intensely_human , 3 days ago

Just generally speaking, I think of this as “concreteness”.

Software should seek to mimic real spaces, in the sense that one step back takes you to the place you were one step ago.

One pattern that breaks this in my opinion is when a menu appears as soon as you scroll up. It’s just a minor inconvenience, but 95% of the time I scroll up on an article, it’s because I want to re-read a line of text that just disappeared under the top of my screen. This menu reappear crap means I have to scroll up like three inches to get something that’s only a quarter inch under the upper edge.

I think it’s a matter of mental health to have software that faithfully mimics real world causality.

It’s all very vague in my head, but I would love to articulate this fully into a design spec.

It’s kind of like Google’s Material Design spec in its idea, but it’s about the effects of navigation rather than just how UI elements behave.

It kind of relates to the concept of a State Function in math and science.