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.

There is incompetence and there is also malevolence in the encouragement of dark patterns by the revenue side of the business.

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.

The best part is, it's super easy to customize them, read others for inspiration or to see how they did something, or even ship multiple per site to deal with different user preferences. Through this "forms" api, and little-known browser features like url-fragments, target/attribute selector, and style combinators, plus "the checkbox hack" you can build extremely responsive UIs out of it by "cascading" UI updates through your site! When do you think they're going to add it to next.js?

I'm tentatively calling this new UI paradigm "no-framework" or "no package manager", not sure yet https://i.imgur.com/OEMPJA8.png

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.

Something not mentioned here (that came from the Mac world as I understand it): everywhere that the text ends with an ellipsis, choosing that action will lead to further UI prompts. The actions not written this way can complete immediately when you click the button, as they already have enough information.

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.

Especially now, in the AI era, where each person can make a relatively working app from the sofa, without any knowledge of UI/UX principles.

* Undo & redo

* Help files & context sensitive F1

* Hints on mouse hover

* Keyboard shortcuts & shortcut customisation

* Main menus

* Files & directories

* ESC to close/back

* Drag n drop

Revelation features when they first became common. Now mostly gone on mobile and websites.

It might have started in an innocent way, all those A/B tests about call-to-action button color, etc. But it became a full scale race between products and product managers (Whose landing page is best at converting users?, etc.) and somewhere in this race we just lost the sense of why UX exists. Product success is measured in conversion rates, net promoter score, bounce rates, etc. (all pretty much short-term metrics, by the way), and are optimized with disregard to the end-user experience. I mean, what was originally meant by UX. It is now completely turned on its head.

Like I said, I wonder if there is way back of if we are stuck in the rat race. The question is how to quit it.

Since then, the "idiomatic design" seems to have been completely lost.

> 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.

Then the website has made its first mistake, and should delete that checkbox entirely, because the correct answer is always "yes". If you don't want to be logged in, either hit the logout button, or use private browsing. It is not the responsibility of individual websites to deal with this.

G Suite (no s) was the old name for Google Workspace. Google Workspace includes GMail, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Calendar, etc., so it doesn't really make sense to say that Google Workspace has a different UX than Google Docs, if Google Docs is part of Google Workspace.

Disclosure: I work at Google, but not one of the listed products.

As soon as UI design became a creative visual thing rather than a functional thing , everything started to go crazy in UI land..

Another annoyance is that many web forms (and desktop apps based on web tech) don’t automatically place the keyboard focus in an input field anymore when first displayed. This is also an antipattern on mobile, that even on screens that only have one or two text inputs, and where the previous action clearly expressed that you want to perform a step that requires entering something, you first have to tap on the input field for the keyboard to appear, so that you can start entering the requested information.

laughs in linux wouldn’t that be nice.

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.

> Avoid JavaScript reimplementations of HTML basics, e.g. React Button components instead of styled <button> elements.

I've been hearing that for the entire Internet era yet people continue to reinvent scrollbars, text boxes, buttons, checkboxes and, well, every input element. And I don't know why.

What this article is really talking about is conventions not idioms (IMHO). You see a button and you know how it works. A standard button will behave in predictable ways across devices and support accessibility and not require loading third-party JS libraries.

Also:

> Notwithstanding that, there are fashion cycles in visual design. We had skeuomorphic design in the late 2000s and early 2010s, material design in the mid 2010s, those colorful 2D vector illustrations in the late 2010s, etc.

I'm glad the author brought this up. Flat design (often called "material design" as it is here) has usability issues and this has been discussed a lot eg [1].

The concept here is called affordances [2], which is where the presentation of a UI element suggests how it's used, like being pressed or grabbed or dragged. Flat design and other kinds of minimalism tend to hide affordances.

It seems like this is a fundamental flaw in human nature that crops up everywhere: people feel like they have to do something different because it's different, not because it's better. It's almost like people have this need to make their mark. I see this all the time in game sequels that ruin what was liked by the original, like they're trying to keep it "fresh".

[1]: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design/

[2]: https://geekyants.com/blog/affordances-in-ui-design

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.

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 :)

> Both are very well-designed from first principles, but do not conform to what other interfaces the user might be familiar with

> The lack of homogeneous interfaces means that I spend most of my digital time not in a state of productive flow

There are generally two types of apps - general apps and professional tools. While I highly agree with the author that general apps should align with trends, from a pure time-spent PoV Figma is a professional tool. The design editor in particular is designed for users who are in it every day for multiple hours a day. In this scenario, small delays in common actions stack up significantly.

I'll use the Variables project in Figma as an example (mainly because that was my baby while I was there). Variables were used on the order of magnitude of billions. An increase in 1s in the time it took to pick a variable was a net loss of around 100 human years in aggregate. We could have used more standardized patterns for picking them (ie illustrator's palette approach), or unified patterns for picking them (making styles and variables the same thing), but in the end we picked slightly different behavior because at the end of the day it was faster.

In the end it's about minimizing friction of an experience. Sometimes minimizing friction for one audience impacts another - in the case of Figma minimizing it for pro users increased the friction for casual users, but that's the nature of pro tools. Blender shouldn't try and adopt idiomatic patterns - it doesn't make sense for it, as it would negatively impact their core audience despite lowering friction for casual users. You have to look at net friction as a whole.

On the web, the rise of component libraries and consistent theming is promising.

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.

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.