“IF IT WAS JUST ME AND A TAMBOURINE,
IT WOULD STILL BE THE FALL”
– Mark E. Smith

User-interface conventions, invented by individuals from scratch, that went on to become actual norms.

hashtags
Invented by Chris Messina (q.v.)
Name coined by Stowe Boyd (American Dialect Society Word of the Year [q.v] for 2012)
microformats
Arguably the O.G. folk UI, and almost certainly invented by Tantek, inserting values into rel and rev attributes according to loosely-agreed-upon rules is still being done (e.g. rel="payment" in Overcast)
pull-to-refresh
Invented by Loren Brichter for Tweetie; it is now easier to list where it isn’t used on iOS
machine tags
Used almost exclusively on Flickr and now almost exclusively by me. Didn’t take off as microformats did
house icon to mean homepage
As distinct from skeumorphic floppy disc to mean Save. No officially encoded emoji is a clear candidate here (perhaps 🏠); people tended to use images

Next likely candidate

Procreate’s two-finger single-tap for undo (three-finger single-tap for redo). (As distinct from two-finger double-tap in VoiceOver [“Magic Tap”], which does the most obvious thing – if the phone’s ringing, it answers the phone, &c.)

Not really falling into the category of folk UI

  • hamburger menus

  • Alt‑Tab (so useful that Macs borrowed it as Command‑Tab)

  • right-clicking

(Hat tip: Gruber.)

The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2019.01.13 13:21. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is:
https://blog.fawny.org/2019/01/13/folkui/

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