Tag: user interface
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Browser vertical tabs are great (and they're older than you think!)
A conversation about the invention of browsers with (the option of) vertical tabs reminded me of how brilliant they are. I used them back in 2000, and (with a break in the middle) I use them again today, and they're wonderful. Let me tell you why!
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Opusfived
Miloลก Novoviฤ's experimental interactive fiction is a silly (but with a grain of truth!) simulation of what it feels like to attempt to use vibe-coding to make small, simple, isolated changes to an established codebase. Go play it!
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The secret API I used to tell LeShuttle about different outbound and return passengers
Channel Tunnel operator LeShuttle's website wouldn't provide a working UI to specify that I'd have different passengers in my car for the outbound and return journeys. So, obviously, I reverse-engineered their API and pushed the information to their database directly.
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I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys
Sometimes keyboards come with a 'Fn' key that allows some of their context-sensitive keys to do particular general-purpose functions. Sometimes these are implemented in careful, considerate and configurable ways... and other times they just make me want to throw the keyboard out of the window.
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Why, when I change the temperature on the thermostat of my Renault Zoe does it change the fan direction, too? Is this a UI affordance for people who want their faces colder but their feet warmer? I don't understand!
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A white hand turns the thermostat knob in a car from 19โ to 20โ in 0.5โ increments; the untouched nearby fan direction control seems to change of its own accord. Initially blowing towards the user's face it switches on 'towards feet' at 19.5โ and switches off 'towards face' at 20โ, and reverses the process when the temperature is turned down again.
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Molly guard in reverse
In his Unsung blog, Marcin Wichary's shared the concept of a 'reverse molly guard', which is awesome. I didn't actually know the originating term 'molly guard' until I saw it, though, although I've definitely seen (and implemented) then before. Hey: d'ya wanna hear about a molly guard I added to Three Rings the other year?
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The Dungeon of Dark Patterns
The latest episode of webcomic Mini Fantasy Theater - The Dungeon of Dark Patterns - is just excellent.
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Most-often when a toaster has a 'cancel' button it's simply labelled 'cancel', 'stop', or with a cross. But this week, I discovered a toaster that uses the 'eject' icon - like you'd find on a VHS tape recorder - on its button.
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Close up of the side of a toaster, showing an "eject" button (rectangle with an upward-pointing triangle above it).
At first I thought this was an unusual user interface choice, but I'm coming around to it. It feels like a more-accurate and skeuomorphic representation of what actually happens than a cross suggests.
But the existence of toasters like this one does necessarily mean that, some day, some Gen Alpha will see a tape deck in, like, a museum or something, and will say 'hey, that's cute: the button you press to pop the tape out is the same as the one you use to pop your toast out'.
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Reducing Phantom Obligation in FreshRSS
Terry Godier's fantastic article last week introduced us to the term 'phantom obligation' and reiterated something I've been saying for years: that 'RSS zero', unlike 'inbox zero', is not an admirable goal. And that reminded me to share with you how I personally make my FreshRSS installation feel more like a tool that serves me, not the other way around.
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Hive's Password Policy Makes Me Cry
Hive's password form can't decide whether you need 8+ or 12+ characters, gives misleading error messages and... requires that you use a 'special character' except most special characters (including most common punctuation) is secretly banned, and gives you a misleading error message if you try to use it. Do better, Hive!
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Did I just rank my LPG provider 10/10, or 1/10? I genuinely don't know.
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Slider from a web questionnaire, asking "In a scale of 0 to 10: How likely are you to recommend Flogas for bulk gas?". The slider below, though, is a scale from 0 to 100, not 0 to 10. The value 10 is selected on the slider, but this is only one-tenth of the way along its length.
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Egencia Mailing List Accessibility
A special level of accessibility failure on Egencia's mailing list subscription management page: the labels for choosing which individual mailing lists to subscribe to are properly-configured, but the "unsubscribe all" one isn't. Click the words "unsubscribe all" and... nothing happens.
But it gets better: try keyboard-navigating through the form, and it's hard not to unsubscribe from everything, even if you didn't want to! As soon as the "unsubscribe all" checkbox gets focus, you get instantly unsubscribed: no interaction necessary. -
Developers just love to take what the Web gives them for free, throw it away, and replace it with something worse.
Today's example, from Open Collective, is a dropdown box: standard functionality provided by the
<select>element. Except they've replaced it with a JS component that, at some screen resolutions, "goes off the top" of the page... while simultaneously disabling the scrollbars so that you can't reach it. ๐คฆโโ๏ธ
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Animation showing a dropdown menu for editing a personal profile on Open Collective. The dropdown menu is implemented using JavaScript, and has a bug that means that at some screen resolutions it goes off-screen and parts of it cannot be seen; because its appearance also disables the scrollbar, there's no way to get to the "missing" parts of the menu.
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Lock All The Computers
I wanted a button on my desk that, when I pressed it, would simultaneously lock every computer connected to my KVM system. Here's what I came up with.
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WebDX: Does More Mean Better?
I like the work that the WebDX Community Group have been doing, but I find myself asking: are we at risk of implying that giving the Web 'more' features invariably makes it 'better'?