I gasped when I first saw Lightroom do this:

I know this won’t have the same effect on you just watching. What happened was that, after I clicked on the Disable button, Lightroom moved the mouse pointer for me.

I don’t think I have ever seen anything like this, and it provoked many thoughts and emotions:

• This feels wrong. If the mouse is the extension of my fingers, and the mouse pointer the extension of the mouse, this is in effect the app grabbing my hand and moving it.
• I did not know this was even possible. I can see how moving the mouse pointer programmatically can be useful in very specific situations (like scrubbing, or accessibility), but… not like this.
• If you do something for the user, won’t that make it harder for them to remember how to do it themselves?
• I’ve seen this kind of a thing many times in my career: Someone genuinely asks “hey, if this is such a huge transgression, why wasn’t it codified somewhere in the style guide?” But to me the challenge is that it’s hard to imagine everything that needs to be preemptively captured and prohibited. I have to imagine this stuff for living, and I literally did not think anyone would just move a mouse pointer like this.

So seeing this now, yeah, I’d bundle this inside the “some interactions are 100% sacred” bucket, alongside focus never being hijacked randomly (especially in the middle of typing), avoiding scrolling anything until I specifically ask, undo and copy/​paste needing utmost protection, and a few more.

In the opposite camp, here’s a fun new project by Neal Agarwal (only worth clicking on a computer with a mouse). This is a situation where it feels perfectly fine for a cursor to be hijacked; as a matter of fact, there is something really interesting about a mouse pointer feeling less like a deity floating above it all, and more like a regular in-game actor.

This reminded me of that time, in the earlier days of Figma, when I prototyped an interaction where you could select someone else’s pointer and press Backspace to delete it:

We didn’t seriously consider it because it felt just too weird, and not that effective in solving “the other person’s cursor is distracting me” problem. But today it feels like it belongs to the same category as the two examples above.

I’ll let you decide if it’s closer to Agarwal’s delight or Lightroom’s terror.

I recently installed a screenshotting utility CleanShot, and I was enamored with its settings:

There’s much to like here – thoughtful grouping and layout, good explanations, more details than expected.

There are some nice interaction moments, for example the hints swapping to reflect the current status:

The fact that the tool allows you to override its single-key shortcuts, which are the hardest to change using third-party keyboard customization apps:

Or, when you want to customize the key visualization, Settings shows a nice preview:

There was even this lil molly guard:

But also just the settings themselves gave me a sort of competence contact high. A few clicks in, and I thought “oh, they do know what they’re talking about.” So many things here were for me, to solve specific problems I encountered.

It all gave me confidence this is the right tool for the job. (Also, perhaps a corollary: has there even been a bad tool with well-designed settings?)

Compare with also-new-to-me settings from Affinity, which I was much less impressed with:

It uses the troubled right-aligned style originating in iOS, the capitalization is clumsy, and the navigation muddy (it feels like in-page links on the web, which are always confusing).

Is this a fair comparison? Not at all. I don’t actually want to say that CleanShot is better and Affinity is worse. This is so very much east coast apples and west coast oranges.

I don’t even want to say settings are always worth designing well in the traditional sense; sometimes the only thing between you and 20 unnecessary options in your app is simply having no surface that could host them. A limited (but never unpleasant!) settings UI might be an intentional design decision.

But there was a nice quote in the Shadow of the Colossus book: “I often find myself exploring simply because it’s beautiful.” I too became a tourist in all of CleanShot’s settings because they were put together so well, and I was so curious what’s behind the next corner. Its creators understood that the best way to get to know what the tool is capable of is to take a stroll through the settings. I think it’s a good case study at how a proper welcome mat doesn’t always have to be a few onboarding tooltips flying spastically around the screen. Sometimes it won’t look like a welcome mat at all.

If there was one go-to example of an impenetrable error message in the 1980s, it must have been this – popping up, for example, if your disk drive was dirty:

On some technical level, the options made sense: “Abort” would stop whatever you were doing, “Retry” would try to repeat the action, and “Ignore” would proceed as if there was no error. But in the heat of a moment, or seeing it for the first time, this was a puzzling choice to be asked to make. Not only were the words weighted improperly (the seemingly most innocuous action here, “Ignore,” was actually the only one that could do actual lasting damage), but it also wasn’t entirely clear what’s the safe thing to do to get out of the situation.

(The redesign of “Abort, Retry, Ignore” was “Abort, Retry, Fail,” and it wasn’t really a huge improvement.)

Last night, I installed Google Photos on my iPhone, and the first message that greeted me was this:

This is really a matryoshka doll of bad dialog presentation.

First: any buttons in a dialog should be labeled with enough information to keep me going. Here, both have generic labels, so now I need to pay attention.

Second: Even after reading, I have no idea what is the choice I’m making. I see the pathway marked “yes, keep it the way I had it” and, sure – this would be generally what I want from any given computer on any given Sunday. But what’s the actual alternative?

But the third, and most important one, is this: this dialog has no safe escape hatch. By now, in UX design, we established quite a few canonical escape hatches:

• a Cancel button,
• a × close box,
• a “No, thanks” link,
• a press of an Escape key.

But you can’t × this dialog out. The main button seems positive, but it also feels like I’m taking an action with consequences, and I don’t want to deal with that. There is a “No, thanks,” but it doesn’t feel like the other “No, thankses” I have seen – it’s juxtaposed with copy that makes it seem… a dangerous thing to choose.

And this last bit makes it a pretty serious design offense, because you are now messing with foundational stuff. You need to protect those escape hatches for the future; the moment you introduce hesitation into the mix and taint “No, thanks” as a concept, really bad things will start happening all across your product.

In real life, fire doors have to open outwards when pushed with body weight, aircraft stick shakers are impossible to ignore, and anti-lock braking systems do smart things even after your brain turns off its smart parts.

I know seeing a dialog like this would never happen in a moment of true panic, but sometimes I think of the user in their most absent-minded moment: trying to get their kids to hurry up for school, on hold with an annoying cable provider, with a cat looking like it’s about to jump up directly into a running toaster. A dialog on their phone pops up. If that dialog absolutely has to happen, what is the escape hatch it can offer so they can dismiss it safely if they cannot think about it at all?

This Google Photos screen needs a lot more rethinking and rewriting, but in its current incarnation, it desperately needs a clear and trustworthy escape hatch I can tap absentmindedly, just so I can get to my photos.

I have been working on an essay about how to gently get started and have fun with keyboard customization. I am finding myself surrounded by programmable keypads…

…and I am going out of my way to try various new shortcuts and automations, big and small, just so I can write a helpful article.

In Photoshop, one of the classic dialogs I use a lot when scanning things is brightness + contrast:

It doesn’t come with a keyboard shortcut, so I mnemonically assigned ⌘B (for Brightness) to it. ⌘B is easier than using your mouse to select a menu option, but still tedious in the long run; every time I have to input brightness and contrast numbers, then click on Use Legacy which is not sticky, then realize that enabling Use Legacy inexplicably resets the values I just typed so I have to input them again…

…which really isn’t as much fun 20th time in a row, 20th year in a row.

So imagine my surprise when one day I invoked the dialog, and it came up looking this out of the box:

It somehow remembered the previous settings. How? Why? Was that a new thing? Was that a bug? Did the stars align or did they misalign? Figuring out how to make it do this every time would have save me so much trouble.

I dug deeper and figured it out. On the way to ⌘B, my fingers grazed the ⌥ key. This invoked a “use same settings as last time” option I never knew existed. This option would have been a lifesaver, has been there for god knows how long, and I just discovered it by accident. Moreover, it wasn’t just a feature of this dialog. One can hold ⌥ for many more Photoshop dialogs – a thoughtful system to make repeated tasks faster.

Damn.

This reminds me of something. I am curious if you’ve seen what I’ve witnessed probably ten times by now: once in a while my corner of the internet overflowing with awe when someone shares that on the iPhone, you can hold the spacebar and it functions as cursor control:

Inevitably, tons of people are always amazed and excited, proclaiming this is the best thing since sliced silicon wafers…

…and that always make me a little sad inside. Both this and my ⌥ story feel like failures of onboarding, of software growing with you and sharing its motor-memory nooks and power-usery crannies. If a helpful thing exists, but people don’t know about it, it feels worse than it not existing. Imagine all these interactions made more pleasant, all these hours saved, all these flow states undisturbed.

I want to spend more time on this blog highlighting onboarding and conveyance done well – I just shared a tiny example a few days ago – particularly since this feels to me like an area underinvested in. If you have a story of an app or a service doing this well, I’d love if you could share it with me so I can highlight it and we can learn from it.

Did you catch one interesting bit in the last post? The undo shortcut in Paint and other apps in Windows 1.0 used to be Shift+Esc:

This reminded me that the classic Ctrl+Alt+Del shortcut was initially Ctrl+Alt+Esc. Except, people apparently invoked it a bit too often by accident, so it was split to require two hands for extra safety.

When you look at the keyboard for the original PC, it all makes sense. Esc is at the edge of the main typing block, and in line with all the modifier keys. It would make sense to build a system around this, and it’s interesting to imagine the Esc Kinematic Universe that never happened.

Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s good that it didn’t. ⌘Z or Ctrl+Z are much easier to get to than Shift+Esc, especially in concert with cut/copy/​paste next door – that system introduced by Apple Lisa and Mac teams deserves endless trophies and infinite accolades. (In case you are curious, Windows 1.0 used Delete for Cut, Insert for Paste, and… F2 for Copy.)

But it has always been peculiar to me that Esc isn’t seeing more use. I see Backspace tasked with all sorts of modifier key combinations in various apps, but Esc – equally available on the other side, and even easier to target on some keyboards – is often left alone.

Poetically, given the beginning of this story, it was Mac that grabbed ⌘⌥Esc for force quit:

There is a nice thoughtful design element in that window that’s worth calling out: the hint line the bottom.

Why, of all places, would this window go out of its way to announce its own shortcut after you already figured out how to open it? I think this might be for a similar reason airlines repeat the safety announcements before every takeoff. If your computer goes haywire, if one of your apps starts hogging resources, if the UI slows down so much any action takes forever, it might benefit you if somewhere in the back of your head exists one small bit of information: “ah yeah, I don’t know how I know this, but I think I’m supposed to press ⌘⌥Esc now.”