There’s a classic The Oatmeal comic, “How A Web Design Goes Straight To Hell”, about clients with requirements like “could you please make the site ‘pop’?”. It concludes like this:
Another web designer, Erik Kennedy, coined the terms up-popping and down-popping in honor of that comic.
It turns out they’re wildly useful terms when talking about UI design! But googling them yielded bupkes so, here we are. You’re welcome, internet.
As Kennedy points out, you could instead talk about “visual weight” but that’s boring. Also it’s not very verbable. So up-pop and down-pop it is. We’ve been using these terms for like 10 years amongst ourselves and finally thought of an excuse to blog about them.
The back-story is a terrible design choice we’ve been living with for embarrassingly long. Here, look, if you saw the following at the top of your graph,
would you have any idea that you could click on either or both of those first two rectangles to turn them into the following?
(Ok, maybe you’ve been around the Beeminder block enough times that you knew, but we assure you, newbees did not. There was no discoverability aka affordance.)
In the above example, which happens to be my own pullups goal, I might never want the second version. Knowing that I need to do 5 pullups by 4:59pm tomorrow is the more useful information. But this is goal dependent, whether you want the delta or the total. (Relevant aside: Why Beeminder uses cumulative graphs.) For a book-reading goal I’d rather know what page I need to read to (the total), not how many pages I need to read (the delta). For the deadline it’s just a matter of preference whether you want the countdown or the absolute date and time.
As of just now, we’ve finally fixed this, using the power of up-popping and down-popping. Namely, you always see both versions, and you click to toggle which is up-popped and which is down-popped. Here’s how it looks on the dashboard:
And here’s how it looks above your graph on the graph page:
Better, right?
Aside: Killing an
Anti-Magic
Violation
At some point in the hazy past, before we’d formulated the Anti-Magic Principle, we had the misguided idea to conditionally suppress click-to-toggle for delta-vs-absolute on the dashboard for auto-summing goals. Our thinking was that it only ever made sense to see the delta, never the total, on auto-summing goals. Users — even sometimes ourselves — would even occasionally think there was a bug after accidentally toggling to the quasi-nonsensical total on an auto-summing goal. Especially if you didn’t know you could click it again to toggle it back, since there was no discoverability.
But magically suppressing the feature was worse. Even we ourselves would sometimes forget we’d added that dumb if-statement. (Exacerbating the confusing: we did this on the dashboard but not the goal page header! 🤦) It made it seem like the click-to-toggle feature was flaky and sometimes randomly broken. So now we just make no presumptions about what may or may not be confusing to see and just always let you click to swap which of delta vs total is up-popped vs down-popped. Viva la anti-magic.
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