

A new UI annoyance - lispython
https://plus.google.com/u/0/115212051037621986145/posts/AvFEVJpwYtj

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zaidf
Couple more super annoying mobile UI patterns that should die:

1\. Banner ads in footer that blink every time you scroll the page. The
blinking makes me go nuts when reading a longer article. It gets my attention
alright but I sure don't associate that brand positively in my mind.

2\. Not being able to select text on an iPhone in safari. I really dont get
this. Websites shoot themselves in the foot because often I want to share the
article and quote a sentence or two. I don't because I can't select the text!

~~~
brianwillis
To select text in Mobile Safari you have to tap and hold, not double tap.
WebKit views are only place in iOS where this is inconsistent.

I suspect it is this way because double tap was reserved for zoom-to-fit in
iPhone OS 1.0, and now we're stuck with it being that way.

~~~
zaidf
I was referring to sites that find a way to disable tap and hold text
selection, intentionally or not.

~~~
brianwillis
Interesting. I haven't encountered this problem.

~~~
j79
I joined a team working on a single page app that disabled text selection (via
CSS user-select:none) to give it more of an "app" feel. While I understood
disabling text selection on certain things, the "disable everything" approach
drove me nuts.

When we had a redesign of our app, I decided that was one rule that could be
left out (and only applied where needed).

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JasonFruit
I'm struck by how much more gentlemanly Guido's tone was than some other
prominent open-source project leaders when they criticize publicly. (Linus
Torvalds comes to mind.) I think that level-headedness may underlie the
essentially sane, middle-of-the-road nature of Python.

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monochromatic
Fuck links that make me log in to google to view. And fuck them even more when
my true name gets flagged for violating some google policy, and I have to
submit it for review.

~~~
someone13
I clicked "Open link in Incognito Window" on Chrome, and it worked for me
without signing in, FWIW.

~~~
monochromatic
My problem may be that I'm on an iPhone.

~~~
DigitalJack
Chrome on iPhone has an incognito mode, btw.

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rglover
This is how I've been doing it as of late:
[http://dribbble.s3.amazonaws.com/users/14012/screenshots/867...](http://dribbble.s3.amazonaws.com/users/14012/screenshots/867046/attachments/92623/toggles.mov)

~~~
guptaneil
How is that any different, or any more clear than existing toggles? At the end
of the video, are they all off, or will clicking them turn them off? I can
never tell with these toggle buttons if the text is describing a state or an
action.

The worst offender was the HDR button in the iOS 5 Camera app. It just had an
"HDR On" label at the top, which left me absolutely no way of knowing if that
meant HDR was on right now or if touching that would turn HDR on.

~~~
Timothee
A few years ago, I worked on a video player and looked around a lot to figure
out if designers tended to go for "show action that will happen when clicked"
(e.g. video is playing, so display the "pause" icon) or "current state" (e.g.
video is playing, so display the "play" icon). For a video player, you'll have
things like the play/pause button, the video quality, etc.

I think the conclusion is that in a lot of cases there are no conclusion.
There are no definite best practice, both can be justified and both are used
pretty widely.

(PS: I just checked Vimeo, Youtube and Hulu. It seems that they tend to agree
on showing pause when it's playing. However Hulu and Youtube both show the
mute icon when it's muted, so they're not consistent regarding action vs.
state. My point is that for video players, there seems to be a potential best
practice here, but in general "action vs. state" is not clear-cut)

~~~
Gormo
This is pretty common, even in desktop media players. VLC, for example, has a
play/pause button that's labelled according to action, and a mute/unmute
'button' that's labelled according to state.

I put 'button' in quotes, though, to reflect a key difference: the mute/unmute
control in VLC isn't actually a button; it's an icon without button styling
sitting next to the volume slider, and this appears to be the case for other
desktop media players as well. Since the presentation of the control is
distinct, this might be less of an inconsistency with desktop players than
with these web video players.

Still, there seems to be an increasing muddle between action and state in
labeling UI controls, and that's not even considering functional controls that
display arbitrary information unrelated to any current state, like icons for
applications that display arbitrary content from a file created or accessed by
that application (I'm looking at you, Windows Phone Photo app).

I really don't understand why there's so much wild experimentation with UIs in
production software these days, but I do find my count of UI-related "WTF
moments" going up every month.

~~~
Timothee
Yeah, the video player ended up being a so-so example. :)

The point is that it's common to have UI elements that can go one way or the
other and it's often possible to justify either way.

As far as why there's a lot of experimentation, I think it's just because
designers are trying to find the pattern that will make people go "wow, look
at this, this is so cool/smart". Look for example at the praise Loren Brichter
got for pull-to-refresh. (it was indeed cool and smart) I think a lot of
people are experimenting to see if they can find the same kind of pattern that
end up sprouting all over the place. I don't know if this is really something
new though.

~~~
Gormo
There's certainly historically been a great deal of UI experimentation out
there, but in the past, it's been limited in context: entirely new UI
paradigms, as I remember, we're often tested out in entirely new products
designed around the UI concept - which often succeeded or failed in the market
due to the UI's influence - or we're gradually fleshed out as R&D projects
over long periods of time. But anything more than incremental UI paradigms
used to have to prove themselves before they ended up as the default UI of
well-established software products' shipping releases.

It just seems like there's a tendency for new versions of existing products to
have in their release notes something along the lines of "added: entirely new
grounds-up UI design, based on experimental concepts, that bears little
resemblance to previous UI". E.g. Ubuntu Unity, Gnome 3, Windows 8;
ironically, Apple currently offers the most conservative and predictable
desktop UI among currently-shipping OSes.

This doesn't really relate to the state-vs.-action question directly, except
that I thing both may be related to a current tendency to emphasize visual
aesthetics over functional consistency.

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smegel
Strange that you need a G+ account to view this...not very open is it.

~~~
gebe
Worked without an account for me.

~~~
notatoad
every single link to G+ this comes up, and every single time the response is
the same: If you are signed in to google but not G+, you have to sign in. If
you aren't signed in to google, you don't have to sign in.

~~~
smegel
I should have made this clear, but I was using my Android phone, and I don't
really get much of a choice. Either way, still sucks.

Why cant I read the web without a public profile that includes my real-world
first and last names?

~~~
icebraining
You can. You just need to sign in to Google again, not G+. Or, you can log out
completely.

~~~
smegel
Not on my Android phone. When I click on the link, I get taken to a page where
I am asked to create a Google+ Profile by entering my first and last name.
There is no "skip" button or any other way to bypass this screen. If it wasn't
clear, I _dont want_ to create a Google Profile, let alone a G+ account.

I _could_ try and logout, but this has certain implication on my Android phone
I don't want, like possibly disconnecting Sync and Gmail etc.

Also, saying "you can, but..." is a weasely way to describe things. I think
that having to do _anything_ beyond clicking on a link in order to read a
public webpage is an unacceptable barrier.

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nshepperd
[http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2012/11/invention-multiple-
choi...](http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2012/11/invention-multiple-choice-
windowed-slider-ui/) posted on HN a while ago as
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4742535> explained a solution to this
(or a very similar problem). But a simpler solution is just to use proper
shading to make the selected button look depressed, by analogy with physical
buttons.

------
rogerbinns
You also see this nonsense in DVD menus where there are two choices and no way
of telling.

~~~
lostlogin
What about DVD menus that can't be operated without the remote. Most DVDs let
you hit play on the player, and the movie starts. However there are way too
many out there that don't do that - requiring a left arrow, then play, or some
such rubbish. That way, a lost or non-operable remote leads to no DVD playing.
This is part the reason all my DVDs went in the bin, now if only i could
persuade my wife to play along.

~~~
rogerbinns
DVD players can be had for less than $25 so throwing away the DVDs out of
spite seems a bit silly. Many of the remote controls that come with TVs etc
can also be configured to also control your DVD player, cable box etc. The
actual IR codes are standardised but you do need to know the manufacturer.

I use a Harmony remote which also retains state (eg it knows what is already
on and on which inputs) and so sends the necessary codes to all devices such
as if you want to stop playing a DVD and switch to a game console.

~~~
lostlogin
I'll explain my spite. The following happened during this week. New DVD
purchased by my wife, I knew the remote was going to have flat batteries (last
used about 2 years ago) so I stuck the DVD in the Mac to use airplay to get it
on TV. Grey checker board appears over the screen. I google it and find this
is some kind of feature relating to DRM. So then spent time configuring a
workaround via VLC and screen mirroring. An irritating use of 30 mins that
reinforced my hatred to DVDs.

------
ngokevin
The proper way to do this is with hollow sliders...

[off]on

rather than an opaque one...

[xxx]on

~~~
eflowers
Quija sliders are perfect for this ;) <http://shaunxcode.github.com/ouija/>

~~~
notatoad
As are checkboxes.

~~~
lostlogin
You should see what GE do on their very latest, very greatest MRI scanners. To
turn things on and off they have a box next to the feature. You type "1" for
on, "0" for off. If you deviate (type 0.5) you get a message saying that only
1 or 0 are valid. As it now 2013 I wish they would remove their command line
stuff from the UI.

~~~
micheljansen
Unbelievable! Do you have a picture or something of this? I used to work on
similar interfaces for a competing company and this stuff fascinates me :)

~~~
lostlogin
Message me your email and ill fire it through. A developer at work looked like
he would cry when I showed him!

------
maebert
Quick fix: <http://jsfiddle.net/Q4HQg/>

------
statictype
Sublime Text has this annoying habit as well. The command palette and switch-
file list show gray/lightgray on the list. I can never remember which is
selected and which is not.

That's probably my single big annoyance in Sublime Text.

------
dylanrw
It seemed to me his biggest gripe was about lack contrast to show a state is
selected. It's a novice mistake, contrast is one of the fundamentals and he's
right. If you don't use it, things suck.

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davecap1
One way of addressing this issue is putting the labels outside the switch
itself... like: off[* ]on -> off[ *]on

~~~
alexandros
The problem is that the position of the moving part (the asterisk in your
example) is unclear. So effectively the [* ] is not distinguishable from the [
*]. Putting the labels outside won't fix that.

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mdznr
Segmented control with only two segments?

~~~
craz
I do this in my app: <http://i.imgur.com/lR9eB.png>

I think it's a fairly common UI pattern.

~~~
micheljansen
Would be clearer if the active one looks "pressed", sort of like real radio
buttons do.

~~~
craz
Thanks. I'll have another play around with it and see what I can come up with.

------
hdra
I am having problem trying to figure out what is he referring to, anyone have
a screenshot of an example?

~~~
hfsktr
I don't have a screen of anything using it but I understand what he means.

A simple example:
[http://s33.beta.photobucket.com/user/hfsktr/media/temp_zps28...](http://s33.beta.photobucket.com/user/hfsktr/media/temp_zps28422b0b.png.html)
a media player that has the options in the image linked. Which is on and which
is off? I usually guess that darker is selected but occasionally the lighter
option is the one that is on.

When it is a binary question the selection is clear (or when there are other
options to compare to). The few times I've seen the options is for something
like styling in a game (classic/new).

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drivebyacct2
I presume this is for people using keyboard navigation, or a trackball (or a
non-touchscreen device?)? Or am I misunderstanding?

Oh, I see, it could be a dipswitch style toggle where you can't tell which is
toggled.

Here's an easier solution: use the damn platform widgets. It probably looks
better than your custom solution and integrates with the rest of the OS better
anyway.

