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Comment by gitgud | Hacker News Reader

Good UX abstractions out perform bad ones, which means they endure, are copied, and eventually become the implied standard UX… some examples of this are; the hamburger menu, tiny icons and auto-scroll for streaming text

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> Good UX abstractions out perform bad ones

And then get get every precision input being represented by a slider versus text box.

Hamburger menu is not a good UX abstraction, that's why the mass usage stage of it was pretty short lived and most people are leaving it for more obvious patterns, like tab bars

Doesn't necessarily have to be good. Can also propagate and become "standardised" if it's the easiest, most convenient, most well documented way. Eg. Twitter Bootstrap.

Why are tiny icons good abstractions?

I assume they signal what menu item does what, to make it less confusing on different screen sizes.

I.e. Large displays get “icon + label”, whereas small displays just get “icon”

I believe it has to do with the size of the icons rather than placing the icon with a label. The AI trend is towards smaller icons. That being said, the more I look at the pic in the article, the more pleasing the smaller icons look to me. Perhaps we just didn't know any better.

I really hope streamed text doesn’t outperform other design patterns in places where it doesn’t make sense.

I might be an old man yelling at cloud, but for things coming after win98 era this feels demonstrably false in many cases.

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