Hacker News Reader

Comment by idle_zealot | Hacker News Reader

It's sad to see F-Droid using the now-standard design convention of categorically refusing to draw lines between things. No visual differentiation between sections of the UI, no clear indication of what's tappable and what will happen on a tap, no indication of scrollable areas beyond content being cut off. I'm willing to chalk some bad text alignment or uneven padding up to amateur designers working for free, but the design ethos on display, the thoughtless trend-chasing, is depressing to see.

View on HN

I've only seen the screenshots in the post, but those don't look confusing at all to me. A line between every section is not good or clear UI. I'd argue that grouping related entities by their proximity and leaving enough space in between sections is clearer. If you have to draw a line to make that distinction, they are probably too close.

In the case of the featured sections in the first screenshot, there should at minimum be a visual well indicating the horizontally scrollable strips. Invisible scroll panes are insane.

They’ve already made it obvious that the row is horizontally scrollable by leaving part of the next icon visible at the right edge. That's a clear (and standard) visual cue that there’s more content off-screen.

But... does the whole page scroll at once, and can I tap and drag "between" two rows (slightly above one, slightly below the other) to scroll the whole page? Or does each row scroll independently, and only taps on the row scroll? I habitually don't tap on anything that looks like an icon if I want to scroll around, because I'm afraid I'll activate the icon in a poorly written program (or if I tap too lightly and it is picked up as a tap and not a hold and drag event). So visual cues as to what's scrollable makes it easier for folks like me to know where to tap to scroll things properly.

this is an interesting take. I've never noticed but I just scroll by using a scrolling motion wherever on the screen, and I don't ever seem to hit a button by accident. It sounds like you are purposefully trying to find empty parts of the screen in order to scroll without the risk of hitting buttons. Modern devices are pretty good at figuring out whether you're scrolling or tapping tho. Have you tried just using a scrolling motion and not worrying about the location?

What happens if my screen width is a multiple of their icon size?

the icons can be scaled with the screen to always have a half icon on the end, just as other layouts scale the icons to always fit a whole number within the screen.

If that clipped column of icons were like K-9's, which has a transparent background and left padding, those clipped icons wouldn't be visible.

Redundancy would be fine. It would help in edge-cases like that.

> It's sad to see F-Droid using the now-standard design convention of categorically refusing to draw lines between things.

Where exactly would the UI benefit from "drawing lines"? I'd say the visual hierarchy is rather obvious.

I'll say more: most separators people use in their UIs are completely unnecessary. They should be used sporadically when you don't have a better way of segmenting the interface.

> No visual differentiation between sections of the UI, no clear indication of what's tappable and what will happen on a tap

What section of the UI are you referring to exactly? From the screenshots in their blog post it seems to me like the visual hierarchy is preserved and without using the app at least I can form an immediate expectation as to the function of each button. (And what is clickable and what isn't)

> no indication of scrollable areas beyond content being cut off

What type of indication would you like to see here? I think most users intuitively understand that visual cue. An always-on scrollbar would introduce unnecessary clutter..

You would fit right in at Mozilla.

Only because devs and designers are making things so unrecognisable that people have to do that, or try to tap to see. Now those developers and designers think it is working. It's the other way what you said.

Many people I met everyday have to be given tutorials where to click in modern apps. I guess all these devs live in a bubble with other devs and make such comments.

Let's make everything a guess work and over many years forced people to learn to tap everywhere to do everything. Good game.

User activity heatmaps over the last five years increasingly show that users often tap on things they want regardless of whether that word/graphic/icon has any outward indication of being interactive.

Of course the hottest of hotspots are always the high-contrast button-looking things, but I can understand the trend towards card-ifying or completely unwrapping touch targets given that users stab more freely than they used to.

Surely this should mean "debuff the design of the non-interactable elements (desaturate, shrink,...)" and not "crank up the interactable ones" or "make everything interact!"

Just like "customers keep running into our glass door" doesn't imply approval of glass and it doesn't mean you should turn everything into glass.

It's a race to the bottom. Users have to anticipate designers making inconsistent apps, so designers feel vindicated in their idiosyncratic and frankly user-hostile designs.

Such win-win horrors..

Many people I met everyday have to be given tutorials where to click in modern apps. I guess all these devs live in a bubble with other devs and make such comments.

Let's make everything a guess work and over many years forced people to learn to tap everywhere to do everything. Good game.

It's like herding cats to try to get consistent interfaces in software, in part because lots of people want to change the world with something new, and in part because UI is often an untested afterthought for people doing the 'real' work of launching features. For many devs, the downstream effects of actual UX design are an unknown unknown.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com