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My favorite Safari feature is how it auto-completes the URL you want to go to and then, mere milliseconds later, gets shy and removes the auto-completion, so my Google history is filled with a bunch of insane searches for two- and three-letter prefixes.

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The recent article from @aresluna.org on key press timing and responsiveness feels like it should lead to quantitative testability for this kind of problem, but I feel like it’s still treated as expert domain knowledge or “taste” on the part of designers. Lots of cogsci numbers are just mechanics!

Oh, yeah, how the autocomplete follows you on the journey needs to go even further. Another problem I’ve seen is how the list under the cursor gets reordered at the last moment (looking at you, Raycast), which feels like a rug pull – again, because your brain processes things at different speeds.

Not sure if it’s interesting to you, but I caught it on camera – it feels weird that “Shortcut” jumps up to the first result occasionally. It is deterministic.

React generally seems to exacerbate this pattern, common big web UIs I use every day jiggle components around without warning causing misclicks or mistypes