I rarely want those arrow buttons for numbers
A spinner control, that is.
Spinners always puzzled me, to be honest. There is obviously a need for a compact numeric input control that both displays the exact value and allows rough changes using the mouse. Witness knobs in DAWs—which don’t actually work the way you’d expect from their appearance, you’re supposed to grab and then drag in a linear fashion, possibly ending outside the knob’s screen bounds. Or consider the weird input thing Darktable uses—which at least doesn’t mislead you with false skeuomorphism, but takes a bit to figure out. Then there are the inputs used for color grading in DaVinci Resolve. And so on. And all of them are nonobvious. Spinners are obvious, but they are also needlessly fiddly to use with the mouse, and neither do they provide the at-a-glance readability of knobs et al.
I feel like humanity just hasn’t solved compact numeric inputs yet.
I think that a quick improvement would be to let the mouse wheel "spin" the number up/down when the input element is focused.
An even better improvement would be having the `<input type='range'>` element actually display the value as it changed, and allow the user to set that value directly (say, by typing it in).
Right now, range is useless because the user cannot tell what is selected. The developer has to add in extra JS magic to let the user set range to an exact value, or to show the user the value they have chosen.
If `range` is improved in this way, then spinners are redundant and can be ignored.
Firefox did that for number inputs for a long time, until very recently. They switched it off in Firefox 130 because people kept inadvertently changing values in forms while scrolling through them [0]. Personally, I've set the about:config option to reenable it since I've found it useful in certain interfaces, though I can't imagine it's much longer for this world.
I guess the room for unwanted consequences is a bit bigger when the scrolling controlls the value instead of just the viewport.
> In step (3) here, if you do several mousewheel-spins while also subtly moving the mouse (just from placing your hand on it), it's quite easy/possible for the first spin to inadvertently change the value that you just entered (since step 1 had left the cursor hovering the input field, so that's where it starts), and then for the subsequent mousewheel-spins to successfully scroll the page. This can mean you change the number you just entered without noticing (and also without it being "in the middle of an existing scroll action", hence my note that this suggested mitigation wouldn't necessarily help).
The cause being that people don't look at where their cursor is before they start scrolling, and don't look at the value since they've finished entering it.
The correct context model is to not select an element for scrolling until it has been made the active element, and that UI element SHOULD have some sort of embellishment to make it obvious that's the focus.
But then it turns out that you really do want a free-form text input. Let people paste text in, edit their text freely, then let it validate afterwards. When it validates, then reformat it.
For example, text boxes with length limits. These are awful. It messes with your ability to paste something in, then edit it down to the correct length.
- pasting from Word
- QA testers being through
- devs pranking each other
The third one is by far the most common. Word is much better these days and I've not seen that happen in a long time. I wish I saw QA test this stuff more often. The idea that it's common enough that you'd break your UX to handle it baffling to me.
<input type="text" pattern="[0-9.-]*">
though?
To be fair, it's not usually that frequent. Just a funny coincidence that I've JUST dealt with it more recently.
For example phone numbers can be a string of digits, or multiple strings separated by spaces or hyphens or with parts enclosed by () etc
It's a more pleasant UX to let them paste anything, then edit it inside the input, validate and submit.
How is that more pleasant than a textbox which automatically removes the extra characters?
The nice thing about the native input is that it is very simple, predictable and flexible. It may be easier to make a better UX on the happy cases but it is very difficult to not add some suboptimal and confusing UX on the less happy cases. Often times it is best just to keep it simple so that the user can easily complete their task rather than adding some "magic" which may backfire and confuse users.
It is surprisingly often that I need to open a text-editor or clipboard-editor to format values before pasting them into apps or websites because they have broken an input field by trying to be magic and failing to consider anything but the happy cases and maybe one or two bad paths.
FWIW if you're copying text on Android, you can tap the clipboard popup to edit the clipboard item before pasting it elsewhere.
I never noticed that after 13 years of Android. I checked that now and I could not find a way to do it. Samsung's keyboard has a way to look at the clipboard but I could not edit them. Swiftkey does not. Maybe Google's keyboard? It's not on my phone. I looked at a couple of videos but they don't look anywhere like my phone. Not a feature to invest much time on it. If I have to edit the clipboard and I can't do it where I want to paste it, I open an editor and paste it there.
You could remove the zero-width spaces in validation (for eg a phone number).
Instead of asserting that "users are too stupid" as you have done earlier, perhaps programmers should be less stupid and write more permissive parsers.
Accessible design is actually pretty hard, and most designers and programmers get this wrong. If you want some good design advice, you can start here: https://adamsilver.io/blog/the-problem-with-live-validation-...
To clarify, we get _asked_ by our users to implement fields that limit input to help them avoid mistakes. Our QA and UX teams agree. This isn't a unilateral engineering decision.
That's why I was suggesting letting the user paste in these 'wrong' characters, but offering help in removing them.
Of course, that's a trade-off. And it's more annoying to design and implement than just forbidding those characters from entering the input field in the first place.
If I ever grew to hate users this much, I would find a new career. You should consider that.
That is the definition of user hostile. Why lie? You make yourself and your organization look bad.
You can say "You're wrong". "You're lying", though, is almost never appropriate, and is, in itself, quite hostile.
(I see that you edited that bit out of your post, so thanks for listening...)
What I have found to work well is when the user unfocuses the input field or on submit strip everything but expected values then validate. If you want you can format the value at this time too (and the formatting won't interfere with text input).
If you want to get really fancy you can strip and format as they type and be careful to keep the formatting "virtual" such that the user is only editing the raw digits but this is very tricky to get right on all platforms and support all expected native editing UX. But even in the best cases this can have bad edge cases. For example the user pastes some text but it happens to have multiple numbers in it, if you eagerly strip and format what is left for the user will be these two numbers mushed together with misplaced separators or similar. If you let them paste, remove the unintended stuff, then format on blur this just works and is understandable.
You can validate roughly anywhere, but at the absolute earliest, only re-format on blur. Never earlier. You have no idea what the user might be doing in the meantime.
And even then, I'd strongly suggest not changing what they entered. Change it to a display-only element with nice formatting if you want, but don't screw with their input.
Which is really nice for copy pasting. For example, I have a number with spaces in it, and when I paste I get nothing or only until the first space because someone decided I'm not allowed to have non-numericals in the input field at anytime.
And final validation needs to happen on the server side anyway - anything before that is just a usability helper.
It should be split into:
type=integer so the keyboard does not allow anything besides 0-9
type=decimal so the keyboard also allows decimal dot/comma and a fixed number of decimals!
type=float which allows for scientific notation, e.g. 1.2e42