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Comment by Zak | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the author's wish for visual cues when something is clickable, scrollable, etc.... This, on the other hand:

> Imitating real objects is good, too -- I don't have a single one of Android's "sliders" anywhere in my house, for example, so why don't you make this a checkbox, because writing down a check mark on paper is something that I actually do:

feels like an idea from a time when many people were encountering UIs on screens for the very first time as adults. I think the slider would be recognized as a toggle in its usual context of a settings screen by most people who have seen a settings screen before, but not that specific design for a toggle.

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> I think the slider would be recognized as a toggle in its usual context of a settings screen by most people who have seen a settings screen before, but not that specific design for a toggle.

I've been using computers since the early 90s; we got our first home computer when I was four; I've used many different operating systems.

As a professional Web developer, it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out what those slider widgets are supposed to mean. It's still very easy to get them wrong/confused (both as a user, and as the designer/dev making the form), e.g. when the affirmative state involves a negative setting, like "Mute" (does "on" mean "muted"; or does "on" refer to the audio, which I can use this to mute?)

There is a specific UI guideline for something that can be enabled or not: it's called a tick box. The on-off switch thing is a distinctly iOS invention [1]. The funny thing is that OS X (now macOS) mostly held off using those 'switches' too, until fairly recently.

[1]: https://freeimage.host/i/CxYBW6G

Whose specific UI guideline are you talking about? Android's recommends the switch component for setting toggles: https://m3.material.io/components/switch/overview

The switch widget is for settings where flipping the switch takes immediate effect, unlike a checkbox where you have to press some "OK", "Submit" or "Apply" button. In Windows 2000/Office UIs, this would've been shown as a button that could visibly switch between "pressed" and "not pressed" states, just like a push-down switch, but that was rarely used. The modern labeled switch design is a lot more intuitive than that.

> The modern labeled switch design is a lot more intuitive than that.

In a lot of the modern switches I meet with the colour choice makes it totally unclear which is on and which is off.

Ok, if it's a cookie acceptance dialog it makes sense to do dark patterns, but I've seen it in legit apps too.

DVD menus is another place where this confusion happens. Of course, any DVDs I buy these days are ripped, converted to H.265 and put on the NAS.

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