but I would at least re-consider if that pattern is truly a common knowledge or not :)
UX has gotten from something with a cause to being the cause for something
Apps not born within Windows's realm were not homogeneous. Blender today is far more homogeneous with other apps than it used to be.
As soon as UI design became a creative visual thing rather than a functional thing , everything started to go crazy in UI land..
Since then, the "idiomatic design" seems to have been completely lost.
laughs in linux wouldn’t that be nice.
I don't care about the new features in a browser update. Ideally, nothing at all has changed.
I don't want a "tour" of the software I just installed. I, presumably, installed it to do something, and I just want to do that thing.
I don't want to have to select a preference for how a specific action is performed in your software. If it's not what I expected, I will learn it.
And for the love of GOD, nobody wants to subscribe to your newsletter.
All of these people who keep saying that webapps can replace desktop applications were simply never desktop power users. They don’t know what they don’t know.
I wish more people would avoid or at least introduce abbreviations that may be unfamiliar to the audience.
Are you serious? Nothing has come close to it. Yeah we have higher resolution screens, but everything else is much less legible and accessible than that screenshot.
On the web, the rise of component libraries and consistent theming is promising.
When someone asks me for a checkbox so they can have my app work their way instead and everyone else can do theirs, the hair stands up on the back of my neck. The check boxes are hard to discover unless you put them front and center, in which case they remain there forever serving no purpose.
I would rather redesign the entire interface, either to find the right answer that works for everyone, or to learn what makes one class of users different from another. The check box is a mode, and nodes are to be avoided if I possibly can.
I realize that this puts me at odds with a whole class of users who want to make their box do their thing. It's your box and you should do what you want. And I really love style sheets for that. Rather than cobbling together my own set of possible preferences you should have something Turing complete. Go nuts with it.
They added more customizability in Material 2 (or was it 3?), but yeah at that point some of the damage was done.
Tell me you know nothing about web development without saying you know nothing about web dev ...
1. React is an irrelevant implementation detail. You can have a plain HTML button in a button component, or you can have an image or whatever else. React has nothing to do with the design choices.
2. React is also how you get consistent design across a major web app. Can you imagine if every button on every site was the same Windows button gray color, regardless of the site's color? It'd be awful! React components (with CSS classes) are a way for a site like Amazon to make all their buttons orange (although I don't actually know if Amazon uses React specifically). But again, whether they look and act like standard buttons comes down to Amazon's design choices ... not whether their tech stack includes React or not.
Look idiomatic design is incredibly important to web design. One of the most popular web design/usability books, Don't Make Me Think, is all about idiomatic design!
But ultimately it's a design choice, which has very little, if anything at all, to do with which development tools you use.
Speaking as a user not a developer, it'd be lovely.
This Twitterism really bugs me.
You took the time to write a really detailed response (much appreciated, you convinced me). There’s no need to explicitly dunk on the OP. Though if you really want to be a little mean (a little bit is fair imo), I think it should be closer to level of creativity of the rest of your comment. Call them ignorant and say you can’t take them seriously or something. The twitterism wouldn’t really stand on its own as a comment.
Sorry for the nitpicky rant.
Not a webdev, but can't you just use CSS on the <button> element for that?
There's a reason why 99.9% of web apps use JavaScript, and with it a tool (framework) like React, Astro, Angular, or Vue. And if you're using such tools, you use them (eg. you use React "components") to create a consistent UI across the site.
But again, which tool you use to develop a site has very little to do with what design choices you make. A React dev with no designer to guide him might pick the most popular date picker component for React, and have the React community influence design that way, but ... A) if everyone picks the most popular tool, it becomes more idiomatic (it's not doing this that creates divergence), and B) if there is a human designer, they can pick from 20+ date picker libraries AND they can ask the dev team to further customize them.
It's designers (or developers playing at being designers) that result in wacky new UI that's not idiomatic. It has (almost) nothing to do with React and that layer of tooling, and if anything those tools lead to more idiomatic design.
I don't know how we got here and I don't know how to fix it, but "bring back idiomatic design" doesn't help when we don't have enough idioms. I'm not even sure if those two behaviors are wrong to be inconsistent: you're probably more likely to want fancier formatting in a PR review comment than a chat message. But as a user, it's frustrating to have to keep track of which is which.
If you turn on Markdown formatting, shift+enter adds a new line, unless you’re in a multi-line code block started with three backticks, and then enter adds a new line and shift+enter sends the message.
I can see why someone thought this was a good idea, but it’s just not.