5 ms·

> I have had to explain to people tons of times that the random word in the UI somewhere in an application is actually a button they can press to invoke an acti

> I have had to explain to people tons of times that the random word in the UI somewhere in an application is actually a button they can press to invoke an action. Exactly this. I often help others use computers and phones. In the old days it was easy to see what could be clicked. Now input and output look the same. It makes it harder to use. In many ways it is a victory of style over substance - UI's are now designed by the same crowd who designs high fashion, that is clothes not designed to be worn but to be gawked at.

bobthechef 5y ago
> In many ways it is a victory of style over substance - UI's are now designed by the same crowd who designs high fashion, that is clothes not designed to be worn but to be gawked at. Is it? Style is no style at all if the thing in question does not fulfill its function. The whole point of something stylish is that it accomplishes its end so well and respects the appropriate constraints that is pleases the intellect when it recognizes this perfection. So if someone is designing a UI that is difficult to use, that is a failure of both style and substance since there is no style without substance.
- JasonFruit 5y ago
  Fine, a Pyrrhic victory of style over substance.
- HstryrsrBttn 5y ago
lenkite 5y ago
We probably need to start paying UI folks NOT to change stuff. They can do all their flat-experimenting in custom themes.
- berkes 5y ago
  In the case of the article, that is somewhat unfair. > GTK4 has been in development for a bit and has improved a lot of the internals. One of the great upsides is that it can take more advantage of the GPU when rendering the UI. So there was a clear need to rewrite parts to fix internals. > The Adwaita theme has also been nicely carried over and looks very similar to the GTK3 counterpart. ... > When I want to make a gtk4 application for mobile I would need libhandy, but libhandy for gtk4 is not a thing. The "solution" is libadwaita. This provides the widgets I need but it comes with the downside of having some of the worst decisions in application theming. So, there we have it: it's not "UI folks just changing stuff", its a ground-up rebuild of a UI-language. Now, whether or not that ground-up should be flat, modern, or just copy the old, is another discussion.
chefandy 5y ago
> In many ways it is a victory of style over substance - UI's are now designed by the same crowd who designs high fashion, that is clothes not designed to be worn but to be gawked at. Oh? Where do the Gnome designers list their runway appearances on their site? https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/ https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/ I'm an art-school educated designer, decade+ full-time web developer for over a decade and regular FOSS contributor for about as long, and regular FOSS users since the late 90s. Like most other designer/developers I know— there are way more than you think— I contribute code regularly but never design work. Why? Because it's a sucky experience. Most FOSS UIs are akin to someone's first website made from cargo-culted code from free tutorials. Fixing it is harder than starting from scratch and either approach takes significant intellectual work before even seriously proposing changes... and those proposals are received with something on a spectrum of suspicion to outright hostility. Would you contribute code to a project run by people with no coding experience but were extremely opinionated about code, bikeshedded and poopooed all code changes as a matter of course AND referred to developers and their work with the same glib contempt you and so many other developers here displayed in your comments? Gosh I hope not. I often hear FOSS developers lament lack of designer involvement, but won't even entertain the prospect of having any culpability for that. I mean, come on. UI design as a discipline fundamentally assumes the person designing the interface doesn't intuitively understand what's better or what's worse— they should investigate, check, and confirm their strategies. The problems you see in UIs are because the people running the projects Solicited the wrong kind of designers or let people without subject matter expertise trampler on some core features of the design.
- FeepingCreature 5y ago
  > UI designer proposing changes is received with hostility > solicited the wrong kind of designers This points to me that the root problem is that we can't tell what kind is the wrong kind. It's a trust issue, but also a competence legibility issue. That said- > referred to developers and their work with the same glib contempt Uh yeah? Developers absolutely refer to developers with glib contempt.
  - chefandy 5y ago
grishka 5y ago
Yeah I keep saying that modern UIs are designed to be looked at and enjoyed like museum art pieces, not to be actually used. They look nice-ish when static, but they're unbearable in real use.
notatoad 5y ago
i don't think flat design is really a question of style over substance. flat design has been popularized because designers like it, but designers like it because it's easy. a flat element can be re-coloured without having to worry you've gotten the shadows correct on the new color. you can put two buttons beside each other without worrying that one appears to have more depth than the other. we make things flat because we're lazy, not because we think it looks good. a culture of lazy designers has convinced people it looks good, so we can continue being lazy.
hulitu 5y ago
> In many ways it is a victory of style over substance Or as Statler and Waldorf would have put it: it is a victory of care over matter - we ( developers) don't care and you ( users) don't matter.
dspillett 5y ago
The one that irritates me these days is working out at a glance what has input focus. Window borders are so thin, and the difference between focused and not minimal, app have custom chrome so while titlebars are a good indicator sometimes often they are not, or are just two subtle, etc. MS Office apps are an offender here. An example taken right now with Firefox under Windows: https://daveflix.deeohhtee.enneeetee.net/stuff/tmp/FocusNotObvious/FocusExample_TwoTBars.png https://daveflix.deeohhtee.enneeetee.net/stuff/tmp/FocusNotO... Which of those has focus? There is actually a difference (and to take the screenshot they overlapped making it obvious that way) but it is subtle. Try spotting it reliably when they are on different monitors. At some point it'll annoy me enough that I'll write a util to scan for the current window that is top of the stack and draw a bright green border (or otherwise unmissable clue) around it… It'll look ugly, but I'll darn well know where what I'm about to type will go!

bobthechef 5y ago

> In many ways it is a victory of style over substance - UI's are now designed by the same crowd who designs high fashion, that is clothes not designed to be worn but to be gawked at. Is it? Style is no style at all if the thing in question does not fulfill its function. The whole point of something stylish is that it accomplishes its end so well and respects the appropriate constraints that is pleases the intellect when it recognizes this perfection. So if someone is designing a UI that is difficult to use, that is a failure of both style and substance since there is no style without substance.

JasonFruit 5y ago
Fine, a Pyrrhic victory of style over substance.
HstryrsrBttn 5y ago

lenkite 5y ago

We probably need to start paying UI folks NOT to change stuff. They can do all their flat-experimenting in custom themes.

berkes 5y ago
In the case of the article, that is somewhat unfair. > GTK4 has been in development for a bit and has improved a lot of the internals. One of the great upsides is that it can take more advantage of the GPU when rendering the UI. So there was a clear need to rewrite parts to fix internals. > The Adwaita theme has also been nicely carried over and looks very similar to the GTK3 counterpart. ... > When I want to make a gtk4 application for mobile I would need libhandy, but libhandy for gtk4 is not a thing. The "solution" is libadwaita. This provides the widgets I need but it comes with the downside of having some of the worst decisions in application theming. So, there we have it: it's not "UI folks just changing stuff", its a ground-up rebuild of a UI-language. Now, whether or not that ground-up should be flat, modern, or just copy the old, is another discussion.

chefandy 5y ago

> In many ways it is a victory of style over substance - UI's are now designed by the same crowd who designs high fashion, that is clothes not designed to be worn but to be gawked at. Oh? Where do the Gnome designers list their runway appearances on their site? https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/ https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/ I'm an art-school educated designer, decade+ full-time web developer for over a decade and regular FOSS contributor for about as long, and regular FOSS users since the late 90s. Like most other designer/developers I know— there are way more than you think— I contribute code regularly but never design work. Why? Because it's a sucky experience. Most FOSS UIs are akin to someone's first website made from cargo-culted code from free tutorials. Fixing it is harder than starting from scratch and either approach takes significant intellectual work before even seriously proposing changes... and those proposals are received with something on a spectrum of suspicion to outright hostility. Would you contribute code to a project run by people with no coding experience but were extremely opinionated about code, bikeshedded and poopooed all code changes as a matter of course AND referred to developers and their work with the same glib contempt you and so many other developers here displayed in your comments? Gosh I hope not. I often hear FOSS developers lament lack of designer involvement, but won't even entertain the prospect of having any culpability for that. I mean, come on. UI design as a discipline fundamentally assumes the person designing the interface doesn't intuitively understand what's better or what's worse— they should investigate, check, and confirm their strategies. The problems you see in UIs are because the people running the projects Solicited the wrong kind of designers or let people without subject matter expertise trampler on some core features of the design.

FeepingCreature 5y ago
> UI designer proposing changes is received with hostility > solicited the wrong kind of designers This points to me that the root problem is that we can't tell what kind is the wrong kind. It's a trust issue, but also a competence legibility issue. That said- > referred to developers and their work with the same glib contempt Uh yeah? Developers absolutely refer to developers with glib contempt.
- chefandy 5y ago

grishka 5y ago

Yeah I keep saying that modern UIs are designed to be looked at and enjoyed like museum art pieces, not to be actually used. They look nice-ish when static, but they're unbearable in real use.

notatoad 5y ago

i don't think flat design is really a question of style over substance. flat design has been popularized because designers like it, but designers like it because it's easy. a flat element can be re-coloured without having to worry you've gotten the shadows correct on the new color. you can put two buttons beside each other without worrying that one appears to have more depth than the other. we make things flat because we're lazy, not because we think it looks good. a culture of lazy designers has convinced people it looks good, so we can continue being lazy.

hulitu 5y ago

> In many ways it is a victory of style over substance Or as Statler and Waldorf would have put it: it is a victory of care over matter - we ( developers) don't care and you ( users) don't matter.

dspillett 5y ago

The one that irritates me these days is working out at a glance what has input focus. Window borders are so thin, and the difference between focused and not minimal, app have custom chrome so while titlebars are a good indicator sometimes often they are not, or are just two subtle, etc. MS Office apps are an offender here. An example taken right now with Firefox under Windows: https://daveflix.deeohhtee.enneeetee.net/stuff/tmp/FocusNotObvious/FocusExample_TwoTBars.png https://daveflix.deeohhtee.enneeetee.net/stuff/tmp/FocusNotO... Which of those has focus? There is actually a difference (and to take the screenshot they overlapped making it obvious that way) but it is subtle. Try spotting it reliably when they are on different monitors. At some point it'll annoy me enough that I'll write a util to scan for the current window that is top of the stack and draw a bright green border (or otherwise unmissable clue) around it… It'll look ugly, but I'll darn well know where what I'm about to type will go!