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Comment by superhuzza | Hacker News Reader

I think you're mistaking UX with UI design.

UX people tend to advocate for simple, boring stuff because they test. Like you pointed out, UX professionals like Krug, Nielsen, Norman constantly advocate for boring navigation:

"Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know."

- Jakob's Law of Internet User Experience

However, someone simply designing UI will often suggest new and complicated designs, because they don't test. If they don't test, they are not practicing UX. Even if their job title is UX designer, they are just doing UI design.

Disclaimer: Yes I am defending my UX job, which involves testing and face time with users :)

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This is precisely what drew me to start making Mac apps 10 years ago. There was a whole philosophy behind Mac OS X's Cocoa framework that contrasted sharply with my experience with all the programs I had been accustomed to using on Windows 95-98-2k-XP. In all those OSes, there was invariably some program I would need to run that had its own custom scroll bars that didn't work like normal, and the body of a scrollable page didn't respond to arrow keys and the scroll wheel, or the buttons had unusual semantics and required pressing them in certain ways. This was the norm for Windows programs. When I came to Mac and everything all worked the same, it was a breath of fresh air. The philosophy behind Apple's Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) at the time was that every app should follow the same basic rules with only slight variations where it made sense. I went full force into learning Cocoa because of this genius idea, but unfortunately now every app is Electron and each has their own UX paradigms that reinvent the wheel all over again. It's frustrating and I hope and plan to make apps that hearken back to the days of predictability, familiarity, and simplicity so people can just use their computers to get a thing done and then get off their computers ASAP, like it's meant to be.

Windows also had the equivalent to HIG, and it was just as rigorous as Apple's in many cases, especially by Vista. Take a look at this:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/uxguide/gui...

Problem is, it was and is routinely ignored.

Anyway, as you say, it's the Electron era now, and it's the same everywhere. We had our golden age of desktop UX, but we couldn't keep it.

Just wanted to say thank you for trying to make native apps with thoughtful UX! I also frequently bemoan how far we've fallen since the golden age of app design and implementation.

Navigational difficulty increases site stickiness, and I hope nobody is going to try to say sites left that idea behind 10 years ago, because they haven't. I think any UX/UI person opining on this topic, by mere businesswise proximity, is behooved to contribute understanding of BizDev and Marketing's role in all of this.

Nielsen etc advocate boring, predicrable designs.

A number of others seem to have mistaken simple and boring for dumb and useless.

What happened to the familiar menu?

UX Designers decided it wasn't simple enough and replaced it with hamburger menus and ribbons because "dumb users".

I'm not saying you are one of these UX designers, but lets not pretend they aren't there cause they run the shop at most places it seems, including a number of places in FAANG land.

Try running Netscape on a 4" screen

640x480 is tiny compared to a modern phone...

Still, there is a point: even if we could easily see the design elements from Netscape 4 on a modern smartphone they'd be hard to hit consistently.

So that is not what I argue above. In my post above I argue against the dumbification of desktop apps and websites. Things that were working until UX designers came up with the idea that people are to dumb.

But people are dumb.

Nope, an iPhone 8 is 375x667

Edit: for those questioning my reply, I’m talking about the logical resolution (what you actually use for layout) not the physical pixel resolution

How did you come up with that? iphone 8 is 1334x750.

It looks like the parent commenter is talking in points (iPhone 8 is a 2x Retina Display), while you're speaking about pixels.

Yep!

Ok; the classic 640x480 figure is also in pixels, so I'm not sure why the parent commenter would use a different unit to try and draw a comparison.

There must be a pixel-per-inch ratio in this equation. A 14" monitor running at 640x480 will have around 57 ppi, while iPhone X has like 462 ppi.

We’re taking about rendering UI... If I render a div with width=375px and height=667px it will fill the screen on an iPhone 8 because it renders @2x.

Not according to Apple. They say it is “1334-by-750-pixel resolution at 326 ppi“[0]

https://www.apple.com/iphone-8/specs/

That's the raw screen resolution but the web viewport size will be in CSS Pixels and is 667 x 375.

https://vizdevices.yesviz.com/devices/iphone8/

A 14" CRT monitor from The Olden Days has an area of about 523 cm². An iPhone X has a screen area of about 127 cm². A 5.8" screen is tiny, regardless of its resolution.

Resolution will only get you so far; people don't have infinitely acute eyesight and infinitely precise dexterity. Most people can't reliably hit a touch target of less than ~10mm in any dimension, which equates to ~180 real pixels on an iPhone X.

> A 14" CRT monitor from The Olden Days has an area of about 523 cm². An iPhone X has a screen area of about 127 cm². A 5.8" screen is tiny, regardless of its resolution.

People hold phones much closer than you would sit from an Olden Days CRT, too. It's not just raw area that matters, but something like degrees, as observed by your eye.

This does not explain why there are still hamburger menus on 20" screens.

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