Emil’s Letter

Share this post

56 // The Challenge of Building on UI Conventions: A Formable Update

emilbruckner.substack.com

Discover more from Emil’s Letter

Sunday letter about my personal journey building Formable and related thoughts
Continue reading
Sign in

56 // The Challenge of Building on UI Conventions: A Formable Update

Emil Bruckner
Mar 26, 2023
1
Share this post

56 // The Challenge of Building on UI Conventions: A Formable Update

emilbruckner.substack.com
Share

I’m resisting the temptation to write about AI this week. Instead I’ll say a few words about how Formable isn’t intuitive and how that might stem from similarity to other software.

This newsletter is also just a short update on what’s been going on on my end.

I’ve been bugfixing and onboarding a couple of people.

Up next I want to fix some problems I’ve seen.

I’ve noticed that I have to be extra careful with using known UI primitives. For example, Formable has a menu component / sidebar. Now many people think that a menu item resembles a page, since that’s what they’re used to from other apps (think Notion pages in the sidebar), whereas in Formable, it’s a view that could show any item in your system.
That’s not very intuitive. I have some ideas for improvements there, which I’ll play around with over the next days. I’ll report back to you with some updates on that front.

Let's Get Physical: When Skeuomorphism and Flat Design Meet

Building on prior work

When designing new user interfaces people often lean on previous work, sometimes work in another medium. Take skeuomorphism for example.

Let’s start with the desktop metaphor. The first graphical user interfaces heavily leaned on a desktop, trashcan, files and folders. We’re still stuck with much of that, which I and many others are trying to change, and indeed we don’t rely so heavily on those metaphors anymore.

Mobile OSs kind of got rid of the file system in the UI. But they also used skeuomorphism—iOS maybe being the most prominent example.

Nowadays, when designing metaverse experiences, at least most non video game ones try to resemble the physical world once again. Facebook wants to get into the workspace so they build virtual offices. We wouldn’t need tables in a world where everything could just hover in space though.

Rebuilding things that users already know is very useful still. It allows them to just remap their existing knowledge of the world to just be remapped to a new medium. It’s a nicer learning curve.

Image

That takes me back to Formable’s learning curve. I want to make use of existing UI primitives, like a menu, but at the same time have to make it obvious which parts don’t work the way one might expect from other apps, views not being pages, and blocks being able to live at multiple places probably being the one that’s most tricky to wrap one’s head around.

1
Share this post

56 // The Challenge of Building on UI Conventions: A Formable Update

emilbruckner.substack.com
Share
Comments
Top
New
Community

No posts

Ready for more?

© 2023 Emil Bruckner
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start WritingGet the app
Substack is the home for great writing