> does an application behaving according to the UX language of the rest of the system actually benefit the people using that system?
The answer is of course, no. Unless your target audience is already technically-minded people, most users will struggle the same and simply do not internalize the "UX language of a system", only noticing when the departures are huge.
Examples of such departures that can actually make a noticeable dent on the average users' productivity with software are:
- the move from classic menu -> ribbon menu
- single desktop -> multiple desktop
- stacked windows -> tiling by default
Examples of changes that do not affect anyone's productivity but annoy UI purists:
- Input doesn't glow the same way native input does when selected
- OK and cancel swapped places or are aligned to the other side (I'll grant you the importance of swapped buttons if they pretend to look native)
- The menus are behind the titlebar instead of using the global menu
- Using a custom set of icons for standard behavior
- Hierarchy of background colors is not respected
- It's using the horrible Qt file picker again
All of this is coming from an UI purist that has seen how cross-platform development looks like. Having a good language design that is good enough for all targets requires work to come up to but is well-treaded ground (and there are many already out there you can just copy). Alternatively, having 3 codebases for the same app multiplies the cost of frontend development by anywhere from 1.5x to 3x depending on the feature and architecture and that is simply absurd for the overhwelming majority of applications given all options.
The answer is of course, no. Unless your target audience is already technically-minded people, most users will struggle the same and simply do not internalize the "UX language of a system", only noticing when the departures are huge.
Examples of such departures that can actually make a noticeable dent on the average users' productivity with software are:
- the move from classic menu -> ribbon menu
- single desktop -> multiple desktop
- stacked windows -> tiling by default
Examples of changes that do not affect anyone's productivity but annoy UI purists:
- Input doesn't glow the same way native input does when selected
- OK and cancel swapped places or are aligned to the other side (I'll grant you the importance of swapped buttons if they pretend to look native)
- The menus are behind the titlebar instead of using the global menu
- Using a custom set of icons for standard behavior
- Hierarchy of background colors is not respected
- It's using the horrible Qt file picker again
All of this is coming from an UI purist that has seen how cross-platform development looks like. Having a good language design that is good enough for all targets requires work to come up to but is well-treaded ground (and there are many already out there you can just copy). Alternatively, having 3 codebases for the same app multiplies the cost of frontend development by anywhere from 1.5x to 3x depending on the feature and architecture and that is simply absurd for the overhwelming majority of applications given all options.