This week I had a fascinating conversation about disabling paste into a text input. You might see this UX pattern when a form requires a user to type “confirm” before taking an action. I believe it’s a UX anti-pattern. It breaks an expected behavior of a web form without an obvious benefit. What I learned is that even if it were good practice, you can’t reliably enforce manual typing anyway. ...
Today, after waiting for an album review to load, I built something small: my own take on the Pitchfork aggregate review loading experience. Pitchfork uses a Skeleton-style UI while returning an album’s aggregate review, such as “8.0” for Mastodon’s Crack the Skye. Skeleton UIs show you something, like blurred text or a flashing bar, to build anticipation and fill out the page while in a loading state. They are a fantastic UX touch for the right kind of app and data. In the case of the Pitchfork app, the aggregate review is a pivotal piece of information about an album, and is presumably being calculated on demand, so this choice makes sense. ...
Today I’d like to highlight something I built with some colleagues that I think is cool: the dynamic paths of Hashrocket’s daily learning site, Today I Learned (TIL). Check out the browser bar here: The URL it contains is: https://til.hashrocket.com/posts/ee0a1bc878-parameters-filtering What do you notice? Here’s my list: After posts/, the path starts with ee0a1bc878 (?) That’s followed by a dash, then the post title in kebab-case (parameters-filtering) When you visit the same URL with an altered kebab-case title (e.g. ee0a1bc878-nope), you get the same page 😵💫 When an admin changes the post’s title (e.g. “Rails Parameters FTW”), the URL changes too(ee0a1bc878-rails-parameters-ftw) 😳 There are some sneaky features in there! Let’s dig into them for a minute. ...