Hacker News Reader

Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

> the answer i got from UX people is that "you can't hover or have tooltips on mobile". they are trying to achieve uniformity between mobile and desktop.

Achieving uniformity by reducing the user experience to the platforms' lowest common denominator. Not the best solution!

View on HN

It actually doesn’t seem like that bad of an idea to me, at least under the assumption that you’re not going to maintain an entirely separate UI for the mobile and desktop apps (which would be ideal, but is incredibly expensive and tends to result in broken and missing features on one or both platforms even for companies with enormous budgets). I would argue that “reducing to the lowest common denominator” actually is one of the more reasonable solutions among the feasible options. It certainly isn’t a great solution to create a UI that is impossible to understand without tooltips and ship that UI to mobile devices without the tooltips!

> It certainly isn’t a great solution to create a UI that is impossible to understand without tooltips and ship that UI to mobile devices without the tooltips!

Right, so don't do that. But, desktop and mobile are different platforms with different input devices, and designers should make use of both to create the best experience for users. There are certainly tradeoffs in terms of cost to implement versus value for users, and if the argument is "it will simply cost us too much money to implement tooltips" then I suppose that's up to the product manager or equivalent. But, "we can't have tooltips on desktop because the mobile version doesn't support them" is a non sequitor. If a UX person gave that as a reason, I'd have some questions for them.

It's a terrible idea to me! Like sure, I know the devs want to do the minimum of work, but that doesn't make it a good idea to take the easy way out.

Best option is to provide choice. Icons with Labels by default, show keyboard shortcut on hover. Want just icons? There’s a config option for that. Want just labels? Also an option. Want no toolbar at all, and only use shortcuts? Also an option.

I clicked your profile to see exactly who would come up with such an odd take, and then it made sense.

I actually agree with you that this type of deep customisation is great for a "productivity tool" like VS Code. For something that people don't spend hours of every day in, though (say, a weather app), you don't need or want this level of customisation.

Hah, such a sleuth :)

Though I was actually thinking of SketchUp when writing that. VS Code does not provide always-visible labels for icons (tooltip only), though it’s something we’ve discussed and I’m in favor of. I believe Teams recently adopted them.

It ebbs and flows but I feel like we're coming to the end of a long period of "convention over configuration" that prioritized consistent, predictable behaviour across systems at the cost of powerful options & custom configurations. I understand what you're saying but there's also cost to implement and maintain all those options you want, plus a huge set of testing combinations for QA

abundance of choice is inversely correlated with satisfaction

https://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/bschwar1/Sci.Amer.pdf

As the siblings mention it doesn't really apply here because the choices aren't one-shot, you aren't stuck with one, you have time to consider, choices can differ a lot, etc.

But really any supposed psychological phenomenon should be looked at skeptically absent overwhelming evidence like IQ or the Big 5 personality traits. Here are three links on "choice overload":

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/48210291_Can_There_... 2010 meta-analysis, "we found a mean effect size of virtually zero but considerable variance between studies"

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8426193 2018, "...where they could compare them one another anytime with relatively low cognitive load, the choice overload did not occur (Experiment 1). ... where participants had to compare them based on memory representations with relatively high cognitive load, the choice overload did occur (Experiment 2). These results suggest that the choice overload is actually replicable when cognitive load is sufficiently boosted."

http://psychbrief.com/choice-paradox/ Nice overview of some actual studies and the underlying experiments, as well as common flaws in the mathematical methods used for analysis that apply to many psychology studies.

That applies to when a choice must be made before the user can proceed, or when making once choice has an associated opportunity cost that prevents/discourages the user from making other choices. If the user is presented with sane defaults from the start and can also try toggling a checkbox in a settings UI to instantly test alternatives, the study does not apply.

When the extra choices are useless, and the few choices are genuinely the best ones, sure. That's not what we're seeing.

Rule of the lowest common denominator, whether it be by way of trying to accommodate multiple form factors or multiple operating systems is certainly one of the biggest drivers of the decline of truly excellent software. One size fits all is never going to fit anybody even half as well as something more tailored to a specific subset.

I would like to see someone try the opposite, where when possible gaps in functionality on one platform or form factor are filled in, so all users’ experiences are elevated by the most capable target rather than dragged down by the least capable. That will probably never happen though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com