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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

Lack of technical solutions isn't the only issue. System controls (well most of them - recent Windows and macOS seem to be regressing) have decades of refinement and battle-testing behind them and users are familiar with them. You're not replicating all of this alone regardless of how much money or years of experience you have.

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Literally stepping off the shoulders of giants and wondering why you're less capable.

You and the parent are totally missing the point.

Use the system tools. But make the look of the system tools customizable.

System tool. Customizable look.

That's what should be available. But even today you can't consistently change something as simple as a scroll bar or a checkbox.

Which, even worse, are by default styled differently on different browsers.

I think the parents are _exactly_ getting the point.

Separating look&feel from functionality isn't that easy. In any kind of UX, they are bound to various degrees, depending on the use-case.

Let's take windows. The scroll bar on the start-up screens looks different to the one in explorer, looks different to the one in Chrome, which looks different to the one in IE11, which looks different to the one in IE Edge, which looks different to the one in Firefox, which looks different to the one in excel, which looks different to the one in the control panel, which looks different to the one in visual studio, which looks different to the one in Visual Studio Code.

So if they're _exactly_ getting the point, they're pretty unobservant.

There already is no consistency.

This was the entire selling point behind Windows Presentation Foundation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Presentation_Foundatio...

Customizable look and feel means lack of consistency, and confusion as to why things look different without good reason.

This purist talk about how everyone should stick to some system standard or whatever really needs to die. It's not working. Nobody is doing it.

Everyone, literally everyone is running their own thing. Name me big company that doesn't roll their own design system.

Preaching purism really doesn't help anyone, let's just accept reality as it is, and stop chasing some utopian dreams that just won't ever materialize (and if only because it would make a lot of jobs and professions useless, overnight, and there's too much inertia for that to happen).

I’ll keep complaining about it as my parents age and struggle to use their tv apps to watch shows because every product manager needs to prove that they can reinvent the search interface.

Consistency is overrated. Context is what matters. And context often requires customized controls.

We will never live in a world where an abstract concept like a checkbox can have an 'assigned' specific visual affordance that doesn't allow for adjustments. Such thinking is stuck in the past and won't allow for new/better UI paradigms.

Consistency is a shortcut to usability; context is the long way 'round. Don't take the long way unless you're prepared to do so with care.

We’re saying the same thing. The web’s current tools requires devs to reimplement all that functionality from scratch, which isn’t gonna happen, when the ideal solution would be to start with the battle tested native control and then tweak from there to fit the design.

My point is that by tweaking the looks of the existing thing you are breaking standards users are used to or might be causing issues you're not even aware of (bad color choices for colorblind people for example) even if the behavior/functionality of the control is unchanged.

I think this is an important concern, but not a disqualifying one. There is already a lot of variety in the space of controls, for example compare browser controls to the Office Suite to native OS, it's a big spectrum. When controls are customized correctly they become more usable within the context of the app because they are sized consistently, line up with the content grid, follow visual cues from the rest of the app, etc.

Maybe you can introduce smaller changes over a longer period of time? I dunno. Would not Windows users be stuck with that very old look if there were no changes? I mean, is this actually what you are favoring? That said, I cannot stand the trend of UI/UX on desktop being so touch-friendly, along with more padding and/or increased font sizes and less content, too.

But, once you tweak it, it is no longer the same "battle tested" thing. Even little tweaks. App developers should do themselves a favor and just stick to the standard controls that have decades, maybe centuries of tester-time working out the kinks and edge cases. A medium-size company's UX expert's "restyling tweaks" are unlikely to make the control better.

This position doesn't make sense to me. Certain customizations to the native control (which is the ask here) are already available, such as adding padding to input controls, increasing the font size, changing the width. You can even change the border color and the border radius and the background color for some controls! Some of these turn out to be necessary functional changes, and some of them -- imma say it -- are obvious and important adjustments so that your app looks consistent and everything lines up properly.

To think that there's no room for variation in the design of form controls, given the broader context of a design system for app, is just a lack of imagination. I guarantee you that the people who design the operating system form controls (which change every couple years) have all sorts of ideas, and they end putting out one possible, relatively minimal option from many good designs they considered.

Please have a look at any OOP desktop framework from like the past 3 decades. It is not a difficult concept — one is free to overload the render function, while the functionality will remain the very same, like getting focus with tab, activate to space, whatever.

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