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It’s very funny to me that people think “the past” was a UX wonderland.

yen223 5y ago
It's like how no matter when you're born, the best music was always the ones from your teenage years (when your taste in music was being formed). And how music sucks these days because kids don't know to make good music (and not because musical tastes has changed around you and you don't like that) Same thing with UI I guess.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  I don't think the comparison works. Music generally is what people want to listen to for its own sake. UI is disconnected from what people want; everybody wants to do something, and UI is how you get there. As is in-app advertising, electricity, and so on. And not only is UI tied to other things that aren't available a la carte, but the whole package is frequently chosen by someone (corporate software) who will never experience the UI and didn't talk to anyone who will on the subject. So I think it's a fallacy to assert that UI is in general what the public prefers. The same fallacy as saying consumers want binding arbitration, or melamine in their milk, or surveillance advertising.
amatecha 5y ago
I mean… in the 90's, software didn't harass me to update every 15 minutes or pop up extraneous notifications that are irrelevant to my interests. Interactions were, in general, far more discoverable. You could come to rely on simple, consistent design cues to understand how something might work. A whole new piece of software was instantly usable because it adhered to the expected interface guidelines[0] defined for the OS. In recent years, a lot of this has gone out the window and each dev house seems to invent their own paradigms and complete UI toolkits, so while there are similarities, they are few. The cohesive, simple nature of software UI is generally a thing of the past, that most of us who experienced it are quite nostalgic for. Generally speaking, most application UX problems were "solved" ~30 years ago, and every time someone tries to reinvent the wheel, they miss subtle, important aspects of those earlier solutions. Like the importance of consistency across time, and "principle of least surprise", and things like that. I can really go on and on ad nauseam about this because it's a huge pet peeve of mine. I cannot stand having to relearn major aspects of how to use the same software, the same OS, every 6mo because some company decided it's time to completely overhaul their design/UI, for Reasons™. [0] http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

It's like how no matter when you're born, the best music was always the ones from your teenage years (when your taste in music was being formed). And how music sucks these days because kids don't know to make good music (and not because musical tastes has changed around you and you don't like that) Same thing with UI I guess.

perl4ever 5y ago
I don't think the comparison works. Music generally is what people want to listen to for its own sake. UI is disconnected from what people want; everybody wants to do something, and UI is how you get there. As is in-app advertising, electricity, and so on. And not only is UI tied to other things that aren't available a la carte, but the whole package is frequently chosen by someone (corporate software) who will never experience the UI and didn't talk to anyone who will on the subject. So I think it's a fallacy to assert that UI is in general what the public prefers. The same fallacy as saying consumers want binding arbitration, or melamine in their milk, or surveillance advertising.

amatecha 5y ago

I mean… in the 90's, software didn't harass me to update every 15 minutes or pop up extraneous notifications that are irrelevant to my interests. Interactions were, in general, far more discoverable. You could come to rely on simple, consistent design cues to understand how something might work. A whole new piece of software was instantly usable because it adhered to the expected interface guidelines[0] defined for the OS. In recent years, a lot of this has gone out the window and each dev house seems to invent their own paradigms and complete UI toolkits, so while there are similarities, they are few. The cohesive, simple nature of software UI is generally a thing of the past, that most of us who experienced it are quite nostalgic for. Generally speaking, most application UX problems were "solved" ~30 years ago, and every time someone tries to reinvent the wheel, they miss subtle, important aspects of those earlier solutions. Like the importance of consistency across time, and "principle of least surprise", and things like that. I can really go on and on ad nauseam about this because it's a huge pet peeve of mine. I cannot stand having to relearn major aspects of how to use the same software, the same OS, every 6mo because some company decided it's time to completely overhaul their design/UI, for Reasons™. [0] http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]