Hacker News Reader

Comment by nanairo | Hacker News Reader

Gosh, I can feel my perfectionist side in big pain right now.

Adobe could have tried to pull a more subtle way than: "Welcome to lazy town!". So much for all those thinking the UI is important, and that maintaining the look-and-feel of the OS should be very important. :(

I find Adobe's strategy a bit naive (or more accurately only looking at the short-term). If you become the paladin of the lazy developers, you will get plenty of money at first, but you'll get plenty of bad reputation, and that can be really hard to get rid off (just as Microsoft).

View on HN

> and that maintaining the look-and-feel of the OS should be very important.

I don't think maintaining the look-and-feel of the OS is very important. In fact I would go so far as to say that attempting to shoe horn novel interface requirements into local OS look-and-feel requirements is a detriment to interfaces.

A bad interface is a bad interface no matter what. Same goes for a good interface.

But I think that if you look around at most of the most successful pieces of software across all platforms (by pure volume), very few of them look anything like the prevailing look-and-feel guidelines for their host platform -- I'm talking about Office, Photoshop, Firefox, Chrome, iTunes, GarageBand, iLife...

iWork at least looks like a piece of software that conforms to the look-and-feel rules.

But then we get something like Aperture 3 which could be something running on just about any platform.

Most of the top iPhone apps could be running on anything with a big touch screen (and some of them are almost pixel identical across platforms): Pandora, Remote, Yelp, New York Times, Jott, Netflix, Shazam, etc.

People care about app consistency across platforms not local consistency with the OS.

Web apps blow the idea of local OS consistency out of the water. I won't even list million user web apps because we all know what those look like, and they pretty much look the same no matter the platform. Sites that try to "look like" some OS, end up looking rather silly to be perfectly honest.

No, maintaining the look-and-feel of the OS is not anywhere near the top of pretty much anybody's priority list these days.

I understand your point, but I think it's an exaggerate view. I am happy to admit that if there's a good reason a rule should be broken, then it's ok too: but you need to know what to do. Like all rules, once you understand them and know what you are doing, then it may make sense to break them.

But imagine a user that faces an interface that looks familiar but it's all different. Maybe the most external button in the title bar expand it. Or something that looks like a button has to be double clicked instead of clicked once. The point of having a consistent UI for the whole OS is that the user doesn't need to relearn a new interface for each product.

That said there are cases where the current UI is not good enough, maybe because the developer has a new, never done before idea. Then it's ok. Apple does it, for example, as do other mac developers.

The other exception is when it's a very specialised piece of software that is not for the masses but for a very specialised niche. I consider CAD applications, Photoshop and Aperture are like that. It's not _as_ useful to use the same look because they are software that has to be learnt anyway.

However... Firefox and Chrome do try as hard as possible to conform to the UI interface so I don't follow your examples there. And iTunes is loath by everyone as a awful piece of UI, so I wouldn't use it as an example either.

Similarly many people (at least on the Mac) hate the completely alien look Photoshop has, or Office. Microsoft did put a lot of effort with OS X to follow OS X conventions, and despite Photoshop not being a mass market product, Adobe has preferred to have a uniform cross-platform interface, and there's a lot of complaints for that.

So yes, if you have a novel interface requirement then you are more than welcome to break the OS standards. But otherwise if there's no need (from a user perspective) I don't think it's a good idea.

> Like all rules, once you understand them and know what you are doing, then it may make sense to break them.

I actually agree with this whole heartedly. I think we're on the same wavelength here. Just like all good literature violates supposed rules of good form for the language.

But I think that following OS conventions is the wrong set of rules to learn and target. There are already good interface guidelines. It just so happens that some OSs (OSX) do a particularly good job at following those guidelines.

It reminds me of this http://catb.org/esr/writings/cups-horror.html

The meta-problem here is that the configuration wizard does all the approved rituals (GUI with standardized clicky buttons, help popping up in a browser, etc. etc.) but doesn't have the central attribute these are supposed to achieve: discoverability. That is, the quality that every point in the interface has prompts and actions attached to it from which you can learn what to do next. Does your project have this quality?

A good interface can look like anything so long as it follows good GUI conventions. And fortunately most OSs follow pretty good GUI conventions so targeting the conventions of that platform are in a way following good GUI conventions transitively. I just wouldn't limit myself as to say that the measure of important should be following OS conventions when it should really be following interface conventions. The CUPS story I linked to brings that problem directly to the forefront. They're already doing the appropriate interface rituals with respect to their OS. The problem is that they are not doing the appropriate rituals with respect to good interface design.

(I also agree that some tools, like Photoshop, have absymal user interfaces. But I think it's because they don't follow good interface conventions in general, not because it doesn't look like an OSX app or a Windows app http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/235455865/the-many-sliders-of-p...).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com