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Comment by overgard | Hacker News Reader

I think the web really killed the idea of "native" widgets. I think the rise of web apps just got everyone used to the idea that controls are just going to look different everywhere. Even on macOS, practically every app I use has a very distinct look and set of widgets (vscode, photoshop, blender, spotify -- two of those are electron, but even the non-electron stuff doesn't look very much like a "mac" app anymore). And in windows, microsoft really killed it themselves by constantly updating their own apps with non-standard widgets that everyone else wanted to clone (I remember the longest time it seemed like the only new things of note in every new version of ms office was how the toolbars looked). I suppose it's not a terrible thing, but I do kinda miss the days of windows 2000 and classic macos where the platform had a (somewhat) uniform look and feel.

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I think it's more a desire for branded UI rather than Web apps. Adobe wants their UIs to be instantly identifiable as Adobe, Slack wants to be instantly identifiable as Slack, MS Office as you said, etc. Personally, I doubt this benefits users (do you really need to market to people who already bought your product?) but I'm sure the logic is compelling to decision makers and it's cheaper to "design once, run everywhere". It also makes sense to developers that their app should look the same across OSes even though that "consistency" doesn't affect the 99% of users who only use one OS.

What's funny is that it pisses off a large number of those 1% of users who swap OSs frequently as well. So it isn't even for the benefit of that 1% either.

When operating a Mac I expect Mac-specific behaviors. When operating a Windows PC I expect Windows-specific behaviors. I LOATHE programs that decide to do away with OS-isms that I am accustomed to and require me to learn how to "do things their way" because they wanted cross-OS consistency. Sometimes this means conforming everything to a single platform which is partially evil but just as often it means conforming to _none of them_ which is pure evil.

But I understand this - as a web developer I've experienced pressure from Project Managers and the "decision makers" to make things consistent across browsers/devices even if doing so goes against how the users of said browsers/devices would expect things to operate - breaking user expectations and creating a worse UX for many users. I fight against it when I can but I'm not always successful.

Games are the peak of this, since consoles lack anything resembling a filesystem, natural fits for that (like inventory management) tend to differ for every single game... and then they get ported back out to PCs of various flavors with zero adaptation for new peripherals. (Or old ones, as most of those consoles COULD in theory support a keyboard and mouse or touchpad input of some sort too.)

What do you mean by inventory management? Like each item in the characters inventory is a file? There are lots of reasons to not do that.

Could you give an example which inconsistencies are the most offending to you?

I agree that some platform specific behavior is important. But only behavior that relates to OS, like window management, system dialogs, accessibility etc.

IMHO we are focusing too much on what does and doesn't look like platform UI. Big part of native widgets is also about branded UI. Arguing weather Apple or Adobe is more important brand for the UI is kind of pointless.

Consistent UI across multiple platforms affects more than just people who are using multiple OSes. For example, user watching a tutorial, expects to be able to replicate instructors actions. Imagine the joy of discovering in-app menus on his machine are different, because instructor was using the app on a different OS. Also, greater cost of designing and developing widgets for different platforms means there is less budget left to design custom task-specific UIs with better UX.

For UI "inside" the app, we should be focusing on what is a best possible UX of human-computer interaction for a task at hand. Just blindly using native widgets for everything can actually lead to bad user experience. For example, I hate it when an app uses Win32 Color Dialog for color selection. It's a widget with a bad UX for 99% of use cases.

To me, as a user, UI with good human-computer interaction experience is much more important that use of branded platform-native widgets.

But this kind of branding wasn't as prevalent before web apps invaded the desktop. Now the users are pretty much conditioned to expect every app to do its own thing.

> But this kind of branding wasn't as prevalent before web apps invaded the desktop.

This is ahistorical. App branding now doesn’t hold a candle to the late-90’s mania for every app having its own skin engine. App-vs-platform UI deviation is a lot tamer nowadays.

> App branding now doesn’t hold a candle to the late-90’s mania for every app having its own skin engine.

I dunno, I would say the 90s (well, for Windows and MacOS, DOS and the other no-standard-GUI OS’s that were still very much alive in at least the early part of that period are a different story) were pretty much the low point in terms of degree of UI branding for “professional” apps.

I remember the late 90s - early 00s very well. I remember that such "branded" apps existed, true. I also remember being annoyed enough at this that I always used equally functional but properly styled alternatives - which is to say, there were such alternatives.

Consistency across OSes if for the benefit of devs, not users. The more you can reduce platform differences, the easier it is to maintain multiplat code, you don't need a specific platform to repro issues, etc. It's the same logic as the trend toward static linking.

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