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).
