Especially scrollbars. For a webdev trying to figure out what element triggers the scrollbar is extremely difficult with thin disappearing scrollbars.

You could disable the Fischer Price skin in XP. Many people did.

I’m might quibble a bit and choose Windows 2000, or even XP despite the Fischer Price skin, but generally I agree.Clickable things should have some minimal skeuomorphic detail and scrollbars need to be a minimum of some thickness.

It was IBM who established the standards with its CUA books.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IBM_Common_User_Access" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IBM_Common_User_Access</a>

This with MacOS 9 and GTK2 not far behind.

Lots of educational institutions and public libraries used it here in Britain. I think it was good at squeezing a few years of extra life out of the hopelessly underpowered machines that they bought, but I rather think removing the myriad copies of Java Updater and the McAfee Virus* would have been more effective.* Officially called the McAfee Antivirus, but I&#x27;ve never understood why

Windows 7 was the last one that let you select the &quot;classical&quot; pre-XP theme. I was the only person I know who used it, and I miss it to this day.

Windows 95 remains the pinnacle of clear, discoverable GUI.It&#x27;s like the companies rolling out UI elements don&#x27;t even bother running them past people, and are guided solely by what the design department thinks looks cool that day.

I like toggles, they are much larger touch targets and easier to hit one-handed when you&#x27;re running late to a meeting and can&#x27;t hold your phone still.

That is frustrating, and very bad accessibility.It should always be grey = off, darker = on.

If you like to design good UX, you shouldn&#x27;t look at any cookie consent forms.

&gt; saw one cookie consent form with red meaning &quot;on&quot;, and green meaning &quot;off&quot;.Cookie consent forms are specifically designed with all sorts of misleading and user-hostile patterns, so I would not take them as an example of anything. I&#x27;m sure there are consent forms out there with checkboxes where checked means no.

I dislike toggles as the on&#x2F;off state is not always obvious. Some fun examples I&#x27;ve encountered:* red is &quot;on&quot; and by default already selected, black is &quot;off&quot;;* black is &quot;on&quot;;* saw one cookie consent form with red meaning &quot;on&quot;, and green meaning &quot;off&quot;.

Only if that is how you implement it.I have done tons of toggles that are not reactive, being a form submit

Checkboxes can also have an indeterminate state (usually with a &quot;-&quot; in place of the checkmark), like the ones you can see at the below link (and which your link also mentions).<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;storybook.react95.io&#x2F;?path=&#x2F;story&#x2F;controls-checkbox--default" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;storybook.react95.io&#x2F;?path=&#x2F;story&#x2F;controls-checkbox-...</a>I think the ternary checkbox has two uses: when it&#x27;s a master checkbox, showing whether all of the binary checkboxes in a group are selected, and it may also be used on its own (the UI may have different actions for the three possible states).

There is a significant difference between checkboxes and toggles. Checkboxes expect a secondary submit step, whereas toggles have instant effect. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.uxtweak.com&#x2F;checkbox-vs-toggle-switch&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.uxtweak.com&#x2F;checkbox-vs-toggle-switch&#x2F;</a> explains this better. Especially the pizza toppings example, that obviously make no sense with toggles.

I&#x27;ve encountered many toggle switches where you can grab the knob and drag it, but just clicking it will toggle it too.
Sometimes the cursor has changed to a pointing hand.

The first time my mother encountered a toggle she tried to actually slide it. I also once saw a website which replaced in a redesign checkboxes with toggles where the cursor changes to a &quot;grab hand&quot; but of cause you cannot grab and slide them need to click it.
Imo it is not intuitive that you have to click toggles and they magically start sliding but you cannot slide them.

&gt; in fact I dislike toggles for some reason I can&#x27;t quite identify.For me it&#x27;s that the &quot;on&quot; and &quot;off&quot; state are styled inconsistently and can be difficult to guess without toggling. Whether a checkbox is checked or not is never in question.&gt; There is a nice visual distinction for toggles, as if you have an &quot;On&quot; and &quot;Off&quot; column for each option.Except there is no such column, so the visual distinction is not self documenting, whereas a checkbox or radio very much is.

My particular cultivar of ADHD doesn&#x27;t have a problem with check boxes, and in fact I dislike toggles for some reason I can&#x27;t quite identify. That alone is not a very useful anecdatum, but I&#x27;m having trouble figuring out what it is that would cause different adhdemons to favour the toggles.There is a nice visual distinction for toggles, as if you have an &quot;On&quot; and &quot;Off&quot; column for each option. Then again that idea would have a conflict where it should be a radio circle because you can&#x27;t be both On and Off, but a checkbox square because more than on option (row) could be On. Maybe a shape with a flat top and rounded sides (a &quot;stadium&quot;) would be good for following the conventions while being worse and more confusing overall.

Toggles are better than checkboxes imo, but checkboxes are a lot harder to mess up design-wise. It&#x27;s really easy to make a toggle that makes it completely impossible to tell if it&#x27;s on or off.

I like the checkboxes and loath the toggle. But after surveying people outside of the tech scene, for anyone with processing issues like ADHD, they report check boxes as easy to misinterpret. Something about the physical movement of the toggle helps them. So I relent and implement toggles.But yeah, fuck round checkboxes. Shows the people driving now are more business oriented and have no love for the culture.

Nice Article with a lot of research to gather all these screeshots that sent me down the memory line.What can I say? The world (of computing) changes under our feet.Nostalgia on Sunday morning...

I don&#x27;t blame the kids: the brutalist yet colorful zoomer UI design is much easier to parse for 30 year old seniors than the flat UI&#x2F;material crap our generation created.I have no way to defend this argument but my eyes, but I can say that Google&#x27;s Material design is the most bland, insipid of them all, and I would rather see Bootstrap again than another Material-inspired with its white cards on white background and tap animations. Just kidding, Bootstrap was as bland.I miss Windows 2000 every day.

I am a mid-30s senior by this definition.Well, maybe I am a senior. I know I spend far more time screaming at clouds nowadays and grow increasingly distant from what kids today are into.

And the UI completely changes every year or three, because progress or something.

And making it worse, past experience with other apps cannot be relied upon.

Don&#x27;t forget to explain that some buttons are inside faint pill shaped shading (or it could be a search field in which they could tap without consequence) and that chips (to show options for a specific context, so they could tap without consequence) are rounded rectangles.Except if the site is still on Material Design 2, then it is the reverse in which some buttons are inside rounded rectangles and that chips are inside pill shaped shading.Are we confused yet?

What does the 2035+ version of this look like? Seniors pushed to VR UIs?

&gt; a senior with fading skillsRecently had to help an aging parent use their phone to obtain medical care: an app was required to access their MyChart to get a message from their case manager. Having to explain what is &quot;clickable&quot; is infuriating. The race for UX&#x2F;UI novelty is leaving seniors behind, which is tragic since hospitals are pushing them online.

The annoyance this causes is not limited to seniors.

I have to argue that it’s not the senior’s skills that are fading.

It’s definitely not just seniors. If you watch young kids use apps, they tap all over the screen to figure out which elements are actually interactive.

Upvote just for sheer passion (using word count as a proxy for this)

Android&#x27;s own Gmail app is a prime example of shitty use of checkboxes in Material Design (or Material You or Material 3 or whatever the hell it&#x27;s called now):There&#x27;s a list of emails with a checkbox for each email on the left.If you want to quickly select a bunch of emails---for instance, to label or sort them---you quickly press all the checkboxes.If you just barely miss a checkbox, you will open the email because you press the larger selectable region (which is, btw, invisible until selected---a nod toward your &quot;prior use&quot; statement) for one email where a checkbox happens to be fully enclosed.Now, if you are trying to label or sort some messages that have been opened and also some that are unread, you now have one extra task of going back after labeling&#x2F;sorting and marking the one that you accidentally opened as unread---if you actually noticed in the first place whether it was already opened before you opened it!On my phone, Gmail checkboxes are about 3 by 3 millimeters. If I dip my finger in coffee and lightly tap the paper on my desk, it creates a circle about 5 to 6 mm in diameter. I&#x27;ve opened countless emails just trying to do routine sorting and labeling via checkbox. I know there are larger fingertips, smaller screens, and people with less stable coordination than mine.Google&#x27;s nested, tiny checkboxes are a waste of time and a needless security flaw, as emails often contain info you&#x27;d like protected, and cameras are commonplace and usually legal, so it doesn&#x27;t matter if you are quick to close the message you suddenly opened outside of your home.The alternative? Hold each message until the checkbox populates, which is noticeably slower but lowers the likelihood you accidentally open a message.I don&#x27;t understand why the Gmail &quot;open this message&quot; region isn&#x27;t a full 5+ mm right of the checkboxes (except maybe at smartwatch resolutions). They shouldn&#x27;t be enclosed or nested AT ALL! Nobody reasonable is opening messages by clicking the little blank space to the left or top of the checkboxes. (...at least they weren&#x27;t until they saw my statement and decided to do it from now on out of spite or curiosity.)I also don&#x27;t know why Android Studio shouldn&#x27;t&#x2F;doesn&#x27;t harass developers with &quot;Attention! You are committing BAD DESIGN!&quot; alert messages when they try to put small selectable elements on top of other selectable elements that perform an unrelated task.

Exactly this. I hate it. Impossible to distinguish a button from a label. I don&#x27;t understand how someone could come up with such ideas and get them approved for such wide-spread UI.

In a similar vein, try explaining to a senior with fading skills that under material design literally nothing is a clue that a region on your screen is a button you can press.Only prior use can inform what is active, and what is not.

From the OP’s article:&gt;Apple is the first major operating system vendor who had abandoned a four-decades-long tradition. Their new visionOS — for the first time in the history of Apple — will have round checkboxes.So the death of the square checkbox they are predicting is only in the context of VisionOS. Apple’s HIG explain why this decision was made (my link), so I don’t think it is part of a larger trend and we shouldn’t expect it to impact anyone not using VisionOS, or other such headsets with eye tracking. It was done for technical reasons relating how the person will interact with the device, not style reasons.

It&#x27;s not a &quot;minuscule number&quot; because visionOS is controlled by looking at things and pinching your fingers. If people subconsciously stare at the edges of a square button, can you imagine how often they&#x27;ll misclick? (mispinch?)

I may be missing a fundamental point of your comment or from the linked content, but given the minuscule number of users who’d be concerned with this in practical presentation, I sincerely hope that the UXers involved didn’t optimize for this use case.

I&#x27;m glad you actually brought a reason to this debate. Not sure I agree but there is at least a reason.

“The sudden realization that the throne was empty.”

Even a rounded rectangle would be more distinguishable than a circle. This is a poor excuse that decreases usability masquerading as an increase to usability.

Dad must know better, surely! It&#x27;s absolutely impossible that almighty Apple is now full of subpar UX wannabes.Apple design has been on a downright trajectory for a long time now, basically since Ive was promoted to the very top (yes he left now, but the damage was done). The Peter Principle doesn&#x27;t make exceptions.

Totally agree. I&#x27;m surprised that a post making a big claim with little research and shallow content like this got to the frontpage with over 800 upvotes. Sad you&#x27;re being downvoted too.

Great point. Very disappointing to read an critique that tries to appear thoroughly thought through, but not even considers that the company that has been very consistent in UX design choices, might have thought about what they&#x27;re doing in a system, that probably requires fundamentally different approaches to UX.I mean:
&gt; Apple is the first major operating system vendor who had abandoned a four-decades-long tradition. Their new visionOS — for the first time in the history of Apple — will have round checkboxes.And yet the author is too lazy to think about that this might have a reason other than &quot;they&#x27;re stupid, look at all my screenshots, i know better than them&quot;.Btw: not saying i agree with this decision. But why even take the time to write when not trying to actually think about what you&#x27;re criticising?Laughable.

It isn’t clear which is which if they all are unchecked

Well, the checkmark itself is pretty angular and hard to look at. I think we should take a page out of East Asian visual language and adopt the circle as the &quot;yes&quot; mark. That is, radio buttons and check boxes should look like this:<pre><code> ( ) Radio button off
 (·) Radio button on
 ( ) Checkbox off
 (O) Checkbox on</code></pre>

So we reduced surface area of elements and made GUIs worse to accommodate disability. Wasn&#x27;t that Apple&#x27;s MO all along?

It sounds like this may be done in an effort to improve the reliability of eye tracking in VisionOS when dealing with checkbox, not Apple just throwing the design book out the window for no reason.&gt;In general, prefer circular or capsule-shape buttons. People’s eyes tend to be drawn toward the corners in a shape, making it difficult to keep looking at the shape’s center. The more rounded a button’s shape, the easier it is for people to look steadily at it. When you need to display a button by itself, prefer a capsule-shape button.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;design&#x2F;human-interface-guidelines&#x2F;buttons" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;design&#x2F;human-interface-guideline...</a>

Radio buttons are always one-of. Initially unselected is just a bug.

Could be a slider with the same radio circles denoting the stopping position, could be those circle volume buttons with labeled marks, could be non-circle switches like these (other&#x2F;position&#x2F;steer on the right) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;img1.wsimg.com&#x2F;isteam&#x2F;ip&#x2F;b81ca6f4-730a-4561-852c-0967c494c50f&#x2F;20210408_165433.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;img1.wsimg.com&#x2F;isteam&#x2F;ip&#x2F;b81ca6f4-730a-4561-852c-096...</a>, etcRe. the missing default - you can have an explicit element &quot;none selected&quot; with the slider positioned therePlenty of options to make UI more intuitive

Microsoft briefly experimented with this, in the &quot;security zones&quot; dialog in Windows XP:<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hs.windows.microsoft.com&#x2F;resbox&#x2F;en&#x2F;6.2&#x2F;main&#x2F;9f04b9c9-cf6e-4797-92cc-a5d0cab42db6_76.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hs.windows.microsoft.com&#x2F;resbox&#x2F;en&#x2F;6.2&#x2F;main&#x2F;9f04b9c9-...</a>It&#x27;s not the exact design you describe: The slider is there, but only the label of the selected option is shown, the other options are only represented as tick marks.I think there are two problems with the design though, (which would also still be there if all labels were shown):- The slider widget back then was normally used for selecting continuous numeric or at least interval scaled input values: That&#x27;s what the mechanism of dragging it with the mouse was developed for. It could be configured with a small number of discrete values as options, but then dragging became awkward: Either the ticks were spaced very far, then you had to drag the cursor a long distance before there was any kind of visual feedback at all - or the ticks were spaced closely, like here, but then dragging the slider to one specific tick became difficult.- It&#x27;s possible to click the slider, but there is no visual indication that you can do so. In fact, the visual indicators are almost inverse to how you&#x27;d need them: The selected option has a big handle that you can not click (only drag), the unselected options have no handle though you can actually click on the empty slider bar to move the handle in that direction.I guess that&#x27;s why they never did this again after this one try - which is sort of a pity, because you could probably build a redesigned slider widget optimized for discrete input that solved those problems.

&gt; The better UI would be for the circles to be visually connected somehow to illustrate that only one selection is possible like you have in physical switches with more than two positionsThis is an interesting point. Radio buttons are kind of weird in terms of their initial position because unlike with checkboxes, there&#x27;s no way to get back to the &quot;empty&quot; state where none is selected. It took me a bit to wrap my head around what you described, but the more I think about it, the more it seems like a &quot;slider&quot; with clearly marked stopping positions. If it&#x27;s too confusing for people to have some sort of &quot;default&quot; option, maybe having a different color for the part of the slider that&#x27;s moved based on whether it&#x27;s in a valid position could help; at the top of the slider, it could be one color indicating &quot;must be moved&quot;, and then when you slide and drop it at one of the marked options (or click the option; it could move automatically to the position like a scrollbar), it changes color to show it&#x27;s valid.

Nope, this group tells you nothing about the fact that these are mutually exclusive, you could just as well group checkboxes because they are all related to some &quot;Icon&quot;

&gt; The better UI would be for the circles to be visually connected somehow to illustrate that only one selection is possible like you have in physical switches with more than two positionsNormally they are within a radio button group so that they are visually connected: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.stack.imgur.com&#x2F;03p3T.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.stack.imgur.com&#x2F;03p3T.jpg</a>

Or my disrespect for tradition will get reinforced when the old chunks of nonsense are replaced with something I can get proficient even when I feel old for the clear reason that it&#x27;s so intuitive even the old folks can grasp it

Your disrespect for tradition will vanish the moment you’ll feel old and software that you were proficient with becomes inaccessible chunk of nonsense for no clear reason.

The text alignment buttons work because you know you can&#x27;t have both centered and left, otherwise relying on subtle spacing would mostly signal some connection, not mutual exclusivity (similar to how those | symbols group related buttons together)One solution to selectable labels would be to add the indeed missing indicator, e.g., you could have the whole label have a border when it&#x27;s active (though in this case maybe you don&#x27;t need radio buttons, but just have multiple lines that look like distinct lines?)Hard to access the background group, I know it doesn&#x27;t work if it includes labels like in the screenshot in another comment, but maybe only for buttons it&#x27;d be more understandable

For mutually-exclusive buttons with the labels inside the buttons, there exists such a convention: Group the buttons together with no space between them. Sometimes, the corners of the buttons at the far edges are rounded but the lines between them are not.
You will often see these in word processors, for aligning text ( left | centred | or right ).A related issue with radio buttons and check boxes is that in some GUIs, clicking the label next to the box&#x2F;button also clicks the widget, but there was no visual indication that that is the case. Sometimes the clickable area even extends the whole width of the window. This carries the risk of users making a selection when all they wanted to do was to click the window in a seemingly inactive area to make it come to front.I think we could solve that issue and visually connect radio buttons by placing them onto a background rectangle with rounded corners — thus adapting a visual cue from the button group widget.
Then highlight the background portion that is clickable when the mouse hovers over it, and when the button&#x2F;area gets clicked.
Further, you could choose to make the colours consistent with those you&#x27;d use for selecting items in lists.

I agree. What the world needs, it is more circles. Damn those rectangular monitors. &#x2F;s

While the checkbox is less confusing than a lot of toggles (eg, the ones in Windows&#x27; settings are bad), relying on the unintuitive distinction between a circle and a square is just one of those bad old UI traditions that, I guess, persist until the next tech generation, little to love here.The better UI would be for the circles to be visually connected somehow to illustrate that only one selection is possible like you have in physical switches with more than two positions

Not to mention the confusion arising from checkboxes in web pages used in place of checkmarks. A checkmark alone should be the correct object to use for output only, while a checkbox normally would accept an input from the user. I don&#x27;t recall where, but have seen this some times around the web and found it misleading.

It doesn&#x27;t matter. The user is an idiot. Just make sure that he enters its credit card details correctly. &#x2F;s

It removes the ability to instantly know whether you have a multiselect situation or a select-one situation.

You might cut your finger on the sharp corners

You can&#x27;t tap a square with your finger?

I think the difference with the square checkbox is that it is for desktop UIs and clicking with a mouse. The circle checkbox is for mobile UIs where you are tapping with your finger.

Pressing a button would be optional. No need to give Apple&#x27;s customers a confusing choice - just transfer all their money to Apple who can prioritise Apple&#x27;s needs appropriately.

the technology is already there[0].we&#x27;re just a few reforms[1] away from having that commercialised.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;3492699&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;3492699&#x2F;</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reason.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;04&#x2F;03&#x2F;abolish-the-fda&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reason.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;04&#x2F;03&#x2F;abolish-the-fda&#x2F;</a>

The MacBook Wheel!<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;9BnLbv6QYcA?feature=shared" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;9BnLbv6QYcA?feature=shared</a>

I think they&#x27;re smart enough to stop at: &quot;press this and we&#x27;ll take your money and tell your friends you&#x27;re cool.&quot;

All in the name of simplicity. Eventually Apple devices will just have one button that says &quot;give us money&quot;.

I suspect that phrase may be a oblique reference to the absolutely lovely UI testing book &quot;Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems&quot; by Steve Krug.

&gt; Rocket surgery
I&#x27;m gonna use this as the superlative of rocket science

Great article, and terrible idea. Wonder why the UI guidelines were bent here.It&#x27;s astonishing how many web designers have no idea about the difference between inclusive and mutually exclusive options.I see checkboxes used all the time when they should be radio buttons. It&#x27;s not rocket surgery. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nngroup.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;checkboxes-vs-radio-buttons&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nngroup.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;checkboxes-vs-radio-buttons...</a>

&gt; hard core programming toollol. eclipse is a bucket of rusty panels held together with duct tape, but embedded companies that can&#x27;t afford software devs and have never heard of UX&#x2F;UI cling to it.

Eclipse is a hardcore masochism tool, try IntelliJ IDEA for Java or just about anything else.That said, is this behaviour actually Eclipse&#x27;s, or is it following the settings of your OS? Windows 11, macOS, and probably some Linux things, decided that scrollbars are not cool and should be hidden or shrunk — but there should be an option to disable that (in Accessibility settings in Windows, in Appearance on macOS). Eclipse might also have its own setting.

&gt; if this is just the world moving on.It is just running in circles. It took Microsoft 3 releases to insert a background color selection in Win 10. I think that around Win 12 it will regain the option for foreground color. &#x2F;s

Much as I love a good rant like this, I have to wonder if this is just the world moving on.I used to hate it (still do a little) when I toggle a checkbox, then go to hit &quot;Save&quot; and realise that the checkbox had immediate effect.Now I observe that this is almost the norm. I guess I need to get over it.I also hate it when people changed the scrollbar behaviour in any way. Then today I realised that one of my micro-frustrations with eclipse is that some UX genius decided to make the scrollbars fade away if there is inactivity. (Inactivity of a few seconds in an IDE is pretty normal - it represents thinking!).But then I reflect that eclipse is a hard core programming tool, used by exactly the kind of people I would have expected to hate on this kind of thing. Instead, it seems that this highly technical audience is OK with this.This article is absolutely on the money, and using rounded checkboxes is deliberately sabotaging one of the few strong mental models that we are able to hold about a UI.But maybe this battle is over, and the UX enshittifiers have won.

I like its design - it&#x27;s simple and familiar and just works. The circular checkboxes are annoying tho.

I bought a Macbook in 2015 because I always loved their UI design. Safe to say, whatever&#x27;s going on with Apple Notes was not what I had in mind.The best designers in the world, keeping alive the worst UI trend of making everything flat and white without any separation, border or shading whatsoever.

This may be petty, but this is one of the reasons why I don&#x27;t use Apple Notes. The design.

Apple ditched square checkboxes long ago in Apple Notes: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;HLrnXn3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;HLrnXn3</a>I believe it was this way since the introduction of iOS 7 in 2014[1] (article from 2016).[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;osxdaily.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;25&#x2F;how-to-add-checklists-to-notes-in-ios-os-x&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;osxdaily.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;25&#x2F;how-to-add-checklists-to-not...</a>

border-radius: 50% is the easiest and most compatible way to make a circle in CSS.

&gt; Especially how many circles are today actually boxes with a large border radius.HTML is all about rectangles. If you want circles, your choices are a straightforward CSS border-radius, or an SVG &lt;circle&gt;. And let me tell you, if you can just slap style=&quot;border-radius:50%;overflow:hidden&quot; onto an &lt;img&gt;, or faff around with &lt;svg&gt;, &lt;image&gt;, &lt;clipPath&gt; and &lt;circle&gt; (or maybe you can even use clip-path=&quot;circle() fill-box&quot; these days, can’t remember if support is there yet), I know which a sensible person will prefer.

If I think of square checkboxes I think of sharp corners. Maybe I should write an article &quot;In Loving Memory of sharp corners&quot; because I definitely miss them but they seem to be extinct from the modern Web and GUI in general.
If I skim the article only old screenshots contain sharp corners. None of the new once.I have a browser where I configured &quot;border-radius: 0 !importent&quot; as userContent.css for fun. Was sometimes surprised how much it is used. Especially how many circles are today actually boxes with a large border radius.

This made me feel warm and fuzzy inside! TY

Yeah Gmail immediately came to mind for me. It feels natural tbh

Google Mail and Google Photos on Android also have round checkboxes.

The parent comment is talking about how the colors are often set on a toggle.That the user never knows if the toggle is in the on or off position.

This assumption breaks if you use macOS. Windows uses (or used to use) Apply button in its settings. Macintosh OSes were reactive from the start. Which means that checkboxes have immediate-ness on Macs.

The real reason is that in contexts like the Settings app, where toggleable items are mixed with other items, checkboxes on the left would take too much space on mobile (especially on the early small-screen iPhones), because it would require the left margin to be increased for all items. Checkboxes on the right are awkward though, and thus were replaced by the toggle switches. The immediateness argument is just a convenient excuse. Immediately-effective checkboxes weren&#x27;t uncommon on desktop before. In addition, there is &quot;previous art&quot; in the form of boolean-toggle menu items that are immediately effective and show a checkmark when active.

That was true in the 90’s when you’d post a whole page but these days the individual checkboxes are more likely to have event handlers that transmit state to the server immediately.

The toggle is supposed to convey immediateness, like a light switch turning on bluetooth is immediate.A checkbox is like filling a form, it requires submission for the action to take place.

&gt; because I think a slider is easier to handle on touch devicesI guess because the toggle has more real estate for you to tap? If so, then couldn&#x27;t you just make the checkbox bigger and get the same ergonomics?

On iOS the toggles are off left, and shown as dim grey. They turn green when you shove them to the right into the on position. That&#x27;s about as much as my brain can process.In many other environments these clues are more subtle or completely absent and I never know which is which.I don&#x27;t necessarily wish my check-box back, because I think a slider is easier to handle on touch devices[1], but it should be done in a way that indicates the status clearly. Apple&#x27;s use of color is also not perfect, but at least they did not fall into the trap of using red and green. Light grey and vibrant green should be distinguishable for most people with color deficiencies even.[1] At least when implemented properly. I am looking at you Ninebot. Your huge on&#x2F;off slider only let&#x27;s me turn off my scooter when the stars are aligned right. I don&#x27;t even bother anymore and just use the button on the scooter.

This doesn&#x27;t need to be the case, though depending on context extra design elements (colour, descriptive text, …) may be needed to make the interpretation truly unambiguous.Sometimes (advert stalking preferences being the key example) the confusion is very deliberately not dealt with, and furthermore on occasion extra steps are actively taken to ensure the confusion.

I&#x27;ve never seen toggles show &quot;what happens&quot;, they&#x27;re mimicking the real-life toggle. Accent color means &quot;I&#x27;m active&quot;unless you&#x27;re on an email newsletter subscription settings page, in that case beware

I find toggles very confusing. Is it showing the current state, or what happens when I toggle the state?

&gt; As for mute, I think it&#x27;s pretty objective at this point that an icon based toggle should show the current state,I can&#x27;t see this holding up as the primary UI rule. And exceptions only for things like mute toggles are seldom a good thing in interfaces where predictability should be the king. It breaks down on play&#x2F;pause toggles. The answer in my opinion is to separate the concern of the action and the state and distinctly show both at the same time.

&gt; I think it&#x27;s pretty objective at this point that an icon based toggle should show the current state, not the state that tapping on the icon will produce.What about a play button? On YouTube, or any music app, the button will show the Play symbol when the media is paused, and the Pause symbol when the media is playing.

White&#x2F;black &quot;indicators&quot; of toggles are horrid. A lot of phone and meeting apps do this and it&#x27;s horrible.As for mute, I think it&#x27;s pretty objective at this point that an icon based toggle should show the current state, not the state that tapping on the icon will produce. That&#x27;s because the icon is serving two jobs: Convey the state and let the user change it. When a developer gets this wrong and shows a crossed out speaker while audio is playing, that&#x27;s just frustrating.

Yep!When the _state_ and _action_ are intermixed it becomes ambiguous. This is one of may things we lost in the war on skeumorphism. The skeumorphic interfaces could mix both more clearly, using shading and texture and &quot;lights&quot; to indicate that a play button was pressed down and active.Look at this UI, it&#x27;s mix of state and action: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discussions.apple.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;attachment&#x2F;861693040" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discussions.apple.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;attachment&#x2F;861693040</a>fast backward rewinds: Probably showing actionPlay: 100% ambiguous if action or statefast forward: Probably showing actionVolume slider: showing stateBack-forward buttons: showing actionSelect drop-down: Showing state

I&#x27;m designing an app right now with this pattern and I&#x27;d love to get it &quot;right&quot;.We&#x27;ve got a video playing and an icon button which controls whether the video is muted. We&#x27;ve got a &quot;playing speaker&quot; and a &quot;muted speaker&quot; icon.What&#x27;s the correct pattern? Should the icon reflect the current state, or the expected state after pressing the button?

Canon does this everywhere in their camera UIs, e.g a button with &quot;(eye-tracking icon) ENABLE&quot;. Gotta open up the full settings UI to remember which way it works. IIRC, they actually show the current state (ENABLE = ENABLED), not the action that will be taken when you tap the button, but I might be misremembering... again.

When a button displays the text &quot;mute&quot; ... does it mean that the status is CURRENTLY muted, or that pressing that button will make it MUTE?

&gt; Radiobuttons seem to always come with one element already selected.This Apple behaviour follows the HTML spec:&gt; At all times, exactly one of the radio buttons in a set is checked. If none of the &lt;INPUT&gt; elements of a set of radio buttons specifies `CHECKED&#x27;, then the user agent must check the first radio button of the set initially.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;TR&#x2F;html401&#x2F;interact&#x2F;forms.html#radio" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;TR&#x2F;html401&#x2F;interact&#x2F;forms.html#radio</a>

Ha! That‘s a surprise to me, I never noticed.So, checking out Apple‘s first party apps it seems that checkboxes are either solid color round circles (just the outline when unchecked) with a checkmark in the middle (for multi selections in lists) or just toggles (typically in settings).Those round checkboxes I could only find being used for list selections (even when the list is horizontal, e.g. when sharing a photo). Toggles for settings.Radiobuttons seem to always come with one element already selected. I couldn’t find an instance of an empty list where you select one element. In those cases (e.g. when picking your WiFi network) they are just a solitary checkmark on the left without the circle.It‘s internally consistent (as I assume visionOS is, too) and the checkbox design in visionOS is actually closer to iOS than macOS. I assume that‘s the origin with quite some history behind it. Nearly two decades.I think the more exact statement would be that as far as iOS is concerned the checkbox already was dead for nearly two decades.As far as UI conventions go I‘m not too worried. What worries me a bit more that this much more clearly frames visionOS (as well as running iPad apps) as a iOS descendant when this might be the platform with the space to be more clearly in the tradition of the Mac.

I was using punchline to actually mean “point”, as in: I assumed the article would show some examples of toggle buttons, but the _point_ of the article was whether the checkboxes were round or square in shape.Yes, literally, at the very end there is a punchline on toggles. But it’s more for the laughs - a literal punchline - it doesn’t change the focus of the article.

The articles punchline IS the use of toggle buttons?! Or have I misunderstood you?

Those are terrible.  I think I’ve had analogs in the physical world where toggles indicated state by the color exposed (green = on, red = off) but this tries to be better by having both color indicator and text indicator) and you’re left deciphering their language a bit.  Yes, it is terrible.

An icon or text should indicate the current state while hover text should indicate what will happen if you click. At least that&#x27;s what we do. It&#x27;s still confusing, but I agree you should be able to infer current state by looking at it. The person who designs it thinks it&#x27;s obvious but it&#x27;s usually not.Checkbooks are quite self explanitory.

Showing the current state matches light switches with the state on them.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.homedepot.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;Leviton-15-Amp-Single-Pole-Switch-White-10-Pack-M24-01451-2WM&#x2F;100075329" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.homedepot.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;Leviton-15-Amp-Single-Pole-Switc...</a>Or car door locks which show red (unsafe) when unlocked. It&#x27;s showing the current state, not the state that will be when toggled.

I actually hate this one because it’s completely unclear.Does OFF there mean-the setting is offOr-Slide this thing over to turn it offI’ve seen it both ways. It’s confusing and not clear.

My same thoughts. The inventors of that revolutionary toggle button should all be tied to the South side of an ass walking towards the North.

I don&#x27;t like these. They can be mistaken to users as an indicator of what moving the &quot;lever&quot; to the other side of the toggle button will actuate - effectively reversing the user&#x27;s intent of the button as compared to what the buttons do.

Or when you try to unsubscribe from a mailing list and are prompted:<pre><code> Unsubscribe from the following:
 [X] List A
 [X] List B
 [X] List C

 [ ] Unsubscribe All Lists
</code></pre>
But if you check the &quot;all&quot; button it clears all of the individual ticks.I would say a solid 80% of unsubscribe prompts have some sort of similarly confusing layout or verbiage.

I would not be able to tell if these slider toggles were saying &quot;yes&quot; or &quot;no&quot; without them going from gray to green. How do colorblind people deal with them?That the whole world adopted these abominations, when there was absolutely nothing wrong with checkboxes, is immensely frustrating.

Yeah so in your example:&quot;Disable all extensions&quot; = OFF.Does this mean all extensions are currently on, or off? Does toggling the switch to on &#x2F;enable&#x2F; the disable-all-extensions subroutine?A switch brings in a bunch of double negatives that can be avoided in most cases.Hella confusing!

Physical switches are labeled like that. Somehow, it&#x27;s not a problem for them, but I do agree that on-screen ones are very unclear.

My &quot;favorite&quot; is when they use green color to indicate &quot;Off&quot;. Like in this page<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.istockphoto.com&#x2F;plans-and-pricing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.istockphoto.com&#x2F;plans-and-pricing</a>The dark patterns here are something to behold (A bit like Adobe&#x27;s stuff)

My &quot;favorite&quot; toggle button is the one where they add on&#x2F;off labels[1] to it, but only one, and the slider hides the label. So the label actually tells you the state, not the state it would be when you move the slider over the label. Or at least that&#x27;s how I think how they work, it breaks my brain a little whenever I look at them.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itsfoss.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;images&#x2F;size&#x2F;w1000&#x2F;wordpress&#x2F;2022&#x2F;12&#x2F;installed-extensions-listed-in-gnome-extensions-website.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itsfoss.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;images&#x2F;size&#x2F;w1000&#x2F;wordpress&#x2F;2022...</a>

Yes absolutely this —&gt; my fav pet peeve remains the unclear toggle button. When the icon is white, is it on? Is it off? Does the line through the microphone mean it’s muted? Or that it mutes when tapped? No one knows, tap it a few more times to find out…There’s no UX consideration just design by committee, looking at static renders of the “design language”

&gt; iOS has had round checkboxes since forever?but iOS hasn&#x27;t been around forever. In the spirit of TFA, iOS marks the start of the Vandals climbing over the gates and sacking what had been to melt it all down and make a soup of melty things.

Toggle buttons are hard! I tried making some for a game I made once but ended up just using text because half the people thought it meant the opposite of what it did

I’m ashamed I never noticed this until you pointed it out. Standards can be broken insidiously, and it’s disappointing that a company that cared about consistent UI enough to put out the HIG. Having typed that, I read the HIG on toggles and realized that those items in iOS aren’t checkboxes. A checkbox turns something on or off. The “round checkboxes” used in iOS are to select multiple items for further action. I don’t know what those are, or if&#x2F;where they’re covered in the HIG.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;design&#x2F;human-interface-guidelines&#x2F;toggles" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;design&#x2F;human-interface-guideline...</a>

I find that kind of &quot;feature&quot; frustrating as well, but I&#x27;m pretty certain that the reason it&#x27;s there is that otherwise they get a constant deluge of support requests from people who forgot they turned it off.

&gt;&gt;&gt;&quot;...increasing use of on-off toggles instead of checkboxes&quot;One of the most egregiously angering thing to me is toggles that self un-toggle:&quot;Disconnecting Bluetooth Until Tomorrow&quot;WHAT?I literally just commanded the device to turn something off which required me to pick it up, unlock it with a biometric identification, navigate to the settings containing the option I want to control with my physical hands, look at the screen, read the results for the object I want. Make the decision to turn a thing off. Do so by physically touching the device and adjusting the setting - not the Device says&quot;Oh you want that off? More than for just a little bit? Well, I&#x27;ll have you know that we use your Bluetooth radio for a lot of our data tracking systems, so its important to us that its on - so we&#x27;ve coded your device&#x27;s operating system to only allow you to turn off your Bluetooth radio temporarily so you feel like you&#x27;re in control of it. Why? Because Fuck You Thats Why. Now go back to browsing reddit&quot;

Yes, but it took awhile. :) Also, I feel like the era when checkboxes were actually filled squares or Xs within square braces were less “checkboxy” in that they filled a box but were not “checkmark” shaped. It’s arguable they were toggles already, just data-constrained design variations of them.

&gt; Likewise I thought the article’s punchline was going to be the increasing use of on-off toggles instead of checkboxesIt kind of was. The last line of the article is “Kids these days will just use a toggle anyway”

Of course the entire point of the article is whining about the web and web developers.

Tabs in Gedit are the same. Whenever I have two text files open, I always understand the tab bar wrong: the item I read as active is inactive and vice-versa. All becuase they doing follow the traditional tab design and use some sort of pills instead.

As a non iOS user, I always get thrown by the horizontal slider toggles. I can never tell by looking at one if it is on or off. And sometimes on touch screens I try to slide them sideways and it doesn&#x27;t work.

That reminds me of how every other time I silence&#x2F;unsilence my iPhone, I stare at the &quot;Silence activated&quot; &#x2F; &quot;Silence deactivated&quot; and work out in my head if it means the phone will make noise or not. Despite doing it thousands of times.I suppose &quot;Sound on&quot; vs &quot;Sound off&quot; would be better because in the moment I&#x27;m thinking of noise and sound, so silence is the inverse of that and kinda forms a double negative situation. &quot;Not-noise mode activated &#x2F; not activated&quot;.

An app I use regularly and have introduced numerous people to uses a small toggle slider next to text that reads &quot;Yes, [enable this feature]&quot;. Both I and literally every person I have introduced the app to have made the mistake of assuming that the &quot;Yes&quot; text described the current state. What&#x27;s worse is that the &quot;on&quot; state of the toggle is just slightly more activated-looking than the &quot;off&quot; state. You could hardly design it worse on purpose.

I could swear Discord inverted its mic button on vs off convention sometime last year.

The must microphone is a great example.
I&#x27;m often finding it hard to find out whether that type of input means &quot;change state to this&quot; or &quot;this is the state&quot;.Most confusing is when the text changes along with the checkbox, I just go from one unknown state to another.

&gt; Kids these days will use a toggle anyway.From the end of the article

I&#x27;ve only seen round checkboxes used in the context of selecting multiple things in a list of indeterminate size, like emails in your inbox, photos in your gallery, etc.In my mind this is a slightly different application to the classic &quot;form&quot; that you fill out with data and options before submitting.

I also absolutely hate switches in almost all contexts. In some applications it can make sense, like the UI that controls your WiFi or something.The reason why a light switch is so effective is because we can see an immediate response&#x2F;impact on our action, the direction that the toggle points in is actually irrelevant, because either the lights are on or off, and toggling the switch changes that state, and I can verify with my eyes. Usually it&#x27;s safe to toggle the switch back and forth until the desired state is achieved.In software that&#x27;s not always possible, and often changing the state has destructive results. So you can&#x27;t experiment.And then you get the abominations that bring in double negatives, and things that use switches to control something more complex than a simple boolean state.&quot;Disable the nuclear missile warning test = ON&#x2F;OFF&quot; - like what the hell does this even mean, and how can the user be expected to understand what the right option is without trying first.

I’m surprised nobody has mentioned that iOS has had round checkboxes since forever? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ux.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;116712&#x2F;apples-round-checkboxes-where-and-when-are-they-used" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ux.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;116712&#x2F;apples-round-c...</a>Likewise I thought the article’s punchline was going to be the increasing use of on-off toggles instead of checkboxes. Like how the settings app on macOS now has more on-off toggles than ever before.Personally though, my fav pet peeve remains the unclear toggle button. When the icon is white, is it on? Is it off? Does the line through the microphone mean it’s muted? Or that it mutes when tapped? No one knows, tap it a few more times to find out…

The name might be antiquated, but the difference is still important and understood.

I also think the visual idiom doesn&#x27;t hold up, especially since implementers don&#x27;t use radio buttons correctly half the time. To help people get the idea that they are possible choices for the same attribute, I like to wrap them in a &lt;fieldset&gt; with a &lt;legend&gt; that explains what their [name] attribute is associated with. I think this is how Win95 did it back in the day too

I suppose people forgot what &quot;radio buttons&quot; are (and where the name comes from). At least I haven&#x27;t seen them on non-vintage devices in ages.WIth that, it might make sense to reevaluate if they&#x27;re still a useful UI language idiom, and if the different handling is still necessary.

&gt; my mentor informed me that those shapes all had different meanings and functions.I have never heard of this. It sounds dubious, like those “flower language” lists which are all different.

Around 2015, I authored my résumé in LibreOffice, and I sprinkled in an assortment of bullet points. Some were indented. I used open squares, filled squares, open and filled circles, right-arrows, stars, etc.I brought it into an employment center for critique, and my mentor informed me that those shapes all had different meanings and functions. It was a wake-up call for me.I am not a UX&#x2F;UI designer, so my experience with the UI elements in applications had been intuitive, and moreover, disconnected from the activity of authoring a non-interactive document.So I believe that these UI features were imitating paper-based forms. Those ovals or circles on Scantron sheets: you&#x27;d better not fill in more than one per line! And being named &quot;radio buttons&quot;: yes, if you pressed &quot;AM&quot; then the &quot;FM&quot; button popped out. If you had six presets in a car--wait a minute, those were oblong...

&gt; apple-style toggle buttons, which I guess are more intuitive for some people?You seriously overestimate the average competency in UX circles.The algorithm outside Apple is basically &quot;what would Apple use here?&quot;.The algorithm inside Apple is basically &quot;what will make people talk about us?&quot;Serious studies are for boring people. Design hipsters don&#x27;t want to look boring.

Toggles are actually not that bad as a checkbox replacement. But I feel they convey a lot of meaning through color (in iOS, sliders turn green when selected), whereas checkboxes reimain immediate even in b&#x2F;w. I wonder whether people with severe colour blindness have any issue with that?Ahh why didn&#x27;t I take interface design as a career :)

My impression is that in modern UIs, both checkboxes and option buttons are being phased out: Checkboxes seems to be replaced with apple-style toggle buttons, which I guess are more intuitive for some people?Option buttons don&#x27;t have any direct replacement that I can think of, you just see them incredibly rarely. My guess is that they always were one of several possible means to have the user select from a set of choices, the other prominent ones being a plain listbox widget or a combobox&#x2F;dropdown widget - or of course, just use plain buttons.For some reason, designers seem to prefer plain buttons or a dropdown for this usecase today.

That wasn&#x27;t anything to do with radios though. That was just the way mutually exclusive buttons worked. I had a portable tape player where the playback controls were the same way.

Yeah the name definitely refers more to the functionality&#x2F;behavior of the buttons.You&#x27;d push one of those buttons in to select a station and it&#x27;d stay pressed. When you push another button in to choose another station, the previously pressed button would &quot;pop&quot; back up&#x2F;depress (thereby &quot;unselecting&quot; itself), thereby enforcing the mutual exclusivity of a station selection.

Here&#x27;s one that seems genuine and has round radio buttons: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.pinimg.com&#x2F;originals&#x2F;f4&#x2F;c8&#x2F;8b&#x2F;f4c88b861769e24674b47c5ba1e64fbe.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.pinimg.com&#x2F;originals&#x2F;f4&#x2F;c8&#x2F;8b&#x2F;f4c88b861769e24674b4...</a>

We have controls that mimic the actual radio buttons in the form of toggle buttons (buttons that stay depressed after pressing them), but in many APIs the programmer needs to toggle the press state of all other buttons in the group to use them.Preset radios came in a huge variety and some of them were actually round. Car radios (the radios that have stuck around the longest) need big and bulky buttons so you can operate them without taking your eyes off the road, but some home radios had smaller, circular buttons instead.The &quot;radio&quot; buttons I used as a kid were small, rectangular sticks poking out of a metal plate that you pushed in. Every brand had their own shapes and designs. Unfortunately, I can&#x27;t find any pictures of older radios on the internet because every image searching site seems to have been overtaken with badly generated AI art, stock photos, and cheap, plastic &quot;retro vintage&quot; Amazon listings.

Huh, I thought they were &quot;radio&quot; because they communicated with each other. Still not a bad mnemonic IMO

TIL radio buttons were named after the physical buttons used on older radios to select preset stations[0]. IMO they look nothing like the actual buttons on radios.0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Radio_button" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Radio_button</a>

Imagine the poor bastards in the future trying to comprehended the floppy-disk &quot;save&quot; icon.

Me too! I had assumed that &#x27;radio button&#x27; was a bastardization of &#x27;radial button&#x27;, referring to the very shape which the author notes is conventionally used for them.

It&#x27;s obvious with hindsight, but I had never realised that that is why they&#x27;re called radio buttons!

Actual radio buttons in cars were for the most part rectangular<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.shutterstock.com&#x2F;search&#x2F;radio-buttons-old-car-radio" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.shutterstock.com&#x2F;search&#x2F;radio-buttons-old-car-ra...</a>There&#x27;s a good explanation of how they worked here:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.physicsforums.com&#x2F;threads&#x2F;how-do-old-timey-radio-buttons-work.956716&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.physicsforums.com&#x2F;threads&#x2F;how-do-old-timey-radio...</a>

This makes me rethink the idea of buying i-things for my grandma, thanks. That said, I see her struggle with android-based devices everyday. Both get shittier and shittier with years, we just tend to suffer less due to the boiling frog situation.I fully support the proposed initiative.

If it is round, it isn&#x27;t a checkbox, it is a checkhole.People see something round, &quot;box&quot; isn&#x27;t the first word that comes to mind.In my previous history as a ... as a web person (I think that&#x27;s both broad and vague enough to encompass the yes-I-did-that-too sense of things), I had an ever-growing disdain for the designers who were off on their own flights of fancy. Usable? Explainable? Accessible? Senior-friendly? Then, late to the party, I got this iPhone thing and I was astonished at how much the device expected me to know about how the interface worked, on a deep level. I tried to get my mother into an iPad and, frustratingly, could find no good cheat sheets on the &quot;gestures,&quot; to the point where I made a laminated, color-coded and numbered set of sheet on gestures, screen, etc. I help out an even older senior with her computer and ... well, I think the i-UX people are frankly out in their own la-la land and their hubris is sustained only by Apple&#x27;s inertia&#x2F;network effect&#x2F;market dominance.In a kinder, gentler world, these UX teams would be required to make a general style sheet document, which would be applied to various real-world applications, and then they would be forced to watch a senior citizen attempt to navigate their trash to, say, get a test result from the hospital. Should this not be accomplished in under five minutes, they are thrown into a hell of leather-clad demons who beat them with sticks while patiently explaining that their design, in fact, sucks.UX design has begun to resemble fashion in an Oscar Wilde manner, &quot;so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.&quot; It&#x27;s getting divorced from meaning and utility, and worse yet, constancy. Nobody wants to relearn UX for your crap app just so you can be cutting edge with sliders that resemble the phases of the moon.

When I had a macbook, I had to buy a plastic case for it, because otherwise its hard, pointy metal surface damaged my fingernails.

That&#x27;s a matter of preference. I like the sharper iPhone forms more (4, 5, the first SE, 12 and onwards). I also love the sharp look of Mini and iMacs (especially the 2007 - 2015 ones).

Apple seems to have been one of the main forces behind the trend of adding rounded corners everywhere in UIs, which frankly is a style I don&#x27;t like at all.The irony is that some of their hardware has painfully sharp corners, the one place where rounding them would greatly improve comfort --- anyone touched the edges of a MacBook or Mac Mini and thought &quot;why did they not smooth these off&quot;?

they are replaced by those slider-switch that came from mobile and are supposed to resemble lightbulb switches. A specific type of switch that seems to be popular in america, and it s hard to immediately grasp for most others

It&#x27;s the same for radio and checkox. All combinations of checked&#x2F;unchecked, enabled&#x2F;disabled, and focused&#x2F;unfocused exist.

&gt; That’s why it’s common to see radio buttons containing checkmarksThe radio-buttons prior all included an additional inner circle to imply a selected state. You can&#x27;t just have empty and filled, since filled could be off, and empty could be a filled circle over a filled circle, in other words on.La, the prior was only good design because it was common design.

There&#x27;s nothing wrong with innovation, of course. A lot of controls needed to change to work well on touch interfaces, like the sliding toggles iOS use(d), and the large, connected touch areas that have replaced the small labels and click targets that computers used to have.There&#x27;s no reason to abandon the toggle button&#x2F;checkbox distinction, though. They&#x27;re still used distinctively, there are common practices to indicate those distinctions that go back decades, and I don&#x27;t see any need to unify these controls.

I remember reading a book about UX years ago, and one of the fundamental principles there was the discoverability and the intuitive use, which boiled down to sticking to conventions that are rooted in everyone&#x27;s experience. Stuff like using check boxes and radio buttons properly, having the &quot;OK&quot; and &quot;Cancel&quot; buttons in their regular places (and not a &quot;Maybe later&quot;), using unambiguous confirmations (unlike the &quot;Are you sure you do not want to not unsubscribe?&quot;), sticking to the same navigation patterns users see in most other apps.Now, I don&#x27;t subscribe to it in full. There needs to be room for innovation. To my taste, it was quite boring when all software looked literally the same. Nevertheless, I agree there needs to be some reason too. Some short time ago every new app looked like a new game where you needed go through a tutorial to learn the basics. That was probably too much.But, I don&#x27;t know, as of late it feels like this iteration comes to and end, the apps start being intuitive again and reuse some patterns. The sidebars, user menus, etc. all in the same place. Mostly.So, yay discoverability and intuitive use. But that doesn&#x27;t mean we can&#x27;t innovate in UX, while keeping it intuitive. Just not the &quot;Maybe later&quot; abusive way, please.

&gt; When&#x2F;why did that happen?There&#x27;s no money in making a thing that works well, only in making things that look good. Effectively 100% of people who are using software are using it for things that fundamentally don&#x27;t matter, so why should they care if the functionality is shit? Personal computers and phones are fashion statements, not useful devices. Business computers and phones exist to facilitate the bullshit jobs that employ the majority of the white-collar population. Follow the money; nobody with money cares.

It started as user-centric research and when the user became the product the intent of this research shifted.

I&#x27;m sure there are many exceptions but a decent amount I&#x27;ve seen is portfolio-driven design, where the goal is more to have something eye-catching, unique and interesting that will look good in a portfolio and to show other designers, more than building something well considered and reliable&#x2F;predictable. There can be a sense, especially amongst more junior designers, that the job of design is to add some style, and that design should be fun and much more like creating abstract art than making sure door handles are in a reasonable place and turn in the expected direction. The end result is, as you say, more fashion than function.

Designers still want to work, so they change stuff randomly and sell it as &quot;modern&quot;.

1. 99.99999% of management have zero understanding of UX. So their view of UX is basically some designer making it &quot;pretty&quot;.2. Most UX design aren&#x27;t probably taught. Especially Software User Interface.3. A lot of Design in that era came from Web. And if we read this article we already know or could guess what web design were like.4. It is my observation that Tech, or Silicon Valley historically speaking learns very little about history of their industry. Unlike many other discipline, things comes and goes like fashion industry. Combine with Hype machine and VC money. Apart from Politics or Finance there is no other industry that contains as much noise as Tech.5. Conservatism ( Not politics ) is generally not well accepted. Finished Software is not appreciated. And if you cant improve, or remake something, there is no way you can move up the ladder. The fundamental of not doing anything hype or large changes is against Resume Driven Development model.

I’ll give my perspective as a designer turned developer. People have always conflated design with “desenho” (drawing). But design is supposed to be more about information architecture. It just so happens that what’s usually trusted to be architected by designers is materialized graphically. But when the whole ecosystem of training and employment robs designers of their impact by not integrating them in both higher and lower level industrial  processes, they’re hopelessly left at their corner, with a lot of energy to spend on what they actually have a stake on: visuals.

Electron-based applications seem like a hugo factor. When native applications were abandoned in favor of Electron, designers stopped trying to match their designs to established operating system standards and began designing from scratch, with much poorer results, because they didn&#x27;t have the resources and experience of teams that had worked on major OSes.Prior to that, deviations from established standards (layouts, colors, logic) were seen as unprofessional and tasteless. Things like buttons with unusual colors made software look like a shareware hobby project downloaded from Tucows, and nobody wanted their product to trigger these associations. Premium software made for Windows wanted to have the look and feel of Word and Excel.

&gt; Then, somehow, it devolved into fashion. When&#x2F;why did that happen?I&#x27;ll tell you what happened.Apple.I&#x27;ve been saying for years now that Apple is not a tech company, they&#x27;re a fashion company. Alternatively, they make tech fashionable, which means abandoning function in favor of form.Actual UX is unimportant. It just has to look nice.What infuriates me is when other companies then start to copy them. I&#x27;m looking at you, Microsoft. With Windows 11, it seems you have forgotten that many of your users stick with you because you&#x27;re not MacOS. So why would you want to start imitating MacOS?

For a few years in the last decade, it seemed that UX design was getting recognized as a serious discipline rooted in user research. Then, somehow, it devolved into fashion. When&#x2F;why did that happen?

I think your point 2 is absolutely on the nose here. It fits in with broader industry trends in testing and operations.And perhaps that&#x27;s where the OP&#x27;s question originated from?As we&#x27;ve watched the despecialization of our field in testing and ops, we&#x27;ve seen that things improve, as ideas are introduced more widely, while also seeing them get mimicked and cargo-culted when the ideas are diffused.Maybe the coders who were fighting against testing mandates or devops or design thinking were just insecurely admitting to their own ignorance on these topics and asking for assistance in being able to perform their new duties effectively?One value in specialists is the freedom that comes with specialization enables them to do their job more completely. Fred Brooks&#x27;s surgical team could not be more relevant.

Which era&#x27;s programmers favored code simplicity over the UX? I find this hard to believe.

I am quite positive, that (despite this and countless others fun examples to the contrary) the average the UX floor has risen by a lot.Sure, things regress and move in waves, but on the whole user design has been established as the primary of software development and that really was a not the case back when.Take something like error handling in a form. In a lot of average software, it was not at all uncommon for a form to just say &quot;Error&quot; when something went wrong (or just not submit). Or lose all form input after unsuccessful submission. Programmers were unironically confused about why people would not just enter correct information. People then wrote books about how to design form errors. Now, basically every web framework includes at least some form of validation and error handling by default(-ish), and most people would be seriously confused if they saw something like the above.If you find it easy to poke holes into this one, please consider the average across all the little things that go into not fucking up a form, which is still hard to get really good, but again I am describing something of an average expectation here.I would pin this to two major developments:1. Designers are increasingly everywhere. If you think &quot;duh?&quot;, this is entirely not how software was made. Programmers, commanded by business people, made software.2. Most programmers today are also designers, and I don&#x27;t mean in the sense that they always were (designing the software), but as in &quot;thinking about people using the product&quot;.Again, this might feel like a comical thing to even say but in most places programmers were just not expected to do anything to make the users life simple, unless explicitly told so. That was the designers job. In fact, a lot of programmers considered it a holy duty to fight any feature that was merely a convenience, and were quite adamant that, surely, the user could simply be expected to suffer a little and work a bit harder to get things done, if that meant keeping the code base pristine.

I blame the human spirit. User interfaces could have been the one thing we collectively agreed to &quot;stop innovating&quot; on and delivered better experiences for everyone. People are unable to stop innovating. People paid to look at design can&#x27;t just say, it&#x27;s done, we did it. And now I fully expect for the rest of my life I will need to explore an increasingly complex labyrinth user interfaces for which I will one day be unable to figure out.

&gt; Alan Cooper&#x27;s &quot;About Face&quot; is a great startI&#x27;m not sure if I read all the way through it when I first got my copy but it -is- very good and I have it stashed for the next time I end up doing UI design.Well worth a look.

&gt;Since ~2013 Apple designers have been throwing over board lots of conventions the company had been itself establishing for decades.2013 was when we first witness it in effect. It started a little earlier inside Apple. When Scot Forstall was forced out, the whole Software User Interface falls to Jony Ive and he basically ripped everything out and redesigned it with iOS 7. There is a huge different, or dare I say 95% completely unrelated field in Software UX and Hardware UX. Apple then spend the next 3-4 years walking back on all the design changes made in iOS 7.Unfortunately a lot of UX learning was lost during that period. Including the Seniors of Human User Interface retiring during 2015 - 2020. The group has also grown rapidly in terms of numbers under Tim Cook. A lot of the Steve Jobs design requirement and &quot;why&quot; were diluted with more new members.The design from Apple today may still look beautiful, but they are no longer as functional as they once were.

I believe these rules should be changed rarely, consciously and very carefully. Perhaps it would be worth it for them to explain their thought process behind revising them in some developer session.Meanwhile, every person working on design systems should think about decisions like these deeply. Designers, engineers, accessibility specialists should all talk together and come to some common ground before doing something like this.

&gt; Since ~2013 Apple designers have been throwing over board lots of conventions the company had been itself establishing for decades.For decades, all the conventions had developed on desktop. By ~2013 it was clear that mobile required different conventions, and that it was important to also unify conventions to some degree across mobile and desktop.Also, traditional desktop apps had largely limited themselves to the UX vocabulary provided by the OS&#x27;s graphical widgets. But with the rise of high quality CSS and JS, websites and apps became more free to develop their own conventions, separate from anything coming out of Apple or Microsoft. Hamburger menus and pills and what have you.So it makes perfect sense that Apple started to evolve more rapidly around that time. And good for them -- none of these rules can or should be set in stone.(And please don&#x27;t make this about generations, that&#x27;s just silly. Trying to assign blame to entire generations is utterly meaningless. Generations are made of individuals who disagree with each other.)

Since ~2013 Apple designers have been throwing over board lots of conventions the company had been itself establishing for decades.I remember user interface design class at my university ca. 2005 where 20 out of the 30 best practice interaction design patterns originated at Apple!Steve Jobs for the most part really cared and you could feel those priorities clearly: &quot;it&#x27;s how it works, not how it looks!&quot;Aside from some natural missteps, the &quot;form over function&quot; critique at the time was predominantly false. Apple is slowly getting there though, joining &quot;ignorant web&quot; as correctly called out here by Nikita.The thing is that none of this is a joke or could be taken however lightly. It&#x27;s 2024 and by now we&#x27;ve fundamentally realized the &quot;Software is Eating the World&quot; prophecy; living in a digitally permeated world.Bad design is a moral issue, in worst case scenarios it has been killing people before and will increasingly kill or harm even more going forward. It always starts with the little things, especially so in design &#x2F; engineering.I desperately hope that Zoomers at least will start to realize that Millenials really fucked it up in that regard. I know, I know it also were the bosses pushing for this but we clearly should have said &quot;no&quot; much more often as the professionals (?) implementing this stuff.There is much satisfaction waiting in learning; a full-grown craft with deep history.Zoomers: Alan Cooper&#x27;s &quot;About Face&quot; is a great start, probably super cheap these days as seemingly no one cares anymore.

I don&#x27;t think Apple outsources visionOS design through Fiverr.

Pretty much so, yes. It is cheaper to just get some random dude on Fiverr who has no clue about GUI design, but can whip up something pretty that impresses the manager who has no idea about UX and GUI design either.

Is everybody insane?I go to Windows, terrible GUI choices.I go to Linux, GNOME makes terrible GUI choices. (Thank God for KDE)I hear about Mac, terrible GUI choices.Did all the people with experience in graphical user interfaces die off or retire?

When GTK 1.x and WindowMaker copied Motif&#x27;s diamond, I hacked&#x2F;themed both for personal use to make it a circle.SGI had their own version of Motif with a look that was more like Mac and Windows of the time.

Nearly all gray, with flat black, no gradients to smooth anything. Gives the impression of harsh lighting.Very sharp-edged 3D boxy window design creates heavy cumbersome feel.Inconsistent pixelly fonts.Oddly aligned text in button.Diamonds happen to be a shape that maximizes pixelation.Indent in vs. out is cognitive heavy to process, relative to something less pure-dual.Black selection border doesn&#x27;t have consistent widths.Separation line between big button and little buttons, despite obvious size and shape differences that already make that distinction.Extra little borders defining window box corners from horizontal and vertical borders - a distinction that surely didn&#x27;t need highlighting.No rounding. (Granted, rounding would look pixelated.)TLDR; It looks like an industrial lead brick you really don&#x27;t want to drop onto your foot.

To clarify, are you referring only to Motif, or the Windows 9x classic look as well?

&quot;X will not run in these 4 bit overlay planes. This is because I’m using Motif, which is so sophisticated it forces you to put a 1&quot; thick border around each window in case your mouse is so worthless you can’t hit anything you aim at, so you need widgets designed from the same style manual as the runway at Moscow International Airport. My program has a browser that actually uses different colors to distinguish different kinds of nodes. Unlike a PC Jr, however, this workstation with $150,000 worth of 28 bits-per-pixel supercharged display hardware cannot display more than 16 colors at a time. If you’re using the Motif self-abuse kit, asking for the 17th color causes your program to crash horribly.&quot; -Steve Strassman, Unix-Haters Handbook<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25734498">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25734498</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@donhopkins&#x2F;the-x-windows-disaster-128d398ebd47" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@donhopkins&#x2F;the-x-windows-disaster-128d39...</a>

For some reason I&#x27;ve always found this design incredibly ugly. My eyes just hate it for some reason.

Early builds of Windows 95 had diamonds too: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;toastytech.com&#x2F;guis&#x2F;chic58test.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;toastytech.com&#x2F;guis&#x2F;chic58test.png</a>

BTW. Motif (on X11) used small bevelled squares for check boxes and a bevelled diamond shape for radio buttons.
There was no checkmark, cross or coloured circle. Bevelled in was active. Bevelled out was not.Example: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oreilly.com&#x2F;openbook&#x2F;motif&#x2F;vol6a&#x2F;Vol6a_html&#x2F;V6a.03.06.eps.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oreilly.com&#x2F;openbook&#x2F;motif&#x2F;vol6a&#x2F;Vol6a_html&#x2F;V6a....</a>

I chuckled when switching to dark mode on this website. The result is hilarious. When clicking it the page becomes dark and your cursor becomes like a flashlight. Definitely doesn&#x27;t help with reading. Feels like it&#x27;s a statement against dark mode. I love opinionated blogs like this.

This site somehow made me dislike dark mode in a good way. That was wayyyy too dark

If I remember correctly Borland claimed compliance with some standard for the TUI toolkit provided as part of Turbo Pascal. I cannot remeber which ISO it may have been, or if details like checkboxes were covered by it.Does the current ISO 9241 cover that topic?The three recent main losses of clarity&#x2F;usability seem to be: 1) links no longer visually identifiable, 2) changes applying instantly instead of only when pressing apply&#x2F;ok and no cancel button to revert, 3) now the loss of visually identifiable checkboxes.Shouldn&#x27;t things become easier and more clearly identifiable to use with todays user base of 100% of mankind compared to limited few persons 30 years ago? Why is the opposite happening?

In loving memory of square checkbox