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My name is Marcin Wichary (he/him). I’ve worked as a UX designer, typographer, front-end person, and manager at Google, Medium, and Figma. I’ve also written a book about keyboards and typing, gave talks, and published essays about design, typography, and technology.
Unsung is my blog about software craft and quality.
Send me feedback, tips, bug reports, and anything else:
A nice moment in iOS – even if you delete an app, you might still be on the hook for its subscription, so the operating system shows this right after deletion:
(Context for the screenshot: I’m only uninstalling Quiche Browser to reinstall it and get back to the pristine onboarding for the previous post.)
Nice recent addition to Gmail – a little warning if you’re replying to a thread you were BCC’ed on.
Please note that I’m not necessarily endorsing the execution details, as I consider Gmail kind of a clunky operation overall. You can’t swat the message away with a swipe, the wrong quotation mark is used, and I’m perplexed about the location of this message – something tells me it was really cheap to do it this way rather than put it close to the recipient field, to help you understand the relation.
But still, I appreciate something shining at least a bit of light at the complex relations between To, CC, and BCC.
A nice little old-school moment from Flickr: When you accidentally type the name of the new photo album in the search field instead of the “new album name” field, Flickr just passes on that value to save you from having to retype it:
(I bet you witness a version of this all the time when dealing with “I forgot my password” flows which should pass on your login from one field to another, but they don’t.)
I’m not saying this dialog is beyond reproach; one way to reduce this problem would be to make those two treatments different enough visually to reduce the chance of confusion. But it doesn’t matter, because the truth is that often there is no dividing line between the problems and the symptoms, and both overlap to a scary degree.
As a designer, I think it’s sometimes good to simply face this truth: no matter what I do, the user might type something into a wrong field. Anything I can do to help then?
I moved Keyboard Maestro app to a different folder as it was running. I gather there must be some technical reason for the app to have to be power cycled, so I appreciated this warning, and the thoughtful bit of copywriting: “Continue” is caveated with “not recommended” so that you feel more comfortable choosing “Quit,” usually the less safe choice. I thought it was a good attempt to add the right scent to the strange options at a strange moment.
(This tradition has reportedly been started by a software company Rogue Amoeba, which wrote about it in 2019.)
Connecting to public wi-fi networks with their captive portals is always a bit of a wonky proposition, and nothing makes public wi-fi wonkier than using it on a plane.
I believe that the resurgence of https made things harder – if the captive portal doesn’t kick in, no secure traffic can happen – and over time I just started remembering that “captive.apple.com” is a reliable HTTP-only destination to visit.
But I noticed this week that United’s onboard wi-fi network is called “Unitedwifi.com” as a reminder where to go once you are connected, to avoid that problem. I thought this was a nice touch.
A nice moment spotted in Slack:
By definition security and usability coexist wearily, so it was nice someone thought about allowing me to do this at an opportune time, rather than at a random moment that might be extremely untimely or stressful.
A thoughful moment in Buttondown. Gmail’s truncation has been going on for decades, and I have no idea why they still do this. Even the overflow interface for a truncated email is awful – the rest of it doesn’t appear in situ, but it opens a new window that where you have to start from the top.
So it’s nice that Buttodown warns you about it.
An extremely thoughtful moment in DaVinci Resolve. When you drop the first video clip into a new project, it suggests to update the settings of the entire project, on the correct assumption that the first media might set the tone of the whole thing.
“You can’t undo this action” is scary and kind of… untrue? But I’ve stopped reading by then. I press Enter and it saves me a trip to a complex project settings dialog box I always forget the location of.
