[gonehome]

I find these long articles about such tiny details odd - extremely nit-picky and ultimately pointless.

Granted this is only based on personal experience and the experiences of people I know. Basically people figure out the shift key in less than ten seconds and it's not an issue.

Is this really a big deal for people? It looks nice and it works well, who cares?

It seems like you can always arbitrarily argue that a certain design decision is better than some alternative - it feels more like bullshit than science.

[Rifu]

Nitpicking on tiny details is probably an accepted way of advancing UI affordances. Pointless it may be, but perhaps the author just needed to vent? And really, it's this attention to tiny tiny details that can sometimes make or break a design.

[wodenokoto]

I never really figured it out.

Also, it's the job of the UI to tell the user what is going on.

So no, it doesn't work, and it would be easy to make it work. Just give it a glow or a color, like the old keyboard did.

[detaro]

If something else looks fine as well and works better, why not use that?

For first-time or occasional users things like that can get needlessly annoying, and if "it's just a tiny detail" is applied to everything, it quickly leads to "death by a thousand paper-cuts".

So yes, most people probably don't care about it, but IMHO good UX design should care about tiny details and look into small effects.

[gonehome]

My original comment was probably too abrasive - it wasn't so much that it was just a tiny detail or that tiny details don't matter (they obviously do). I guess I just find UX more subjective - seems easy to argue that any decision is bad or good based on whatever criteria you're choosing to argue about.