Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

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>This kind of post annoys me. It's driven by the fact that the author has some theories about UI design, and wants to share them with us. There's nothing wrong with that. But this post pretends to be like a real usability audit, which it is not.

Wrong on all counts. What the author complaints about are examples of broken standard usability guidelines that all experts agree upon.

Like consistency, affordances, the principle of least surprise, color coding actions, etc.

The excerpt you provide is characteristic: "When I tap it, it turns red — but wait — it doesn’t give me the visual feedback. Did I break it?"

The similar looking button in the Timer screen DID give visual feedback when pressed. In a consistent UI, either this button would do too, or neither would.

>These comments are disingenous. You didn't get confused by these things. You, as a person who's analysing a UI, have an almost totally different mindset to someone who is just using the thing for real.

Wrong again. Even a UI expert, or someone like me, who's been using DOS, Windows, SunOS, HPUX, Linux, FreeBSD and OS X UIs for 20+ years (and has designed some apps' UIs) can be confused by a UI, even in the most common app and in the most basic actions.

> The similar looking button in the Timer screen DID give visual feedback when pressed. In a consistent UI, either this button would do too, or neither would.

Visual feedback needs to serve a purpose. This is a stop watch we're talking about - one that shows time in tens of milliseconds, which is less than one frame interval at 60fps. Any animation done would hinder the function of the stop watch and raise ambiguity about when the stop watch actually started and stopped. So not using an animation is the right thing to do here. If they'd gone for consistency in this case, it would've been "foolish consistency" [1].

[1] "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

edit: typo fix.

That is a ludicrous argument. An animation does not affect timer functionality unless you are an incompetent coder.

Yes, but it's equally ludicrous to say that the stopwatch "didn't give the visual feedback". It started incrementing those huge numbers, didn't it?

That is not the visual feedback being discussed. Buttons should act identically across a platform. There is no compelling reason for a difference.

I did not comment on the implementation. I said, in effect, that an animation would affect the perception of the start/stop times and using one would therefore be a bad idea in this case.

Yes the stopwatch's buttons are different, but there is a reason for this. Imagine you are using a stopwatch. When the gun fires, you press the button with your finger. When the runner passes the finish line, you push the button with your finger. You will probably expect it to stop and start timing at these times, with no regard for how long your finger spends sitting on the screen, right? Now look at the buttons in other apps: they trigger when you release your finger, not when your finger touches the screen. This makes sense because you may be tentative about submitting a form, and it'd be scary if it just submitted the moment your finger grazed the screen, right?

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