[HN Gopher] Invisible Details of Interaction Design
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Invisible Details of Interaction Design
Author : zenorocha
Score : 70 points
Date : 2023-07-10 17:02 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rauno.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (rauno.me)
| bentt wrote:
| I often think these kinds of posts are bullshit. UX paradigms are
| not proven to always work outside of its very specific context,
| spatially, temporally, culturally. When experts come in they make
| us feel safe, but the only way we get to these answers is by
| having inspiration to try something, give it to users, measure
| the results, and iterating on it.
|
| When you try to look backwards and say "this is why it works",
| that's not a lie, but applying the learnings in a forward moving
| sense are filled with exceptions and traps. So you're kinda back
| where you started, where the palette of things to try gives you
| inspiration, and then again, you gotta put it to users.
|
| Anyway, great for UX people that they command so much money, but
| I think that's less that they are objective and scientifically
| based and more because they are good at navigating the politics
| of decision making.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| > Sometimes we can get away with not animating mouse or keyboard
| interactions, without it feeling jarring.
|
| For fucks sake, you shouldn't even use animations for taps!
|
| Sharing a screenshot in iOS puts a damn animation between each of
| the 4 or so required taps. Totally unnecessary and you can't even
| get out by clicking the home button. It's disabled until the
| animation finishes! You're stuck there watching them for the
| 1000th time.
| steventey wrote:
| The amount of thought & attention to detail that went into this
| post is...incredible. A true masterpiece.
| Solvency wrote:
| Really?
|
| Articles like this always amuse me. This person has created
| nothing except annotating and designersplaining the design work
| other people already researched, designed, tested, and
| deployed.
|
| I suppose by thought and attention to detail you mean staged
| well-composed screen grabs of these common UI patterns?
| throwaway290 wrote:
| First, how about visible details of interaction design, like
| putting navigation/promo bar on top of the text I'm trying to
| read... with icons so low contrast you can't know what those
| buttons do until you tap them? And how do you manage to make it
| lose scroll position every time I switch back to it on mobile?
|
| As to the content, some call me an Apple fanboy but even I found
| the article full of dubious parallels, captain obvious
| observations and generally an unbearable read without a point.
|
| For example, I never swiped physical book pages, by the way.
| Since childhood I turn a page by lifting its edge first with
| initial pinch motion towards the edge. For me "swiping" often
| lifts more than one page which is frustrating. Yet people like me
| don't have problems using swipe. (Let alone new generations who
| see tablets before books.)
|
| Maybe because it's just a thing we all learn when using the
| device?
|
| Later this paragraph just killed me, no comment:
|
| > As a designer, I love to animate everything. Object permanence,
| creating a focal point, and delight are all good reasons for
| doing so. But it's not so obvious when not to animate something.
|
| Okay maybe one comment: _please stop animating everything,_
| thanks.
|
| And I dislike the Pencil's unscrewable tip, because I do actually
| fidget with it and this leads to trying to write with it not
| fully screwed on and thinking Pencil is breaking. Because it
| randomly stops drawing unless it is fully screwed in. A useful
| detail would be if it had a tactile bump when screwing to let you
| know you are safe to use it.
|
| I'd keep it to myself but the article reads just so full of
| itself I couldn't resist. Maybe my mood contributed
| klabb3 wrote:
| Keyword being "details". Interaction design is (or should be)
| primarily about understanding what's going on and how to "do
| things". Both are signal-to-noise problems. Just like
| engineering, trade offs. Don't treat it like a science, it isn't.
| It's a craft.
|
| Mapping the mental models of "where am I now", "did I change this
| or do I need to click save first?", "wait, that was
| unintentional, take me back", "can other people see that I'm
| typing", "omg look at all this garbage, how do I organize these
| random notes" and other everyday things are often overlooked.
|
| I've found that there are many subtle choices that most engineers
| think of as equivalent but are different for the user. UX people
| are sometimes slightly better but oh my they miss the forest for
| the trees soo often as well.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| The ui and the content you have has to leverage each other if
| that makes sense. A new fancy navigation animation because it
| looks cool is asking for a lot of trouble. Only teams with a lot
| resources can afford to do fancy animations, as they take a lot
| of time to debug, change, make it work with other elements and
| most time consuming - get the details just right. You have to
| stick to the stuff the OS framework gives you but add a bit of
| creativity to it.
| cosmotic wrote:
| This seems to hit all the high points of a lot of the iOS and
| macOS interactions, but I think fails to hit any the low points.
| It doesn't take much user testing to find that a lot of these
| interactions are frustrating to a good segment of users. The
| article doesn't even mention discoverability and just briefly
| mentions affordances, two things that are severely lacking in
| these interactions.
|
| I had to resize the browser window to read the content of the
| article and carefully position the scroll bar so I could read the
| content without being constantly distracted by the looping,
| unpausable animations.
| mhink wrote:
| > [...] so I could read the content without being constantly
| distracted by the looping, unpausable animations.
|
| Interesting note: the page doesn't respect the `prefers-
| reduced-motion` media query.
| gochi wrote:
| Was wondering why this site looked so familiar. Very vercel-
| esque, which reminded me of paco.me, and that's when it clicked
| both of you worked on vercel!
|
| Gorgeous sites, wonderful little details all around. As another
| example of this article's very message!
| [deleted]
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