A place for developers to talk about building on Farcaster.

/dev

Slowly realising that making a decent command palette is both challenging and rewarding.

The first intuition is to define some rigid structure: commands, nested commands, maybe a param system, async item fetching, flexible/fuzzy search.

But when you actually try to use it, you quickly yearn for more freedom. Choosing a proper command surprisingly creates a large friction. Understanding the user's intent and providing the best option based on that doesn't really fit well into that system of nested menus, but works much, much better.

I made a command palette with a "go to address" option. Reasonably, typing "address" and pressing enter doesn't look like it's that hard. In practice, even after using it for a while, my first intuition when opening the palette is to type the address directly, without choosing a specific option.

I started with a rigid system, but over time I realized that it should be much more flexible. Implementing it that way takes more time and effort, but the delight is more than worth it.

And that tiny insight just barely scratches the surface. Here's another one. Despite the urge, strongly consider not adding a nice and cute animation for the palette. It looks good but feels clunky after repeated use.

"A good example for this would be command menus. It's tempting to throw an opacity and scale fade on the overlay. But if we for a moment consider the interaction frequency being hundreds of times a day, it does start to feel more like cognitive burden after seeing the same animation for the hundredth time."

And that tiny insight just barely scratches the surface. Here's another one. Despite the urge, strongly consider not adding a nice and cute animation for the palette. It looks good but feels clunky after repeated use.

https://rauno.me/craft/interaction-design