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>But making previous features or UI elements less discoverable because you want them to appear only when needed (and who decides when I need something out of th

>But making previous features or UI elements less discoverable because you want them to appear only when needed (and who decides when I need something out of the way? Maybe I like to see it all the time) — that’s not progress. It seems it's a trend to make everything require more clicks for 'cleanliness'. In the end, it just makes everything frustrating. You end up having to add search to make anything usable. Windows 10 and Android settings are both great examples of this.

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blacktriangle 5y ago
"More clicks for cleanliness" nails it exactly. Namecheap's old UI was perfect, info dense, you could do everything. Now they try and hide everything useful from me in the name of looking like every other hipster inspired UI. It's not bad enough I've bothered moving off of them but I've stopped using Namecheap for new names simply because of how much I hate their new UI. All they had to do was literally nothing and I'd still be a happy customer.
marcosdumay 5y ago
It's a reaction to the Word-like screen-filling toolboxes of the late 90's. And while the toolbox not taking your entire screen would be a real improvement, what we got was a smaller set of larger buttons with plenty of negative space to make them look nice, taking approximately the same area as before, but with added clicks and discoverability problems. Eventually the problem did go away because of larger monitors in a higher resolution. But well, nobody would ever think about going back into those ugly interfaces! Oh, and count me as another previous Namecheap customer that isn't anymore mostly because of their interface. "Mostly" because I had one domain that needed DNSSEC when they didn't support it, and that's what started my migration, but what made me move everything was the interface.
- eitland 5y ago
  > But well, nobody would ever think about going back into those ugly interfaces! Some of us would like to get our toolbars back.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    Well, that part was sarcastic... The new space wasting interfaces are worse in many ways, and better in none. The old ugly interfaces were perfectly good for simple software. We could use something better on the more complex kinds of software, but what he have today isn't.
sumtechguy 5y ago
Well said. The #1 rule I used to follow is I am on this control what can I do here and is it clear. The #2 rule is What is my next step from step #1 and is it easy to find where I currently am. Break either of those and the GUI will be confusing. Disappearing controls makes you think something is wrong. I would typically go with disabled and a clear indicator of the something else needing to be filled out. If that was not achievable a tooltip on the disabled control to tell the user what to do. The way to achieve it is to pretend you are on 2 hours of sleep and not very computer savvy. Now you can go too far and make the whole thing a busy mess and then it is unclear where to even begin. A good rule of thumb with that is left to right top to bottom, keep scrolling to a minimum. Most people get that. One I was using just yesterday was jumping around in the page and the 'finish' control was in the top left and scrolled off the page.

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blacktriangle 5y ago

"More clicks for cleanliness" nails it exactly. Namecheap's old UI was perfect, info dense, you could do everything. Now they try and hide everything useful from me in the name of looking like every other hipster inspired UI. It's not bad enough I've bothered moving off of them but I've stopped using Namecheap for new names simply because of how much I hate their new UI. All they had to do was literally nothing and I'd still be a happy customer.

marcosdumay 5y ago

It's a reaction to the Word-like screen-filling toolboxes of the late 90's. And while the toolbox not taking your entire screen would be a real improvement, what we got was a smaller set of larger buttons with plenty of negative space to make them look nice, taking approximately the same area as before, but with added clicks and discoverability problems. Eventually the problem did go away because of larger monitors in a higher resolution. But well, nobody would ever think about going back into those ugly interfaces! Oh, and count me as another previous Namecheap customer that isn't anymore mostly because of their interface. "Mostly" because I had one domain that needed DNSSEC when they didn't support it, and that's what started my migration, but what made me move everything was the interface.

eitland 5y ago
> But well, nobody would ever think about going back into those ugly interfaces! Some of us would like to get our toolbars back.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Well, that part was sarcastic... The new space wasting interfaces are worse in many ways, and better in none. The old ugly interfaces were perfectly good for simple software. We could use something better on the more complex kinds of software, but what he have today isn't.

sumtechguy 5y ago

Well said. The #1 rule I used to follow is I am on this control what can I do here and is it clear. The #2 rule is What is my next step from step #1 and is it easy to find where I currently am. Break either of those and the GUI will be confusing. Disappearing controls makes you think something is wrong. I would typically go with disabled and a clear indicator of the something else needing to be filled out. If that was not achievable a tooltip on the disabled control to tell the user what to do. The way to achieve it is to pretend you are on 2 hours of sleep and not very computer savvy. Now you can go too far and make the whole thing a busy mess and then it is unclear where to even begin. A good rule of thumb with that is left to right top to bottom, keep scrolling to a minimum. Most people get that. One I was using just yesterday was jumping around in the page and the 'finish' control was in the top left and scrolled off the page.