<story><title>Too Many Knobs</title><url>http://neverworkintheory.org/2016/06/09/too-many-knobs.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>andybak</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve noticed a trend in many web apps to stop doing something that used to be standard&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s this: you&amp;#x27;re displaying a list of things that have various properties. It used to be the case that you&amp;#x27;re be allowed to sort and filter by any property. Many web apps nowadays seem to &amp;#x27;curate&amp;#x27; my sort and filter options and in many cases a particular use is crippled because the property I want to sort or filter by is one that the author deemed a minority use-case.&lt;p&gt;Now the programming cost of allowing filtering by anything is minimal. The cognitive load on the user is minimal (once you&amp;#x27;ve got the UI for one property then adding more doesn&amp;#x27;t make much difference)&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve found this deeply frustrating on many occasions.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>OldSchoolJohnny</author><text>&amp;quot;Now the programming cost of allowing filtering by anything is minimal&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Not only is this not true except in your imaginary app but it&amp;#x27;s also disregarding the incredibly bad UI that can come from allowing everything to be filtered.&lt;p&gt;A good design has constraints and thoughtful choices.  A shitty design has everything possible thrown on the screen because &amp;quot;allow filtering by anything is minimal&amp;quot;.</text></comment>
<story><title>Too Many Knobs</title><url>http://neverworkintheory.org/2016/06/09/too-many-knobs.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>andybak</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve noticed a trend in many web apps to stop doing something that used to be standard&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s this: you&amp;#x27;re displaying a list of things that have various properties. It used to be the case that you&amp;#x27;re be allowed to sort and filter by any property. Many web apps nowadays seem to &amp;#x27;curate&amp;#x27; my sort and filter options and in many cases a particular use is crippled because the property I want to sort or filter by is one that the author deemed a minority use-case.&lt;p&gt;Now the programming cost of allowing filtering by anything is minimal. The cognitive load on the user is minimal (once you&amp;#x27;ve got the UI for one property then adding more doesn&amp;#x27;t make much difference)&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve found this deeply frustrating on many occasions.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dgoldstein0</author><text>One reason for this is that if the list is lazy loaded (e.g. paginated) in any way, it can be more difficult to make sorting &amp;amp; filtering work on more dimensions - mainly it requires the list to be indexed in extra ways.&lt;p&gt;Not impossible, but some applications weren&amp;#x27;t designed to support it from the beginning.</text></comment>