It looks like this was posted 13 years ago when it was initially written. I feel like with UI / UX development there are hundreds or thousands of these little techniques which help to make the experience feel outstanding, but which are largely invisible to the users unless it's missing. At some level I'm lamenting that we haven't done a better job at collecting and organizing this wisdom so it's easily passed down to later generations. I'm also not sure if it's even a worthwhile endeavor at this point or if LLM assisted programming has largely made it obsolete, which is how I've been feeling about of programming-related knowledge lately. How are you thinking about the aggregation and sharing of knowledge in our increasingly AI-dominated world?
This was one of the first articles I remember reading when I started to seriously learn about UI development and it was really inspirational to me, but all through those years I kept feeling a bit frustrated that this knowledge is spread out over multiple sources spanning decades of books, posts, and in-house experience.
I've encountered some modern efforts such as Open UI which provide references to various implementations of existing widgets, but they don't go into the nitty gritty of how to build accessible widgets or the thousands of little UX tricks that enhance the experience.
People often lament that newer developers aren't doing a great job at building applications, but I think we of the previous generations are often failing them by not cleaning up and organizing the back catalogue of knowledge and references. Oftentimes a standard way of solving certain problems will emerge and people in-the-know will know about it and use it, but as far as I can tell there's nobody writing this down and aggregating it in order to explicitly let the newer generation know.
It has been 13 years and I still think about this blog post every single time a menu doesn't work correctly.
This has always been the problem with expecting devs to reimplement standard UI controls on each project. We had platform toolkits and even Windows had well-thought-out HIGs that incorporated these tricks, and we threw approximately all of it away to use the desktop environment as a bootloader for a document rendering platform with interactivity bolted on.
There was a Jakob neilsen essay on this back in the day, can't find it now, but apparently it came out of user testing on macos 6 or 7 and was juat... forgotten in osx. Funny how easily usability research is lost.
[OP] cesarandreu | a day ago
It looks like this was posted 13 years ago when it was initially written. I feel like with UI / UX development there are hundreds or thousands of these little techniques which help to make the experience feel outstanding, but which are largely invisible to the users unless it's missing. At some level I'm lamenting that we haven't done a better job at collecting and organizing this wisdom so it's easily passed down to later generations. I'm also not sure if it's even a worthwhile endeavor at this point or if LLM assisted programming has largely made it obsolete, which is how I've been feeling about of programming-related knowledge lately. How are you thinking about the aggregation and sharing of knowledge in our increasingly AI-dominated world?
This was one of the first articles I remember reading when I started to seriously learn about UI development and it was really inspirational to me, but all through those years I kept feeling a bit frustrated that this knowledge is spread out over multiple sources spanning decades of books, posts, and in-house experience.
I've encountered some modern efforts such as Open UI which provide references to various implementations of existing widgets, but they don't go into the nitty gritty of how to build accessible widgets or the thousands of little UX tricks that enhance the experience.
People often lament that newer developers aren't doing a great job at building applications, but I think we of the previous generations are often failing them by not cleaning up and organizing the back catalogue of knowledge and references. Oftentimes a standard way of solving certain problems will emerge and people in-the-know will know about it and use it, but as far as I can tell there's nobody writing this down and aggregating it in order to explicitly let the newer generation know.
It has been 13 years and I still think about this blog post every single time a menu doesn't work correctly.
jackdk | 23 hours ago
This has always been the problem with expecting devs to reimplement standard UI controls on each project. We had platform toolkits and even Windows had well-thought-out HIGs that incorporated these tricks, and we threw approximately all of it away to use the desktop environment as a bootloader for a document rendering platform with interactivity bolted on.
ryan-duve | 20 hours ago
The activity on that 2013 comment section is something.
ehamberg | 16 hours ago
Yeah, that was a super interesting discussion!
Even the guy who made this for the original Macintosh OS, Bruce Tognazzini, commented – and the lack of this feature in the early versions of Mac OS X was called out, with a link to the Ars Technica review of Mac OS X developer preview 2.
landon | 6 hours ago
There was a Jakob neilsen essay on this back in the day, can't find it now, but apparently it came out of user testing on macos 6 or 7 and was juat... forgotten in osx. Funny how easily usability research is lost.
dsschnau | 12 hours ago
I feel old because I remember reading this in 2013.