Comment by Sohcahtoa82
3 days ago
> Should is interesting because of its subjectiveness. It’s a question that only makes sense to be asked in first person. And you have to know about much more than just design to be able to answer it — you have to understand about business, technology, culture, people. Answering the should question is a skill you only get after many, many years answering questions alike.
I wish more front-end designers would consider "should" more often.
"Oh, we can make the scrollbars in our web page auto-hide so PC users get the same experience as Mac users"
But should you?
No. Because one of the reasons I use a PC is because auto-hiding scrollbars on a desktop/laptop is a bug, not a feature, and I disabled that bug while I had a Mac because it's annoying.
"Oh, we can implement smooth scrolling in JavaScript!"
But should you?
No. Because browsers already do it. And your implementation will fail on at least one browser and cause scrolling to just be fucked up. If a user has disabled smooth scrolling, it's probably for a reason. Don't force it back on.
"We can create our own implementation of a drop-down box"
But should you?
No. You're reducing accessibility for literally zero gain. I hate when I'm entering my address, tabbing through the fields, reach the State, and pressing O then R doesn't bring me to "Oregon" or "OR", and instead brings me to Rhode Island. Side note: The order of entering an address is street address, city, state, zip code. If your form order is any different, you're a madman.
> The order of entering an address is street address, city, state, zip code.
In the US. Most of Europe uses street address; postcode, settlement and optionally province; country. There are still enough occasional warts that you shouldn’t dictate the structre of the second line, though: e.g. in France you’ll usually see things like “75005 Paris” but large institutions that get separate deliveries may list addresses like “75231 Paris CEDEX 05”, where everything but “Paris” is a postcode-like routing instruction. Unless you definitely, absolutely know better, just let people type in whatever postal label they want.
I have mixed opinions on this one. I appreciate the auto populating of City/State when you first enter the Zip. By doing that first, the suggestions of typing in address/street could be a much more accurate list as you've already filtered by state/city. The ones that come up with options from other states when I type in 1234 Main St will give me a list of pretty much every state/city in the country.
This feels like the physical equivalent of email validation, though it's harder to properly validate.
Similar to email validation, I've definitely seen people get bit (or, well, their customers getting bit) by people making untrue assumptions about the acceptable form of an address. See: a number of products that can't be ordered for USPS General Delivery simply because the address form won't allow it.
>"We can create our own implementation of a drop-down box"
Have been using MS "Dynamics" and wanted to add custom styling as a user. Even small lists/tables have all the off-screen elements destroyed so you can't copy stuff from the page, but also you might have to scroll things into view before they get styled (:has gets broken).
They re-implement tables as a swamp of elements which now lack semantic relationships.
They give the same elements random ids, they're non-deterministic. You can only really style by hierarchy, but for every property they seem to add at least one new element.
Everything about it is slow and cumbersome, and no wonder a simple table has hundreds of elements.
It's so Microsoft, the "don't bake your own widgets" taken to the n-th degree.
> "Oh, we can make the scrollbars in our web page auto-hide so PC users get the same experience as Mac users"
That's interesting. Our UI has scroll bars for sub-panels. On my Mac in FF, the scroll bar is always visible when there is overflow. Same screen on a co-worker's Chrome has the autohiding scroll bars even when there is overflow. So it feels more like a Chrome issue than a Windows issue, but I guess at this point in time we just assume everyone is using Chrome.
Yes — so much friction is introduced by redesigning when there should be refinement at most. Or doing nothing at all.
It takes wisdom to do that, and it doesn’t justify a salary. So we get experimented upon by UX designers at every company.
While the volume controls are fun, at this stage in the thread I’m struck by how few people have got to the point of the article at the end: the “should” question.