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 moved Keyboard Maestro app to a different folder as it was running. I gather there must be some technical reason for the app to have to be power cycled, so I appreciated this warning, and the thoughtful bit of copywriting: “Continue” is caveated with “not recommended” so that you feel more comfortable choosing “Quit,” usually the less safe choice. I thought it was a good attempt to add the right scent to the strange options at a strange moment.

(This tradition has reportedly been started by a software company Rogue Amoeba, which wrote about it in 2019.)

I have been at times frustrated by cute placeholder text in places, most notably Dropbox Paper, which still puts them in a just-created doc…

…and in new to-do items:

This bothered me for two reasons.

First was a potential tone mismatch. What if you are writing a layoffs announcement, a project cancellation doc, or something personal and heartfelt? At Medium back in the day, at some point we added a fun celebratory dialog after publishing that said something like “Now, shout it out from the rooftops!” We took it down very quickly as people made us realize Medium is used to write many kinds of things we didn’t anticipate, and in those situations the cutesy message really failed to read the room.

But the other half of my frustration with Paper was that it felt like the app was making itself too comfortable in my space, in effect shouting all over my inner voice and distracting me. I felt like any app giving you a creative canvas should back off of that canvas unless it’s explicitly invited to participate.

Turns out, I can now attach something tangible to that discomfort. From Scientific American earlier this week (emphasis mine):

The researchers asked participants to fill in an online survey with questions about hot-button social and political issues. Some were prompted with an AI autocomplete answer that was deliberately biased toward one side of the issue. For example, participants who were asked whether they agreed that the death penalty should be legal might receive an AI suggestion that disagreed.

Across all the different topics in the survey, participants who saw the AI autocomplete prompts reported attitudes that were more in line with the AI’s position—including people who didn’t use the AI’s suggested text at all. Overall, the study participants who saw the biased AI text shifted their positions toward those espoused by the AI.

Interestingly, the people in the study didn’t tend to think the AI autocomplete suggestions were biased or to notice that they had changed their own thinking on an issue in the course of the study.

The quoted study shows an example…

…and elaborates on how adding warnings didn’t really help:

The Warning and Debrief messages failed to significantly reduce the attitude shift, which is concerning because they were also inspired by those used in real AI applications. AI tools such as ChatGPT show brief and general statements about AI’s propensity to hallucinate false information (e.g., “ChatGPT is AI and can make mistakes. Check important info.”), similar to the messages used in our interventions.

I know on this blog I often focus on the mechanics of interactions, but the job of every designer is to think of more than that. I keep coming back to both pull-to-refresh and infinite scroll mechanics. Both can be put to good use and feel “delightful,” but both started being abused so much that it led to their respective creators disowning them.

Nice, clear, simple copy in ClarisWorks from 1997:

No “Maybe later.” No “Not now.” Thirteen characters. Now, Later, Never.

(Can’t help but notice that Esc and ⌘. – the classic Mac’s equivalent of Esc – still map to Later, however. Also, this breaks the rule of button copy being fully comprehensible without having to read the surrounding strings first, perhaps most well-known as the “avoid «click here»” rule. Never Register/​Register Later/​Register Now would solve that problem, but wouldn’t look so neat.)

In my head, some bugs belong to categories that feel important, and yet remain hard to define and quantify: embarrassing bugs, dumb bugs, flow killers.

Somewhere in the hard-to-explain space is another tricky category: UI decisions that feel cheap.

The examples of cheapness that come to my mind readily will, I bet, be different for each one of you reading this:

• using emoji instead of iconography
• using text and typography instead of graphic design elements as UI (except in terminal/​text-based interfaces)
• excessive centering
• obvious misalignments and overflows
• accidentally mismatched fonts and unspecified fallback fonts
• reflow and bad loading states that do not match the eventual UI
• selectable user interface element that betray “bad webiness” of the UI
• typos

But my absolute #1 go-to example is definitely this:

Computers could pluralize nouns basically for free already in the 1970s, and sure, there are objective arguments of why this is bad, but there’s also this: I wince so hard every time I see something like this.

I think it’s important for every designer to notice when they wince, and teach others how to wince and notice, too.

(I stole the brilliant title from this short post by Joe Leech in 2018, in which Leech uses the word “lazy” rather than “cheap” – they’re related!)

When you start a new game in SimCity 2000 (you can try it in the browser yourself), as the city is generated, you see a few messages fly by: Creating Hills, Tracing Rivers, Smoothing. Among them, for a bit, one can see “Reticulating Splines”:

If it was not obvious from seeing Smoothing followed by More Smoothing and then Yet More Smoothing, the phrase is a joke. From The Official SimCity 2000 Planning Commission Handbook:

“Reticulating splines” is a giant pulling of our legs. Will and some others made up the phrase because they thought it looks and sounds as if it means something. It might: the word “reticulate” means to divide something so that it looks like, or appears to be, a net or a network generating, perhaps, from a single point; a “spline” can be an irregular curve or the approximation of a curve. Individually the terms have meaning. Together – in the case of SimCity 2000 – they don’t. It’s just a prank and a joke.

In some versions of the game, there was also a seductive woman’s voice saying the phrase out loud, which presumably made it even more memorable.

The phrase moved to other Maxis games, notably The Sims…

…and subsequently Minecraft…

…and then tons of other places.

I’ve heard the argument that it wasn’t just Reticulating Splines – that Will Wright’s joke was the beginning of the habit of putting “cute” loading messages in apps, including actual not-game and definitely-not-cute applications. I am 100% sure there are some earlier examples of “funny” loading or error states, but I also see how this one attained a certain critical mass and influence.

I hate these cute loading strings with passion. I think I’m in the minority. It’s a topic for a future time, but it was fun at least to trace some part of its history, sifting through hundreds of pages earnestly explaining the concept of “reticulating splines” to people. Whether they’re in on the joke, I am not sure.

Also, okay. Fair enough. I chuckled just now when I saw this:

This is inside my Sony Alpha camera: a teensy too technical, or maybe slightly-lost-in-translation-from-Japanese message. I love it. It has personality without trying to be cute.

From my friend Robin Rendle:

But here’s what modern UI design looks like: There’s always a confusing title; it doesn’t quickly tell me what to do or what it wants me to understand; beneath that there’s a subtitle, explaining the title again; beneath that there’s several sentences that restates the title and subtitle but simply jumbles all the words around to make it justify its existence; then the button—there is always a button—and it asks me to “Confirm” or “Apply” but as to what I’m confirming or applying I have absolutely no idea unless I go back to the text and fight my way through it all again.

Kept nodding through this whole essay. I don’t love nervous user interfaces that share their own problems and insecurities with their users. I love confident interfaces that know exactly what to say, and don’t outstay their welcome.