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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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...

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