Bring Back Idiomatic Design

(essays.johnloeber.com)

38 points | by phil294 2 hours ago ago

16 comments

  • pkphilip 37 minutes ago

    UX has really gone downhill. This is particularly true of banking websites.

    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

  • teeray 13 minutes ago

    > There are hundreds of ways that different websites ask you to pick dates

    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.

    • nkrisc 2 minutes ago

      Is 03/04/2026 March 4th or the 3rd of April?

      If you have an international audience that’s going to mess someone up.

      Better yet require YYYY-MM-DD.

  • satvikpendem 18 minutes ago

    Not sure how you can put the genie back in the bottle, every app wants to have its own design so how can you enforce them to all obey the same design principles? You simply can't.

  • foobarbecue an hour ago

    Lately I've occasionally been running into round check boxes that look like radio buttons. Why????

    • LunicLynx an hour ago

      UX want to put their own spin on things. I’ve noticed this repeatedly.

      UX has gotten from something with a cause to being the cause for something

  • finghin an hour ago

    > Prefer words to icons. Use only icons that are universally understood.

    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.

    • PhilipRoman 32 minutes ago

      ...except for HN "unvote"/"undown" feedback which is especially unfortunate due to the shared prefix. Every time I upvote something I squint at the unvote/undown to make sure I didn't misclick.

  • xnx 32 minutes ago

    My hope is that since tools like Google Stitch have made fancy looking design free that it will become obvious how worthless fancy looking design always was. It used to signal that a site paid a lot of money and was therefore legitimate. Now it signals nothing.

    • jonahx 4 minutes ago

      This is a good point, but there's usually a long tail on transitions like this.

    • pawsocks 4 minutes ago

      There are no quick signals for anything like that anymore. It's sad and exhausting, everything feels like lies.

  • mcculley 25 minutes ago

    The web needs a HIG.

    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.

    • dxdm 8 minutes ago

      I think HIG means "Human Interface Guidelines" here. Seems to be an Apple thing.

      I wish more people would avoid or at least introduce abbreviations that may be unfamiliar to the audience.

  • ufocia 30 minutes ago

    UIs are inconsistent even in the same app. Nevermind plugins or suites. It would be great if menus were customizable so you could plug in your own template.

  • amakhov an hour ago

    ... and please stop doing paralax...

    • dxdm 5 minutes ago

      Such a nice way to give more depth to your content. </s>