From Dmytro Tovstokoryi at Mintlify:

I recently joined Mintlify as a part-time design engineer. […] I started a daily thread sharing UI fixes and improvements that I was shipping. I also invited people to share any UI bugs they noticed.

People responded. I fixed things in near real-time. It was fun and I learned a lot.

I enjoy little posts with updates like this.

(However, a small thing: I wouldn’t use text-shadow this way. It’s veering into the territory of faux bolding, and looks bad. And, in this case, it feels like it’s not solving a problem.)

Computers Are Bad is an acquired taste and I’m acquiring it. This was an excellent post going deep into the myths and anti-myths of elevator close door buttons, and pedestrian crossing buttons. I love storytelling + rigor:

First, anyone who says that the “door close” buttons in elevators are routinely “not even hooked up” shouldn’t be trusted. The world is full of many elevators and I’m sure some can be found with mechanically non-functional door close buttons, but the issue should be infrequent. The “door close” button is required to operate the elevator in fire service mode, which disables automatic closing of the doors entirely so that the elevator does not leave a firefighter stranded. Fire service mode must be tested as part of the regular inspection of the elevator (ASME A17.1-2019, but implemented through various state and local codes). Therefore, elevators with a “door close” button that isn’t “hooked up” will fail their annual inspections.

Also, this bit was delightful:

The software, as I recall, came from the school of industrial software design where a major component of the interface was a large tree view of every option and discoverability came in the form of some items being in ALL CAPS.

From Scott Jenson’s 2021 post about Tesla 3 interface, this is so clever (emphasis mine):

Edward Tufte has this visual rule that 1+1=3: With a single line on the screen, you have just that single object, but adding a second line does something interesting, it adds a third ‘object’ on the screen, the negative space between the two. All good visual designers deeply understand this effect.

In UX design we have a cognitive equivalent. If you have two buttons, there is a third ‘object’ created: the decision a user must make on which button to tap.

Appreciate little moments showing utmost keyboard orientation in Raycast.

The millisecond you hover over the back button, the app says “you should be using the keyboard for this”:

I am not sure you often see tooltips on buttons, with keyboard shortcuts only:

Every select menu – even those with literally two options – has an inline search:

Party like it’s 1983! Or 1982! Or 1967!

Also, unrelated, love the clarity of this panel. This is what’s synced. This is what’s not.

Evergreen and inspiring from Craig Mod, a 2019 plea for fast software:

Google Maps is dying a tragic, public death by a thousand cuts of slowness. Google has added animations all over Google Maps. They are nice individually, but in aggregate they are very slow. Google Maps used to be a fast, focused tool. It’s now quite bovine. If you push the wrong button, it moos. Clunky, you could say. Overly complex. Unnecessarily layered. Perhaps it’s trying to do too much? To back out of certain modes — directions, for example — a user may have to tap four or five different areas and endure as many slow animations.

Funnily enough, I feel that way about Apple Maps. I abandoned it since small things felt heavy, mired in superfluous swipey animations that felt like driving a 1960s car. Luckily, this was at the time Google Maps redesign its tiles to match Apple’s, so I got what I wanted to begin with, although in a slightly shady way.

I miss Sublime Text and might take it again for a spin (VS Code and Atom felt slow, Nova is delightful but also struggles in performance, even on simple things).

I miss Notes feeling lightning fast.

A good post by Jim Nielsen about icons in menus (in Tahoe).

This posture lends itself to a practice where designers have an attitude of “I need an icon to fill up this space” instead of an attitude of “Does the addition of a icon here, and the cognitive load of parsing and understanding it, help or hurt how someone would use this menu system?”

It seems a necessary ingredient of introducing icons to menus is thoughtfulness and guidance around when the icons are necessary/​useful and when not.

It doesn’t help that the Tahoe icons seems to mess up indentation. (I haven’t updated to Tahoe and might skip it altogether. Even just the planetary-scale rounded corners are something that feels very broken.)

An absolutely eviscerating 18-minute walkthrough of Apple Music for macOS Catalina, from a few years ago. More funny than anything else, but a reminder to test the “boring” edges of your app – like a state with a lapsed subscription, or coming back after a few months.

There’s no way to drag and drop. […] If I want to add this to here, I have to go through this bullshit, and when I do, it takes seconds again.

Also, an ode to a well-functioning back button, and well-behaving loading states. Those things add up so quickly.

(My debugging brain understood what populated the confusing History entries – I bet it was the early play sequences that went through a bunch of stuff without playing.)

I gave a talk about the craft of pixel fonts at Config last year, and this fresh YouTube video by Noodle seems to be a great and quirky companion to the whole issue of “how did pixels look on old CRTs,” including many examples from modern games.

A really interesting convention I just spotted in DevonThink that shows the shortcuts as soon as you hold ⌘, although it feels a bit clunky and cheap in execution.

(The main worry here for me would be that it’s distracting if you already know the shortcuts. I haven’t noticed it disappear if you use it, but maybe it does after a while.)

Tom Forsyth wrote about a fun bug in a Half-Life 2 reissue, of a particular flavour I have never heard before.

So I started it up, selected new game, played the intro section. It’s a fairly well-known section - you arrive at the train station with a message from Breen, a guard makes you pick up a can, and then you have to go into a room and... uh... I got stuck. I wasn’t dead, I just couldn’t go anywhere. I was stuck in a corridor with a guard, and nowhere to go. Bizarre.

Fascinating quick walkthrough of Strudel on TikTok from DJ_Dave (sound on!). Sometimes you see an interface and you immediately just sense how efficient and fun and powerful it is, without ever touching it.

Very bretvictorian in a way. Also related: a recent video from Benn Jordan walking through obscure music software used by Aphex Twin.