12 ms·

I really think that Windows 2000-era Windows Forms had the user experience nailed perfectly. It wasn't the prettiest UI paradigm ever, but it was the most func

I really think that Windows 2000-era Windows Forms had the user experience nailed perfectly. It wasn't the prettiest UI paradigm ever, but it was the most functional and easiest to teach. Nothing was omitted, and the user was shown everything they needed to see in order to get a complete idea of the state of the application. I don't think that efforts to hide UI elements that aren't in use is going to prove to be a good idea when we look back at today from the future. Here's a good rule, in my mind: Don't hide UI elements from the user. End of rule. I do not care if it looks better without whatever UI element. The toolbox in my garage would look better if I could only see the tools I needed at the time I need them, and I would return that toolbox (or never buy it in the first place) because it is constantly lying to me about the state of the toolbox, which is absolutely insulting position for a toolbox designer to adopt.

karaterobot 6y ago
I agree with a lot of what you say, but let's take a step back and acknowledge that, on the whole, desktop and mobile UI design has improved a lot in the last 20 years. Interfaces are generally more standardized than they were back then. The type and layout hierarchies are clearer. There are better patterns (and better technologies) both for orienting and getting help when you're lost. There's better feedback from the UI when there's an error or a state change. And that's not even getting into accessibility improvements. It's definitely not better across the board, and the MacOS scrollbars are a good example of that. But, on the whole, it's a lot better than it was, and I wouldn't want to go back and unlearn all the things we've learned in the last 20 years.
- MagnumOpus 6y ago
  Mobile I give you -- of course that is obvious, it would be hard to get worse UI on a 1080p OLED screen that we had on a 50x100 pixel monochrome display. Desktop, no way. Windows 2000/Office 2002 usability by beginners was head and shoulder above today's versions, even at 10x less dev effort and 100x less HD/RAM/CPU usage (yes the functionality was lesser, but the UI wasn't). And add to that the counterfactual of 200,000 man years of development within sane UI paradigms that don't live under the pretense that every Windows PC is a touchscreen tablet, and you could have so much more!
  - acdha 6y ago
    90s UIs had clear guidelines and concepts - many apps did not follow them but there were references like Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines telling everyone the conventions and when to use them. When we entered the “an artist designed everything in Flash” era and its successor flat design we saw a big hit to discoverability (I still routinely witness people being amazed at core app functions existing because they hadn’t realized that plain black text was a button, etc.) and some specific usability hits which disproportionately affect certain users: click targets requiring very high precision, lack of or inconsistent keyboard navigation and shortcuts, contrast/color/size choices which are hard for many people to read. iOS is interesting for the degree to which you can re-enable functionality but non default options definitely get less testing.
makecheck 6y ago
To this day I am embarrassed to discover entire options in apps I had been using for ages, that were hidden behind invisible scroll regions. I even reported a bug once because I thought a feature was removed in an update, when in reality it was just a stupid default clipping issue with no visible scrolling. When something looks like two simple controls in a small rectangle, and you have to accidentally shuffle your trackpad over it to figure out that it will move to reveal a dozen more controls, that is a failure of design.
- dimitrios1 6y ago
  Needing that many controls to begin with is the real failure.
  - tablespoon 6y ago
    > Needing that many controls to begin with is the real failure. That kind of thinking is why we can't have nice things. I want apps that do things for me, not apps are crippled to satisfy some fashionable UX fad-dogma.
    - naikrovek 6y ago
      I agree. I have a UHD monitor and I get angry when I have to scroll to read the second sentence on a web page. That is not an uncommon thing anymore, and it sickens me.
      - zarq 6y ago
        I get angry when there's not a single letter on the first page of a web page, just a lead graphic.
        gumby 6y ago
        The modern day splash screen. Pathetic. Worse is that apparently Medium requires the stupid, and often irrelevant pictures. Apparently some numbskull decided there would be more "engagement" if an article included pictures. So pictures there shall be, regardless of whether they add to the content or not. They are the photos of procrustes.
toiletfuneral 6y ago
"don't hide UI elements from the user" ok but Windows hides everything in right click which is actually not great at all
silicon2401 6y ago
I agree about older Windows UI. In my opinion, the worst is the increasing abstraction of UI elements like icons. Floppy disk and folder icons may be small, but if you can see them then it's easy to relate to the real world. It's been difficult explaining modern smartphone icons to my >80yo grandma after I got her a phone, when everything is a flat and abstract symbol.
- gundmc 6y ago
  I see the same problem with elderly relatives who struggle to use technology. I am hoping that things like activity blocks on Android [1] become more streamlined and I can use those to make a simplified interface to help make it more navigable. https://blog.google/products/android/accessibility-updates-help-tech-work-everyone/ https://blog.google/products/android/accessibility-updates-h...
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Accessibility is the one thing that can save us right now. It really shows how batshit insane UI/UX zeitgeist has become, when the only way to have usable user interface is to use accessibility features.
- Swenrekcah 6y ago
  I agree 100%. Just wanted to point out that neither a floppy disk nor a Manila folder have been in public use for almost two decades. Still they survive as these icons and I hope they’ll continue on for the next 500 years.
  - basscomm 6y ago
    Floppy disks are still in use for a lot of legacy systems that can't be easily upgraded or replaced for a variety of reasons (mostly it's some combination of they still work for their intended purpose and/or the manufacturer went out of business 20 years ago). Manila folders are still sold at office supply stores, so I'm pretty sure that they're still in widespread use.
dkonofalski 6y ago
As long as you realize that this isn't how the majority of people work, I see nothing wrong with this. The vast majority of users, though, are easily overwhelmed by excessive options, especially those that are infrequently used. It's been proven in study after study that progressive disclosure is the most discoverable paradigm. I'm not saying that Apple is getting this right (they have screwed it up several times) but seeing every option you have is rarely useful for the average user. Case in point - the Office Ribbon interface. It's terrible and somehow uses both progressive disclosure (new tabs show up in context) while also showing you ever possible option in the most non-intuitive groupings.
- breakfastduck 6y ago
  2000 era windows forms are literally the worst UI ever. A design language where it's developers seem compelled to put a million fields and buttons on one page.
  - naikrovek 6y ago
    Perhaps you've forgotten what computers are for. A computer is a tool that a user employs to accomplish one or more tasks. Computers are not a design statement. Computers are tools.
    - breakfastduck 6y ago
      Yes, and making a tool that's so counter intuitive that most users find it a confusing mess is a bad idea. In every place I've worked, a major project has been replacing a grey forms application with every screen so stuffed with information even users who sit and use the software every day are confused by it. It is always win 2000 forms.
      - naikrovek 6y ago
        Don't blame the hammers when you find your valuables shattered. Blame the people wielding the hammers. WinForms can only do what they're told, and they can only look how they're designed to look. Blame the people creating the user interfaces that suck instead of the tool they chose to use to build the bad UI. It isn't the UI's fault. The absolute best and most useful user interfaces that I have ever used were windows forms. They were designed my people who understood how their program was to be used by its users, and who understood what information a user needs at any point in the workflow.
systemvoltage 6y ago
This is just the symptom of a larger, deeper and more insiduous problem - design education, short-term corporate targets, discipline, anti-functionalism, celebration of aesthetics, marketing overreach, lack of rigorous criticism and unwilling to convince users. We're not going to solve it. It requires complete scrub of how we think about building excellent products with deep understanding of humans (not users). Furthermore, needs overhaul on multiple fronts since great design doesn't sell apparently according to most rebuttals. Just look at Apple.com and see how loud it all is. Developers love Stripe design, but it is overrated - full of animations, bright colors, sexy transitions and for some reason they love diagonal lines. We need to revive some people like Paul Rand and Josef Muller-Brockmann, may be get Stankowski and a few others to do marketing. We don't celebrate great design anymore. If it wasn't for Elliot Noyes, no one would ever think of IBM in the same way. We've gotten so worse, it is appalling and we should all be ashamed.
- hootbootscoot 6y ago
  Don't forget "dark patterns" that serve deliberate goals. It's often perfectly functional for a company to force you into certain courses of action due to apparent mistakes that aren't.
  - entropicdrifter 6y ago
    "Oh dang, where's the opt-out of cookies button?"
    - grishka 6y ago
      Forget cookies. It always felt that if your site is related to travel, it absolutely must be filled to the brim with dark patterns. An airline that sneakily adds useless insurance to your order? Why not!
- core-questions 6y ago
  > celebration of aesthetics Yes and no. Aesthetics are always going to be critical to the consumer experience of technology; the problem is that there are difference schools of aesthetics, and presently the high-status UX school is a minimalist one that values showing as little information as possible in order to look 'easy to understand' in screenshots and at-a-glance tours. If Windows 2000 wasn't "aesthetic" then we wouldn't have Vaporwave, after all; look how that late-90s look is glorified now. There's no shortage of people (myself included) that will still defend it as being a pinnacle of sorts, though I'd point at NeXT as being the real high water mark. I'd call that late 90s style Modern Desktopist, where the metaphor of being a 'desk' we may have seen in some 80s Classical Desktopist has been left behind and replaced with functional, well-designed UI widgets building on years of refinement. There was a reaction to this modernism, and it came first in the form of Late 2000s Skeuomorphist UI as on iOS and in many creative applications on desktops preceding it: the 90s style being seen as too corporate, too 'suit', we ended up with skinnable apps, and apps that mimic the real world (I'm thinking of Propellerhead Reason here as the king of these). What skeuomorphism added in terms of enjoyment was lost in terms of losing all of the expected conventions of normal desktop applications: drag-n-drop, multiple select, keyboard shortcut consistency, etc. Skeuomorphism was rejected in favour of what some call "flat" or "material" design, first in the Microsoft Metro form emulating highway signs, and then in the Google form emulating... nothing. Developer laziness, perhaps? I call this Digital Brutalism, it's at once "function over form" but at the same time missing a great deal of the "function" that the previous era had. It's fundamentally a skeuomorphic UI evolved to lose the skin and to hide most of the controls. We're honestly all just waiting for someone to come out with a drastically more efficient UI paradigm. There's still room to make a real difference with people who use a desktop from day to day....
kibwen 6y ago
How do you feel about the infamous Microsoft Office ribbon? Compared to standard 2000-era UI design it made a lot more things visible (by taking things that were "hidden" in File/Edit/etc. dropdown menus and making them into persistent toolbar buttons), but that didn't keep it from being maligned at the time.
- im3w1l 6y ago
  That's now how I remember it. Before the ribbon you had a huge amount of tiny icons on toolbars, then came the ribbon and replaced with a small number of big icons. Many tools are hidden, because they are in different ribbon-tabs from the one you currently have open.
- minikites 6y ago
  You didn't ask me, but I think the ribbon is brilliant and very effective.
  - birdman3131 6y ago
    The ribbon is both good and bad. For low to medium skilled users it increased their ability and speed. For users like myself it was a step back as I skim read incredibly fast and have a hard time with remembering icons. I could vertically scan a drop down menu for what text I want 5X faster than finding the same option on a ribbon menu with half the items. I was the same person who absolutely hated the vista and up start menu. I had about 4 columns on my xp start menu and could find anything I wanted very fast just skim reading it. Vista+ was horrible until I got an ssd as the search was always several seconds long. Now I like the search on a ssd these days but until they worked the kinks out and I got an ssd it was way slower than a popout style menu.
- chronogram 6y ago
  I personally love that ribbon. It’s so functional. It’s like a tree-based menu.
- RHSeeger 6y ago
  They weren't "hidden" in the menus. It's always been very clear that commands live in the menus. They weren't up front and center, but you knew where they were if you wanted them. The fact that there is a menu bar makes it very clear that there's more you can do. The ribbon design is in your face, it takes up valuable real estate, and (to this day) I still find it hard to locate the options I'm looking for. I find it to be a HUGE step down from the functionality of menus.
Reason077 6y ago
System Preferences > General > Show Scroll Bars > Always It's right there, people!
- naikrovek 6y ago
  That doesn't work in the browser, which is what the tweet linked by this story is discussing.
  - kingnothing 6y ago
    In which browser? I have scrollbars in Safari, Firefox, and Chrome from either that setting or an in-browser setting.
  - robotresearcher 6y ago
    I'm reading in Safari with that setting on 'always' and I see the scrollbar handle right there next to your comment.
    - naikrovek 6y ago
      Then tell that to the user in the linked tweet. I'm sure they would be happy to know you've solved their problem.
  - weaksauce 6y ago
    That works to show it in safari/chrome/firefox for me... did they disable this in recent versions of the OS?
- pfortuny 6y ago
  And the philosophy of having them off “by default “? That is the issue here.
  - zepto 6y ago
    They coincided with using trackpads by default on the desktop. The scrollbar appears if you use a scroll gesture. It’s obvious with web pages, and with most content when you can scroll, and removal of visual noise and increasing the content area is good. I personally use a mouse, and so I have them turned on, but generally I like Apple removing unnecessary clutter. It’s really no big deal at all.
Flow 6y ago
Windows 10 in dark mode is just horrible. Overlapping windows are really hard to see where one begins and another ends. I long for Windows 3.11/OS2 Warp style window decoration with goofy distinct colors and a menu bar in every app. These days all apps in Windows hate the menu and hides it.
- bluedino 6y ago
  Dark mode is a horrible trend that I can't wait to see go away.
  - johnmaguire2013 6y ago
    Dark modes don't need to be implemented horribly.
  - brokenmachine 6y ago
    I love dark modes for every app - but this is just bad implementation. There's no reason dark mode should make things invisible.
  - jml7c5 6y ago
    As long as it's optional, I have no complaints. I just wish there was also a "prefer full-contrast body text" mode too. I want white-on-black and black-on-white, not gray-on-gray. Most OSes have some high-contrast accessibility modes, but they're not ideal because they tend to affect all text.
  - jfengel 6y ago
    I was in complete agreement until I got a car with a built in screen. At night I really do need it to be dark. Even dimming a white screen doesn't do the job. I use it almost exclusively via Android Auto, and in particular Google Maps. It's a Good Thing that it has a dark mode. I dislike modes of any sort, but day and night are modes in the real world, and the device might as well accommodate that. I would definitely be grateful to never again hear "When is X going to introduce dark mode?" for every single app and web site. Outside of that very specific instance where I'm required to have an app in my face while maintaining night vision, I'm perfectly happy to use "day mode" with the brightness adjusted.
int_19h 6y ago
And the funny thing is, Win32 circa 2000 was basically just well-polished IBM CUA.
pfortuny 6y ago
The adoration of minimalism has become the curse of user interfaces. Design not for the user but for beauty. Needless to say, controls of dangerous machinery stay clear, loud and accessible.
patrickthebold 6y ago
I got a new macbook pro for a new job. I had to use hdmi since I didn't have a usb-c to displayport adapter. I wanted to check the refresh rate. You have to hold 'option' when you click one of the radio buttons, and then you have to click a check box with some label about 'low resolution modes' to see the refresh rate option. Litterally impossible to do without googling.
- FireBeyond 6y ago
  Apple just doesn't care if you're not using a ProDisplay XDR. Display Stream Compression, working on Catalina, is completely, absolutely broken on Big Sur, since beta 1, through 11.2.3. Got a 4K 144Hz panel? Or HDR? Apple could not care less.
cybrjoe 6y ago
| The toolbox in my garage would look better if I could only see the tools I needed at the time I need them, and I would return that toolbox This comment has completely broken my brain. That's exactly what a toolbox with drawers does, hides tools. Until you, the user, pull a drawer out and select the tool you need. Because you probably put the tools in their place you also have a high likelihood of knowing where they are. Maybe that's the paradigm? Show everything and let the user hide? The opposite of hiding tools in a toolbox is littering your workspace with tools that you can see, but you soon run out of real estate with any decent amount of tools.
- btach 6y ago
  I don't quite disagree, but yet I do. A toolbox organizes your tools so you know exactly where they are (and take much less space). You may not see the tools, but each drawer may have a label (should you choose to slap one on) fully visible at any time. That they are not transparent is an effect of their material. A transparent toolbox seems like it would be more difficult to construct with the same strength and the same inexpense.
  - mmcconnell1618 6y ago
    Imagine walking into someone else's garage and searching their toolbox for a specific item. Now imagine they instead had a nice pegboard where all tools are laid out and visible. You still have to visually scan the items but finding it is a lot less effort than drawer by drawer.
    - naikrovek 6y ago
      Exactly. This is what I had in mind when I said "toolbox". I tried to save some time and it cost me the ability to accurately convey the idea I was trying to convey. "Don't omit useful information."
    - btach 6y ago
      You are not wrong. For me, when I've been in my dad's machine shop, he doesn't use pegboards but rather small drawers for drills, milling bits, lathe tools, carbide inserts, taps, etc. It isn't totally straightforward, but once I understood how he organized each drawer in a set of drawers, and from one drawer cabinet to the next, it was easier. The tool itself may not be in sight, but if you understand the nomenclature and labeling, the tool's location is still in sight. That being said, I do agree about pegboards -- they are so nice even if the drawers are well organized. I find it more seamless to put things away to their "home" when it's directly visual instead of a layer of organization like that. Alas while some tools are well-shaped for that kind of organization, some do not do well with that (drills, lathe cutting tools/inserts, etc).
tonymet 6y ago
I agree. Designers are favoring "looks nice" over usability. It takes multiple taps to even show the UI, then taps to manipulate it. With tap-failures, you're talking 5-6 taps to get work done on the device. Overall UI design has regressed heavily since the 90s. It's clumsy, counter intuitive, un-responsive and high-latency. The latency alone drives me bonkers. My smart tv literally takes 5 seconds between tapping the remote and feedback on the UI
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
titzer 6y ago
I'm still a fan of drop-down file menus. Actions laid out (roughly) hierarchically, by theme, written in a language I already speak? Context menus when you could right click on a thing and do stuff to it? We'll get back to those things eventually.
lordlimecat 6y ago
If someone were to invent a toolbox that could only show the tools you needed, I think they would end up with more money than Apple.
- jml7c5 6y ago
  The unstated caveat is that it sometimes fails to show tools you need.
- hakfoo 6y ago
  I seem to recall using a system in the 90s/00s where the menu bar was dynamic-- based on where your cursor landed, it changed. I think it might have been the Andrew system - https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~AUIS/ https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~AUIS/ - but given it hasn't been touched since 1997 judging by the datestamps, I'm guessing it won't be an easy apt-get to experiment with.
jjav 6y ago
The trend to value aesthetics over all else (particularly functionality) is very unfortunate and leads to the current crop of software that is mostly useless for anything other than the very linear basic use case of a beginner. I get to sit in many user testing sessions and while well-intentioned, the environment of observing someone who has never seen the system before do a few very basic tasks naturally selects for a design that optimizes for that use case. But in real life use, nobody gets to have less than an hour of experience with the system for more than one hour of their life. But now every subsequent hour spent using the system is hobbled by the limitations of that first hour. Good thing for me that I mostly just still use emacs, mutt and zsh, or I'd go crazy. This infantilization of users can be seen in industries far removed from software even. Look at sailboats from the 70s and 80s, mostly designed for usability at sea. Visit a boat show today and new boats are optimized for the initial 20 minutes someone spends touring them at the show, making them mostly terrible for life at sea.
- dragonsky67 6y ago
  Interesting you talk about sail boats, RV's caravans and a lot of cars suffer the same focus on the initial impression. What they don't realise is that a lot of real users a put off by the bling, as they realise it's just an added cost down the line when it either breaks or needs specialist cleaning.
benibela 6y ago
I just changed my linux desktop theme to Reactionary (Windows 9x like) One big reasons was to get better scrollbars. They used to have buttons to scroll a single line/item, but the modern scrollbars do not have it anymore, very annoying. It got the buttons back in all programs, except for Firefox.

karaterobot 6y ago

I agree with a lot of what you say, but let's take a step back and acknowledge that, on the whole, desktop and mobile UI design has improved a lot in the last 20 years. Interfaces are generally more standardized than they were back then. The type and layout hierarchies are clearer. There are better patterns (and better technologies) both for orienting and getting help when you're lost. There's better feedback from the UI when there's an error or a state change. And that's not even getting into accessibility improvements. It's definitely not better across the board, and the MacOS scrollbars are a good example of that. But, on the whole, it's a lot better than it was, and I wouldn't want to go back and unlearn all the things we've learned in the last 20 years.

MagnumOpus 6y ago
Mobile I give you -- of course that is obvious, it would be hard to get worse UI on a 1080p OLED screen that we had on a 50x100 pixel monochrome display. Desktop, no way. Windows 2000/Office 2002 usability by beginners was head and shoulder above today's versions, even at 10x less dev effort and 100x less HD/RAM/CPU usage (yes the functionality was lesser, but the UI wasn't). And add to that the counterfactual of 200,000 man years of development within sane UI paradigms that don't live under the pretense that every Windows PC is a touchscreen tablet, and you could have so much more!
- acdha 6y ago
  90s UIs had clear guidelines and concepts - many apps did not follow them but there were references like Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines telling everyone the conventions and when to use them. When we entered the “an artist designed everything in Flash” era and its successor flat design we saw a big hit to discoverability (I still routinely witness people being amazed at core app functions existing because they hadn’t realized that plain black text was a button, etc.) and some specific usability hits which disproportionately affect certain users: click targets requiring very high precision, lack of or inconsistent keyboard navigation and shortcuts, contrast/color/size choices which are hard for many people to read. iOS is interesting for the degree to which you can re-enable functionality but non default options definitely get less testing.

makecheck 6y ago

To this day I am embarrassed to discover entire options in apps I had been using for ages, that were hidden behind invisible scroll regions. I even reported a bug once because I thought a feature was removed in an update, when in reality it was just a stupid default clipping issue with no visible scrolling. When something looks like two simple controls in a small rectangle, and you have to accidentally shuffle your trackpad over it to figure out that it will move to reveal a dozen more controls, that is a failure of design.

dimitrios1 6y ago
Needing that many controls to begin with is the real failure.
- tablespoon 6y ago
  > Needing that many controls to begin with is the real failure. That kind of thinking is why we can't have nice things. I want apps that do things for me, not apps are crippled to satisfy some fashionable UX fad-dogma.
  - naikrovek 6y ago
    I agree. I have a UHD monitor and I get angry when I have to scroll to read the second sentence on a web page. That is not an uncommon thing anymore, and it sickens me.
    - zarq 6y ago
      I get angry when there's not a single letter on the first page of a web page, just a lead graphic.
      - gumby 6y ago
        The modern day splash screen. Pathetic. Worse is that apparently Medium requires the stupid, and often irrelevant pictures. Apparently some numbskull decided there would be more "engagement" if an article included pictures. So pictures there shall be, regardless of whether they add to the content or not. They are the photos of procrustes.

toiletfuneral 6y ago

"don't hide UI elements from the user" ok but Windows hides everything in right click which is actually not great at all

silicon2401 6y ago

I agree about older Windows UI. In my opinion, the worst is the increasing abstraction of UI elements like icons. Floppy disk and folder icons may be small, but if you can see them then it's easy to relate to the real world. It's been difficult explaining modern smartphone icons to my >80yo grandma after I got her a phone, when everything is a flat and abstract symbol.

gundmc 6y ago
I see the same problem with elderly relatives who struggle to use technology. I am hoping that things like activity blocks on Android [1] become more streamlined and I can use those to make a simplified interface to help make it more navigable. https://blog.google/products/android/accessibility-updates-help-tech-work-everyone/ https://blog.google/products/android/accessibility-updates-h...
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Accessibility is the one thing that can save us right now. It really shows how batshit insane UI/UX zeitgeist has become, when the only way to have usable user interface is to use accessibility features.
Swenrekcah 6y ago
I agree 100%. Just wanted to point out that neither a floppy disk nor a Manila folder have been in public use for almost two decades. Still they survive as these icons and I hope they’ll continue on for the next 500 years.
- basscomm 6y ago
  Floppy disks are still in use for a lot of legacy systems that can't be easily upgraded or replaced for a variety of reasons (mostly it's some combination of they still work for their intended purpose and/or the manufacturer went out of business 20 years ago). Manila folders are still sold at office supply stores, so I'm pretty sure that they're still in widespread use.

dkonofalski 6y ago

As long as you realize that this isn't how the majority of people work, I see nothing wrong with this. The vast majority of users, though, are easily overwhelmed by excessive options, especially those that are infrequently used. It's been proven in study after study that progressive disclosure is the most discoverable paradigm. I'm not saying that Apple is getting this right (they have screwed it up several times) but seeing every option you have is rarely useful for the average user. Case in point - the Office Ribbon interface. It's terrible and somehow uses both progressive disclosure (new tabs show up in context) while also showing you ever possible option in the most non-intuitive groupings.

breakfastduck 6y ago
2000 era windows forms are literally the worst UI ever. A design language where it's developers seem compelled to put a million fields and buttons on one page.
- naikrovek 6y ago
  Perhaps you've forgotten what computers are for. A computer is a tool that a user employs to accomplish one or more tasks. Computers are not a design statement. Computers are tools.
  - breakfastduck 6y ago
    Yes, and making a tool that's so counter intuitive that most users find it a confusing mess is a bad idea. In every place I've worked, a major project has been replacing a grey forms application with every screen so stuffed with information even users who sit and use the software every day are confused by it. It is always win 2000 forms.
    - naikrovek 6y ago
      Don't blame the hammers when you find your valuables shattered. Blame the people wielding the hammers. WinForms can only do what they're told, and they can only look how they're designed to look. Blame the people creating the user interfaces that suck instead of the tool they chose to use to build the bad UI. It isn't the UI's fault. The absolute best and most useful user interfaces that I have ever used were windows forms. They were designed my people who understood how their program was to be used by its users, and who understood what information a user needs at any point in the workflow.

systemvoltage 6y ago

This is just the symptom of a larger, deeper and more insiduous problem - design education, short-term corporate targets, discipline, anti-functionalism, celebration of aesthetics, marketing overreach, lack of rigorous criticism and unwilling to convince users. We're not going to solve it. It requires complete scrub of how we think about building excellent products with deep understanding of humans (not users). Furthermore, needs overhaul on multiple fronts since great design doesn't sell apparently according to most rebuttals. Just look at Apple.com and see how loud it all is. Developers love Stripe design, but it is overrated - full of animations, bright colors, sexy transitions and for some reason they love diagonal lines. We need to revive some people like Paul Rand and Josef Muller-Brockmann, may be get Stankowski and a few others to do marketing. We don't celebrate great design anymore. If it wasn't for Elliot Noyes, no one would ever think of IBM in the same way. We've gotten so worse, it is appalling and we should all be ashamed.

hootbootscoot 6y ago
Don't forget "dark patterns" that serve deliberate goals. It's often perfectly functional for a company to force you into certain courses of action due to apparent mistakes that aren't.
- entropicdrifter 6y ago
  "Oh dang, where's the opt-out of cookies button?"
  - grishka 6y ago
    Forget cookies. It always felt that if your site is related to travel, it absolutely must be filled to the brim with dark patterns. An airline that sneakily adds useless insurance to your order? Why not!
core-questions 6y ago
> celebration of aesthetics Yes and no. Aesthetics are always going to be critical to the consumer experience of technology; the problem is that there are difference schools of aesthetics, and presently the high-status UX school is a minimalist one that values showing as little information as possible in order to look 'easy to understand' in screenshots and at-a-glance tours. If Windows 2000 wasn't "aesthetic" then we wouldn't have Vaporwave, after all; look how that late-90s look is glorified now. There's no shortage of people (myself included) that will still defend it as being a pinnacle of sorts, though I'd point at NeXT as being the real high water mark. I'd call that late 90s style Modern Desktopist, where the metaphor of being a 'desk' we may have seen in some 80s Classical Desktopist has been left behind and replaced with functional, well-designed UI widgets building on years of refinement. There was a reaction to this modernism, and it came first in the form of Late 2000s Skeuomorphist UI as on iOS and in many creative applications on desktops preceding it: the 90s style being seen as too corporate, too 'suit', we ended up with skinnable apps, and apps that mimic the real world (I'm thinking of Propellerhead Reason here as the king of these). What skeuomorphism added in terms of enjoyment was lost in terms of losing all of the expected conventions of normal desktop applications: drag-n-drop, multiple select, keyboard shortcut consistency, etc. Skeuomorphism was rejected in favour of what some call "flat" or "material" design, first in the Microsoft Metro form emulating highway signs, and then in the Google form emulating... nothing. Developer laziness, perhaps? I call this Digital Brutalism, it's at once "function over form" but at the same time missing a great deal of the "function" that the previous era had. It's fundamentally a skeuomorphic UI evolved to lose the skin and to hide most of the controls. We're honestly all just waiting for someone to come out with a drastically more efficient UI paradigm. There's still room to make a real difference with people who use a desktop from day to day....

kibwen 6y ago

How do you feel about the infamous Microsoft Office ribbon? Compared to standard 2000-era UI design it made a lot more things visible (by taking things that were "hidden" in File/Edit/etc. dropdown menus and making them into persistent toolbar buttons), but that didn't keep it from being maligned at the time.

im3w1l 6y ago
That's now how I remember it. Before the ribbon you had a huge amount of tiny icons on toolbars, then came the ribbon and replaced with a small number of big icons. Many tools are hidden, because they are in different ribbon-tabs from the one you currently have open.
minikites 6y ago
You didn't ask me, but I think the ribbon is brilliant and very effective.
- birdman3131 6y ago
  The ribbon is both good and bad. For low to medium skilled users it increased their ability and speed. For users like myself it was a step back as I skim read incredibly fast and have a hard time with remembering icons. I could vertically scan a drop down menu for what text I want 5X faster than finding the same option on a ribbon menu with half the items. I was the same person who absolutely hated the vista and up start menu. I had about 4 columns on my xp start menu and could find anything I wanted very fast just skim reading it. Vista+ was horrible until I got an ssd as the search was always several seconds long. Now I like the search on a ssd these days but until they worked the kinks out and I got an ssd it was way slower than a popout style menu.
chronogram 6y ago
I personally love that ribbon. It’s so functional. It’s like a tree-based menu.
RHSeeger 6y ago
They weren't "hidden" in the menus. It's always been very clear that commands live in the menus. They weren't up front and center, but you knew where they were if you wanted them. The fact that there is a menu bar makes it very clear that there's more you can do. The ribbon design is in your face, it takes up valuable real estate, and (to this day) I still find it hard to locate the options I'm looking for. I find it to be a HUGE step down from the functionality of menus.

Reason077 6y ago

System Preferences > General > Show Scroll Bars > Always It's right there, people!

naikrovek 6y ago
That doesn't work in the browser, which is what the tweet linked by this story is discussing.
- kingnothing 6y ago
  In which browser? I have scrollbars in Safari, Firefox, and Chrome from either that setting or an in-browser setting.
- robotresearcher 6y ago
  I'm reading in Safari with that setting on 'always' and I see the scrollbar handle right there next to your comment.
  - naikrovek 6y ago
    Then tell that to the user in the linked tweet. I'm sure they would be happy to know you've solved their problem.
- weaksauce 6y ago
  That works to show it in safari/chrome/firefox for me... did they disable this in recent versions of the OS?
pfortuny 6y ago
And the philosophy of having them off “by default “? That is the issue here.
- zepto 6y ago
  They coincided with using trackpads by default on the desktop. The scrollbar appears if you use a scroll gesture. It’s obvious with web pages, and with most content when you can scroll, and removal of visual noise and increasing the content area is good. I personally use a mouse, and so I have them turned on, but generally I like Apple removing unnecessary clutter. It’s really no big deal at all.

Flow 6y ago

Windows 10 in dark mode is just horrible. Overlapping windows are really hard to see where one begins and another ends. I long for Windows 3.11/OS2 Warp style window decoration with goofy distinct colors and a menu bar in every app. These days all apps in Windows hate the menu and hides it.

bluedino 6y ago
Dark mode is a horrible trend that I can't wait to see go away.
- johnmaguire2013 6y ago
  Dark modes don't need to be implemented horribly.
- brokenmachine 6y ago
  I love dark modes for every app - but this is just bad implementation. There's no reason dark mode should make things invisible.
- jml7c5 6y ago
  As long as it's optional, I have no complaints. I just wish there was also a "prefer full-contrast body text" mode too. I want white-on-black and black-on-white, not gray-on-gray. Most OSes have some high-contrast accessibility modes, but they're not ideal because they tend to affect all text.
- jfengel 6y ago
  I was in complete agreement until I got a car with a built in screen. At night I really do need it to be dark. Even dimming a white screen doesn't do the job. I use it almost exclusively via Android Auto, and in particular Google Maps. It's a Good Thing that it has a dark mode. I dislike modes of any sort, but day and night are modes in the real world, and the device might as well accommodate that. I would definitely be grateful to never again hear "When is X going to introduce dark mode?" for every single app and web site. Outside of that very specific instance where I'm required to have an app in my face while maintaining night vision, I'm perfectly happy to use "day mode" with the brightness adjusted.

int_19h 6y ago

And the funny thing is, Win32 circa 2000 was basically just well-polished IBM CUA.

pfortuny 6y ago

The adoration of minimalism has become the curse of user interfaces. Design not for the user but for beauty. Needless to say, controls of dangerous machinery stay clear, loud and accessible.

patrickthebold 6y ago

I got a new macbook pro for a new job. I had to use hdmi since I didn't have a usb-c to displayport adapter. I wanted to check the refresh rate. You have to hold 'option' when you click one of the radio buttons, and then you have to click a check box with some label about 'low resolution modes' to see the refresh rate option. Litterally impossible to do without googling.

FireBeyond 6y ago
Apple just doesn't care if you're not using a ProDisplay XDR. Display Stream Compression, working on Catalina, is completely, absolutely broken on Big Sur, since beta 1, through 11.2.3. Got a 4K 144Hz panel? Or HDR? Apple could not care less.

cybrjoe 6y ago

| The toolbox in my garage would look better if I could only see the tools I needed at the time I need them, and I would return that toolbox This comment has completely broken my brain. That's exactly what a toolbox with drawers does, hides tools. Until you, the user, pull a drawer out and select the tool you need. Because you probably put the tools in their place you also have a high likelihood of knowing where they are. Maybe that's the paradigm? Show everything and let the user hide? The opposite of hiding tools in a toolbox is littering your workspace with tools that you can see, but you soon run out of real estate with any decent amount of tools.

btach 6y ago
I don't quite disagree, but yet I do. A toolbox organizes your tools so you know exactly where they are (and take much less space). You may not see the tools, but each drawer may have a label (should you choose to slap one on) fully visible at any time. That they are not transparent is an effect of their material. A transparent toolbox seems like it would be more difficult to construct with the same strength and the same inexpense.
- mmcconnell1618 6y ago
  Imagine walking into someone else's garage and searching their toolbox for a specific item. Now imagine they instead had a nice pegboard where all tools are laid out and visible. You still have to visually scan the items but finding it is a lot less effort than drawer by drawer.
  - naikrovek 6y ago
    Exactly. This is what I had in mind when I said "toolbox". I tried to save some time and it cost me the ability to accurately convey the idea I was trying to convey. "Don't omit useful information."
  - btach 6y ago
    You are not wrong. For me, when I've been in my dad's machine shop, he doesn't use pegboards but rather small drawers for drills, milling bits, lathe tools, carbide inserts, taps, etc. It isn't totally straightforward, but once I understood how he organized each drawer in a set of drawers, and from one drawer cabinet to the next, it was easier. The tool itself may not be in sight, but if you understand the nomenclature and labeling, the tool's location is still in sight. That being said, I do agree about pegboards -- they are so nice even if the drawers are well organized. I find it more seamless to put things away to their "home" when it's directly visual instead of a layer of organization like that. Alas while some tools are well-shaped for that kind of organization, some do not do well with that (drills, lathe cutting tools/inserts, etc).

tonymet 6y ago

I agree. Designers are favoring "looks nice" over usability. It takes multiple taps to even show the UI, then taps to manipulate it. With tap-failures, you're talking 5-6 taps to get work done on the device. Overall UI design has regressed heavily since the 90s. It's clumsy, counter intuitive, un-responsive and high-latency. The latency alone drives me bonkers. My smart tv literally takes 5 seconds between tapping the remote and feedback on the UI

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

titzer 6y ago

I'm still a fan of drop-down file menus. Actions laid out (roughly) hierarchically, by theme, written in a language I already speak? Context menus when you could right click on a thing and do stuff to it? We'll get back to those things eventually.

lordlimecat 6y ago

If someone were to invent a toolbox that could only show the tools you needed, I think they would end up with more money than Apple.

jml7c5 6y ago
The unstated caveat is that it sometimes fails to show tools you need.
hakfoo 6y ago
I seem to recall using a system in the 90s/00s where the menu bar was dynamic-- based on where your cursor landed, it changed. I think it might have been the Andrew system - https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~AUIS/ https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~AUIS/ - but given it hasn't been touched since 1997 judging by the datestamps, I'm guessing it won't be an easy apt-get to experiment with.

jjav 6y ago

The trend to value aesthetics over all else (particularly functionality) is very unfortunate and leads to the current crop of software that is mostly useless for anything other than the very linear basic use case of a beginner. I get to sit in many user testing sessions and while well-intentioned, the environment of observing someone who has never seen the system before do a few very basic tasks naturally selects for a design that optimizes for that use case. But in real life use, nobody gets to have less than an hour of experience with the system for more than one hour of their life. But now every subsequent hour spent using the system is hobbled by the limitations of that first hour. Good thing for me that I mostly just still use emacs, mutt and zsh, or I'd go crazy. This infantilization of users can be seen in industries far removed from software even. Look at sailboats from the 70s and 80s, mostly designed for usability at sea. Visit a boat show today and new boats are optimized for the initial 20 minutes someone spends touring them at the show, making them mostly terrible for life at sea.

dragonsky67 6y ago
Interesting you talk about sail boats, RV's caravans and a lot of cars suffer the same focus on the initial impression. What they don't realise is that a lot of real users a put off by the bling, as they realise it's just an added cost down the line when it either breaks or needs specialist cleaning.

benibela 6y ago

I just changed my linux desktop theme to Reactionary (Windows 9x like) One big reasons was to get better scrollbars. They used to have buttons to scroll a single line/item, but the modern scrollbars do not have it anymore, very annoying. It got the buttons back in all programs, except for Firefox.