
Keyboard Smörgåsbord - elischiff
http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2015/9/29/keyboards-smorgasbord
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kijin
We had skeuomorphism for a few years. Then everyone decided to go flat and
abstract. I don't think the obsession with flatness will last more than a few
years, though. Sooner or later, something else will come up and we'll all rush
to adopt it, users be damned.

Developers tend to have an analytical mindset, and people with analytical
mindsets tend to overgeneralize. We find something that works for us in some
cases, decide that it's the One True Way (tm), and try to apply the same
principle to everything. We defend our choices religiously, blindly pursuing
the ideal of purity. If any user dares to admit that they don't understand the
reasoning behind our elegant designs, we blame them, not ourselves. PEBCAK,
after all.

Then a new trend comes along, and we repeat the cycle all over again.

In fact, the problem does usually exist between the chair and keyboard. Except
it's not always the user's keyboard and the user's chair. Sometimes it's
between our keyboards and our chairs.

------
Redoubts
>More than two years have passed since the 2013 WWDC when iOS 7's flattened
and utterly illegible software keyboard first saw the light of day.

Sometimes I think I'm the only person who feels flat is a dream come true.
I've been waiting for this style to be mainstream for almost a decade.

~~~
wodenokoto
Also, a keyboard isn't "utterly illegible" just because the state of the shift
key is ambiguous.

The article is full of hyperbole, and I wouldn't want to read his book after
reading half of this article.

------
sampo
_" consider Android: it lacks button borders, making it difficult to target a
particular key"_

It is true, the default theme ("Material") of the google keyboard has no
borders.

But, anyone can change to another theme ("Holo" theme has borders). And a lot
of Android users use another keyboard app, either by choice (SwiftKey is
popular, and has borders) or by default (Samsung phones have Samsung keyboard
by default, not google keyboard, and it has borders).

------
fossuser
I find these long articles about such tiny details odd - extremely nit-picky
and ultimately pointless.

Granted this is only based on personal experience and the experiences of
people I know. Basically people figure out the shift key in less than ten
seconds and it's not an issue.

Is this really a big deal for people? It looks nice and it works well, who
cares?

It seems like you can always arbitrarily argue that a certain design decision
is better than some alternative - it feels more like bullshit than science.

~~~
detaro
If something else looks fine as well and works better, why not use that?

For first-time or occasional users things like that can get needlessly
annoying, and if "it's just a tiny detail" is applied to everything, it
quickly leads to "death by a thousand paper-cuts".

So yes, most people probably don't care about it, but IMHO good UX design
should care about tiny details and look into small effects.

~~~
fossuser
My original comment was probably too abrasive - it wasn't so much that it was
just a tiny detail or that tiny details don't matter (they obviously do). I
guess I just find UX more subjective - seems easy to argue that any decision
is bad or good based on whatever criteria you're choosing to argue about.

