alt Hacker NewsHow about when users accidentally click too much, or they believe the first click didn’t register?
I am still reminded of a keynote where Steve Jobs was demoing how much faster PDF documents would display on the newer macOS. So he had engineers put a button in for him to click that would scroll through the PDF on the screen, and he accidentally clicked it more than once. Steve wondered aloud if it would scroll all the way through twice… and sure enough, it buffered the process! He had to wait for it go all the way back up and scroll through a second time!
Steve saved grace by telling the audience that, even with moving through the document a second time, altogether it was still faster than PDFs had been in the last version of the OS.
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From the article:
> The Nothing Phone button gives you a tap confirmation via both haptics and sound, and then ignores the tap if a previous rotation is still animating.
This is the issue. Number of performed actions has to be equal to number of times the app identified that button press was registered. Debouncing is a good practice, but if it is used then debounced taps must not produce feedback.
> How about when users accidentally click too much, or they believe the first click didn’t register?
I was really confused at their mention of accessibility, because my mind jumped to people with hand tremors who would double press when they intended only one press.
And then, of course, there are the people that double-click every button. To handle that, disabling a submit button in the onclick is very common.
"How about"? These situations might exist, but this clearly isn't one. Two reasons:
1. "The Nothing Phone button gives you a tap confirmation via both haptics and sound, and then ignores the tap […]"
2. There is a really good reason to tap this button 3 times in a row.
I'm no longer the Apple/Mac/Jobs fan-boy I once was in my earlier days, but I do miss the Apple presentations that felt like they were run by a human being wanting to show off cool stuff.
I couldn't even finish the last Apple presentations as it all feels so stiff, inhuman and run by suits, they all seem like robots scared of diverging from the holy script who will get fired if they display emotions and humanity.
Off-topic perhaps, but got reminded how delightful even the somewhat messy ad-hoc presentations from Jobs were.
That was a common problem in JS-based menu opening and closing, long ago: they were treated as animations and queued. This was sometimes quite ludicrous.
Nowadays, you use transitions instead, which are not queued. But I still very occasionally see things that use queued animations.
Button ≠ Button. People like to believe they should all be the same, but they really should not be.
On physical keyboards we already have three different kinds: normal buttons, modifier keys (shift, etc) and toggle keys (caps lock).
High stakes rare actions can require special button designs. E.g. on a black magic cinema camera the button that formats the memory card needs to be held for three second while it visually counts down. This gives a small delay during which the user can decide: "Fuck this is the wrong memory card!" and cancle.
The downside is that some imaginary power user that uses the camera only to format a stack of SSDs will get burdened. You have to decide which is more common and make a decision.
Debouncing exists for a reason. Sometimes when a button is clicked twice, you want it executed twice, sometimes you don't. Distinguishing which is better in which situation is not trivial.
At the very least, you should consider which is appropriate for which situation, what if, in your UI, for some buttons one is the obvious choice, for others it's the other, but for some it's not so clear, and both behaviours are defensible? Now you've got an inconsistent UI.
I have no good solution for this.