Saturday, January 4, 2025
Thursday, January 2, 2025
thumbs way up
When you enjoy thinking about UI/UX, it's fun and instructive to see evolutions in products you use every day, and think about what their designers were trying to accomplish, and what you might think they could do better.
So in FB Messenger, they recently changed the "send message" button - I believe that previously it was inactive until you typed some message content. Now it's a "thumbs up" button when the message body is empty, which sends a big thumbs up (btw, isn't that a rude gesture in some cultures? I was just googling to see if FB uses anything different elsewhere...)
So I noticed this on accident, when I see I had sent a big thumbs up
between 2 of my own messages... (I quote "The Tao of Programming": "A
program should follow the 'Law of Least Astonishment'. What is this law?
It is simply that the program should always respond to the user in the
way that astonishes him least.")
So, on the one hand, I could see that an easy general "OK" response is potentially useful, and a little easier to get to here than the usual "reaction" picker for previous messages. On the other hand... it seems weird to just make that the default message - especially to ones own messages. When you accidentally send one against your own message, it seems weirdly insecure or self-aggrandizing.
I wonder if they considered changing the "just send a thumbs up" function to activate only after the other person has written something back? That seems like a more useful scenario. But I guess would make the UI even more chaotic and unpredictable.
So in FB Messenger, they recently changed the "send message" button - I believe that previously it was inactive until you typed some message content. Now it's a "thumbs up" button when the message body is empty, which sends a big thumbs up (btw, isn't that a rude gesture in some cultures? I was just googling to see if FB uses anything different elsewhere...)
So, on the one hand, I could see that an easy general "OK" response is potentially useful, and a little easier to get to here than the usual "reaction" picker for previous messages. On the other hand... it seems weird to just make that the default message - especially to ones own messages. When you accidentally send one against your own message, it seems weirdly insecure or self-aggrandizing.
I wonder if they considered changing the "just send a thumbs up" function to activate only after the other person has written something back? That seems like a more useful scenario. But I guess would make the UI even more chaotic and unpredictable.
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