Hiding inside this page on “user-driven UI” by Brad Woods are two useful things.

The first is the concept of “zone of proximal development.” The idea, as I understand it, is that possible tasks you face span a few categories:

• stuff you already know how to do,
• stuff you can learn to do on your own,
• stuff you can learn to do with assistance (e.g. from a teacher),
• stuff you simply cannot do or imagine doing.

The space between these things is a zone. A good book or a teacher would help you navigate the zone, by giving you tasks hard enough that they will expand the zone, or even teach you how to expand it on your own – but not too hard so that you give up in failure and frustration.

Woods argues that this doesn’t just apply to traditional classroom teaching, but also software, where the role of the teacher is taken by things like:

• onboarding walkthroughs,
• progressive disclosure,
• tooltips,
• help menus.

The second thing was this quote by Anthony Hobday, who made a few appearances on this blog:

• Simple product is released
• Lots of people use it every day
• More features are added
• It’s now complicated
• But most people learned the basics when it was simple, so they don’t notice that it got complicated.

I think this is brilliant and spot on. I always knew the creators of an app would have a problem of not seeing complexity creep in, but this made me consider that the app’s early users might also be biased the same way, and not exert much pressure.

If you are familiar with an app, armed with your desire paths and motor memory, you have a lot of capacity to just ignore new menu items, new panels, and new complexity – provided it doesn’t get in your way. New AI option? Turn it off. New tab? Never click on it. New alternate way of doing things? Just continue with the old way.

But as a new user, you don’t have that history, or that experience-backed confidence that a bunch of stuff can simply be ignored as it’s not crucial to everyday operation. Add to this the industry’s perverse incentives that often present new additions as the most important ones, and it’s much harder to make a sense of it all as a newcomer. And all the while, the creators and existing users might not see the problems you do.

In late 2023, designer Anthony Hobday published a small list of 20 interface quality of life improvements, and recently Hobday and Katie Langerman chatted about it on an episode of their podcast Complementary.

It’s a fun listen (perhaps if you skip a bit of a bummer 9-minute beginning), covering four listed things in more details:

• generous mouse paths (especially in menus)
• coyote time for modifier keys
• optical alignments
• tooltip timing details

There were a few interesting things that caught my attention:

• Figma does have “coyote time” in the very interaction the hosts are talking about, perhaps showcasing that the details of the details can make or break them.
• “Should modifier keys be reversible” and “should modifier keys be consistent with one another” are interesting challenges; some more recent graphic tools have changed the long-standing behaviour here, malking modifier keys more “sticky.”
• Wholeheartedly agree with how frustrating it feels that the menu interactions are not yet baked into browsers as primitives. “The fact that the companies keep having to implement it themselves manually is maddening.” It is.
• Good observation that some people associate animations with “feeling premium” (see also: the quote I put in the title).