GoKawiilI’m part of the desktop software generation. From Windows 95 to Windows 7, I grew using mostly-offline software on computers operated via mouse and keyboard, well before tablets and smartphones. Recently, I’ve been missing one particular part of that era: its consistency in design. I want to tell you about idiomatic design, emphasize the importance of homogeneous interfaces, and suggest that we’ve lost something important.
Design Idioms
Suppose you’re logging into a website, and it asks: “do you want to stay logged in?” There are many ways in which the website could ask you for an answer: for example, a text field where you can enter “Yes” or “No”, or a dropdown where you can select “Keep me logged in” or “Log me out when I close this window.” But in reality, it’ll always be a checkbox. Why is that?
The checkbox is a design idiom: it’s such a common design that as a user, you know how to use it without thinking about it, and if you were making a website and had to ask this question, you would also put in a checkbox without thinking about it. To builders and users alike, it is a standard design pattern that everyone can rely on.
Homogeneous Interfaces
A checkbox is also part of an interface. You’re using it to interact with a system by inputting data. Interfaces are better the less thinking they require: whether the interface is a steering wheel or an online form, if you have to spend any amount of time figuring out how to use it, that’s bad. As you interact with many things, you want homogeneous interfaces that give you consistent experiences. If you learn that Command + C is the keyboard shortcut for copy, you want that to work everywhere. You don’t want to have to remember to use CTRL + Shift + C in certain circumstances or right-click → copy in others, that’d be annoying.
But that’s where we’ve ended up. Software is on the internet now, and the interfaces aren’t homogeneous at all. There are hundreds of ways that different websites ask you to pick dates, enter your credit card number, or do any number of common tasks. Keyboard shortcuts differ from app to app. There are so many different ways of interaction that you can’t remember or learn them at all. Using web applications in 2023 is an exercise of “where do I find what I want to do?” over and over again.
The Desktop Software Era
By contrast, one of the strengths of the desktop software era was high consistency across interfaces by use of design idioms. Look at this picture from Windows 2000:
The visuals feel a little ugly and dated: it’s blocky, the font isn’t great, and the colors are dull. But the interface gets a couple of things really right:
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