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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 2

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.

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.