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> o need to pay some UI designers big bucks to come up with rounded corners). It’s really unfortunate how dismissive of the entire ui design profession so much

> o need to pay some UI designers big bucks to come up with rounded corners). It’s really unfortunate how dismissive of the entire ui design profession so much of HN is. Not a great look IMO

bitwize 4y ago
I've met some great UI designers and they could take a libXaw application and have it present information cleanly and offer available actions and context transitions that make sense. But these people are not rewarded in today's industry. The criteria for good UI design these days is all about "lOoKs mOdErN". Plus the field seems increasingly tied to HTML/CSS/JS. Development teams as a whole are not incentivized to do UI design with an emphasis on making the user's work easier... they're incentivized by engagement KPIs and the like. So there's a trendline towards more sizzle and less steak.
josephcsible 4y ago
Microsoft's UI designers used to be useful. The Windows UI design got better by leaps and bounds at first, was at its peak between Windows 95 and Windows 2000, and has been getting worse ever since. The problem is now that the field has matured, there's a lot less that needs to be changed, so they've started to change things that were fine the way they were to justify not being downsized.
- djur 4y ago
  I've been working on a project recently that involves running Win95 in a VM and it's almost shocking how nice the UX feels compared to the Win11 host surrounding it. Consistent, clean, legible - nothing hidden, very little extraneous animation or visual flash. Even the battleship gray is nicer than I remember. Nostalgia goggles for sure, but...
- rstat1 4y ago
  The one improvement modern Windows has over Windows from the 90s is the lack of those godawful cascading menus that would disappear off the screen the second you even slightly missed a hover target. I do not miss those at all.
  - bundie 4y ago
    > The one improvement modern Windows has over Windows from the 90s is the lack of those godawful cascading menus that would disappear off the screen the second you even slightly missed a hover target. I don't understand
    - nayuki 4y ago
      Like this: https://www.trustedreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2015/07/win95o2start-1.png https://www.trustedreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2...
      - bundie 4y ago
        oh I get it now
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    To be clear, I'm not saying that Microsoft hasn't improved any UI since Windows 2000, just that overall, they've made more stuff worse than they've improved since then.
- kmoser 4y ago
  Not to pile on trashing the Windows 11 UI, but my first experience with it was actually watching a not-very-technical person attempt to restore a mistakenly deleted file by opening the trash can. The Windows Explorer app showed them a very large, obvious trash can icon, which they proceeded to click to open. It failed to open, so they clicked again...and again...not realizing that each time they clicked it, they were actually deleting an item they had selected. To add insult to injury, I don't believe the icon had a tooltip. Bravo, Microsoft.
flohofwoe 4y ago
Respect must be earned, like back when it was called "Human Interface Design" and involved actual scientific research (e.g. between ca the late 70's to mid-90's) instead of just coming up with esoteric essays from time to time about what 'emotions' certain colors, fonts or rounded corners evoke.
concordDance 4y ago
It's some specific fads that get complained about. Plus the big fact that, for the people who post on hackernews, more modern UIs are actually worse for them and their workflows. Why would you not dismiss a profession that actively makes your life worse?
mbesto 4y ago
You're conflating 'being dismissive' with 'being critical'. I think HN very much agrees that good UI is very important, so much so that they take the time to critiquing it when it's obviously bad.
toast0 4y ago
Piling on. It's easy to be dismissive when the resulting design is so uncompelling. It can't accomidate the existing needs, but the existing needs are compelling enough to leave the old version, likely for at least a decade. If the new design was adequate, it would probably be adopted in a release or two. If it were better, there would be demand to get it to all the well used components. There might still be some components left behind, there's a lot of components. A truly inspiring design might pull everything forward automatically... But that's asking a lot.
tehbeard 4y ago
Would you please care to point to something ACTUALLY useful to end users that came out of the W11 UI "redesign"? Because you cannot legitimately look at the W11 task manager and tell me it was designed with any sort of professional UI/UX in mind. It's busy work to keep a job. And if it is then there's something deeply wrong where no UX theory is being applied, or they're being overruled to make it "app-y".
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  The Settings app. It's head-and-shoulders better than the Windows 10 version, or the mess that was Control Panel.
  - sitzkrieg 4y ago
    itd be a decent point if it wasnt still missing stuff that's existed as long as windows
    - frosted-flakes 4y ago
      At this point there is very little need to use the old Control Panel applets. There are a few advanced cases that haven't been migrated, but they're also quite rare, and they are still linked from Settings.
    - wtallis 4y ago
      Also, that new Settings app wasn't even in the original release of Windows 11. It was delivered after the fact through an update.
- numpad0 4y ago
  Problem is fun busywork “creates value” and pays better than boring “actual work” in this absolute meme economy.
Fatnino 4y ago
The windows UI is not a great look either.
FatActor 4y ago
I don't know why it is so pervasive, but programmers think they are inherently good at UX/UI for some reason. And they are very possessive about it. I was until I married a designer, and they actually went to school to study visual composition, balance, color language, etc. I'm fond of saying UIs designed by engineers look exactly like UIs designed by engineers. I'm not saying that all designers are always better than all programmers, but when you've studied visual composition, it shows. I mean just look at the scorching replies you are getting. You definitely offended some people who fall into this "I know better than any stoopid artist" category.
- wtallis 4y ago
  It sounds like you think the job of a UI designer it to make UIs look pretty. That's exactly the misconception that people are railing against, because it leads to disasters like Windows Vista, 8, and 11. The job of a UI designer is to make the UI usable. Looking pretty in screenshots must always be a lower priority than being functional and accessible.
  - FatActor 4y ago
    You are exactly confusing UX and UI. Usability--what you are describing--is the UX or user experience, buttons colors composition affordance is the UI, connecting the buttons to the REST endpoints is frontend, servicing the REST endpoints is backend, making sure the backend is running and so is the gateway is devops. At least that's what it has been for 20+ years.
    - wtallis 4y ago
      > You are exactly confusing UX and UI. > Usability--what you are describing--is the UX or user experience, buttons colors composition affordance is the UI, Considering these to be separate disciplines is just more of the same madness. They're inextricable. > At least that's what it has been for 20+ years. I think it's more that over the past 15-20 years there's been a growing trend of people forgetting that "look and feel" doesn't just mean "look".
rolenthedeep 4y ago
UI design is trending in a bad direction. UIs are being designed as some sort of modern art piece rather than a tool that is designed to be used by humans. My favorite example is VS Code vs Rider. VS code looks like a toy. A big stack of unlabeled vage icons that require a decade of context to intuit. Compiling your program takes three clicks and a context switch away from your code! Unless you're a normal person who hasn't memorized those icons, and then it's six or seven clicks while you fumble through the menus. Rider is a classic ugly UI. everything has labels or tooltips. There's a goddamn toolbar with all your common controls. Building your code requires one single click. Not a single person is going to stare at your landing page like it's a genuine Picasso. Your ui is not going to be placed in the museum of modern art. A UI is a tool. If someone has to ask you how to use it, it's not very good. If your users are fumbling through menus after the first hour, it's a bad design. If a user has to have the documentation open at all times to decode your hieroglyphic icons, it's a bad design. As for my own UI design, the core philosophy is first-order accessibility. If you have to do a task every time you open the program, then that task is accessible with one or zero clicks. If a user asks me what a button does, it gets a better label or a helpful tooltip as well as a mention in the docs. My UIs look like something out of windows 95: simple controls laid out in a grid in clearly delineated functional groups. Everything is labeled and laid out in a way that places the most common controls in VERY OBVIOUS and CONVENIENT locations. It's ugly because it's designed to be used and not looked at. If a user spends time in my program that isn't related to the task they're doing, I've done something wrong. If someone has to ask me how to do something, it means I have to rethink my design. If users are relying on documentation to navigate my program, I need to redesign. I respect ui designers who build helpful and useful UIs. I don't respect designers who drop all text and sprinkle a dozen abstract images on a vast barren wasteland of screen space. ETA: I'm an engineer and I build engineer style UIs: brutal in their simplicity, and utilitarian above all else. Literally not one person who will ever use my programs will care that it's ugly so long as it works. At some point we've lost the idea that programs should be useful more than they are "pretty". It's a trend that I find frankly abhorrent, and I believe it's one of the major factors that's making software as an entire field worse and not better.

> o need to pay some UI designers big bucks to come up with rounded corners). It’s really unfortunate how dismissive of the entire ui design profession so much of HN is. Not a great look IMO

bitwize 4y ago

I've met some great UI designers and they could take a libXaw application and have it present information cleanly and offer available actions and context transitions that make sense. But these people are not rewarded in today's industry. The criteria for good UI design these days is all about "lOoKs mOdErN". Plus the field seems increasingly tied to HTML/CSS/JS. Development teams as a whole are not incentivized to do UI design with an emphasis on making the user's work easier... they're incentivized by engagement KPIs and the like. So there's a trendline towards more sizzle and less steak.

josephcsible 4y ago

Microsoft's UI designers used to be useful. The Windows UI design got better by leaps and bounds at first, was at its peak between Windows 95 and Windows 2000, and has been getting worse ever since. The problem is now that the field has matured, there's a lot less that needs to be changed, so they've started to change things that were fine the way they were to justify not being downsized.

djur 4y ago
I've been working on a project recently that involves running Win95 in a VM and it's almost shocking how nice the UX feels compared to the Win11 host surrounding it. Consistent, clean, legible - nothing hidden, very little extraneous animation or visual flash. Even the battleship gray is nicer than I remember. Nostalgia goggles for sure, but...
rstat1 4y ago
The one improvement modern Windows has over Windows from the 90s is the lack of those godawful cascading menus that would disappear off the screen the second you even slightly missed a hover target. I do not miss those at all.
- bundie 4y ago
  > The one improvement modern Windows has over Windows from the 90s is the lack of those godawful cascading menus that would disappear off the screen the second you even slightly missed a hover target. I don't understand
  - nayuki 4y ago
    Like this: https://www.trustedreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2015/07/win95o2start-1.png https://www.trustedreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2...
    - bundie 4y ago
      oh I get it now
- josephcsible 4y ago
  To be clear, I'm not saying that Microsoft hasn't improved any UI since Windows 2000, just that overall, they've made more stuff worse than they've improved since then.
kmoser 4y ago
Not to pile on trashing the Windows 11 UI, but my first experience with it was actually watching a not-very-technical person attempt to restore a mistakenly deleted file by opening the trash can. The Windows Explorer app showed them a very large, obvious trash can icon, which they proceeded to click to open. It failed to open, so they clicked again...and again...not realizing that each time they clicked it, they were actually deleting an item they had selected. To add insult to injury, I don't believe the icon had a tooltip. Bravo, Microsoft.

flohofwoe 4y ago

Respect must be earned, like back when it was called "Human Interface Design" and involved actual scientific research (e.g. between ca the late 70's to mid-90's) instead of just coming up with esoteric essays from time to time about what 'emotions' certain colors, fonts or rounded corners evoke.

concordDance 4y ago

It's some specific fads that get complained about. Plus the big fact that, for the people who post on hackernews, more modern UIs are actually worse for them and their workflows. Why would you not dismiss a profession that actively makes your life worse?

mbesto 4y ago

You're conflating 'being dismissive' with 'being critical'. I think HN very much agrees that good UI is very important, so much so that they take the time to critiquing it when it's obviously bad.

toast0 4y ago

Piling on. It's easy to be dismissive when the resulting design is so uncompelling. It can't accomidate the existing needs, but the existing needs are compelling enough to leave the old version, likely for at least a decade. If the new design was adequate, it would probably be adopted in a release or two. If it were better, there would be demand to get it to all the well used components. There might still be some components left behind, there's a lot of components. A truly inspiring design might pull everything forward automatically... But that's asking a lot.

tehbeard 4y ago

Would you please care to point to something ACTUALLY useful to end users that came out of the W11 UI "redesign"? Because you cannot legitimately look at the W11 task manager and tell me it was designed with any sort of professional UI/UX in mind. It's busy work to keep a job. And if it is then there's something deeply wrong where no UX theory is being applied, or they're being overruled to make it "app-y".

frosted-flakes 4y ago
The Settings app. It's head-and-shoulders better than the Windows 10 version, or the mess that was Control Panel.
- sitzkrieg 4y ago
  itd be a decent point if it wasnt still missing stuff that's existed as long as windows
  - frosted-flakes 4y ago
    At this point there is very little need to use the old Control Panel applets. There are a few advanced cases that haven't been migrated, but they're also quite rare, and they are still linked from Settings.
  - wtallis 4y ago
    Also, that new Settings app wasn't even in the original release of Windows 11. It was delivered after the fact through an update.
numpad0 4y ago
Problem is fun busywork “creates value” and pays better than boring “actual work” in this absolute meme economy.

Fatnino 4y ago

The windows UI is not a great look either.

FatActor 4y ago

I don't know why it is so pervasive, but programmers think they are inherently good at UX/UI for some reason. And they are very possessive about it. I was until I married a designer, and they actually went to school to study visual composition, balance, color language, etc. I'm fond of saying UIs designed by engineers look exactly like UIs designed by engineers. I'm not saying that all designers are always better than all programmers, but when you've studied visual composition, it shows. I mean just look at the scorching replies you are getting. You definitely offended some people who fall into this "I know better than any stoopid artist" category.

wtallis 4y ago
It sounds like you think the job of a UI designer it to make UIs look pretty. That's exactly the misconception that people are railing against, because it leads to disasters like Windows Vista, 8, and 11. The job of a UI designer is to make the UI usable. Looking pretty in screenshots must always be a lower priority than being functional and accessible.
- FatActor 4y ago
  You are exactly confusing UX and UI. Usability--what you are describing--is the UX or user experience, buttons colors composition affordance is the UI, connecting the buttons to the REST endpoints is frontend, servicing the REST endpoints is backend, making sure the backend is running and so is the gateway is devops. At least that's what it has been for 20+ years.
  - wtallis 4y ago
    > You are exactly confusing UX and UI. > Usability--what you are describing--is the UX or user experience, buttons colors composition affordance is the UI, Considering these to be separate disciplines is just more of the same madness. They're inextricable. > At least that's what it has been for 20+ years. I think it's more that over the past 15-20 years there's been a growing trend of people forgetting that "look and feel" doesn't just mean "look".

rolenthedeep 4y ago

UI design is trending in a bad direction. UIs are being designed as some sort of modern art piece rather than a tool that is designed to be used by humans. My favorite example is VS Code vs Rider. VS code looks like a toy. A big stack of unlabeled vage icons that require a decade of context to intuit. Compiling your program takes three clicks and a context switch away from your code! Unless you're a normal person who hasn't memorized those icons, and then it's six or seven clicks while you fumble through the menus. Rider is a classic ugly UI. everything has labels or tooltips. There's a goddamn toolbar with all your common controls. Building your code requires one single click. Not a single person is going to stare at your landing page like it's a genuine Picasso. Your ui is not going to be placed in the museum of modern art. A UI is a tool. If someone has to ask you how to use it, it's not very good. If your users are fumbling through menus after the first hour, it's a bad design. If a user has to have the documentation open at all times to decode your hieroglyphic icons, it's a bad design. As for my own UI design, the core philosophy is first-order accessibility. If you have to do a task every time you open the program, then that task is accessible with one or zero clicks. If a user asks me what a button does, it gets a better label or a helpful tooltip as well as a mention in the docs. My UIs look like something out of windows 95: simple controls laid out in a grid in clearly delineated functional groups. Everything is labeled and laid out in a way that places the most common controls in VERY OBVIOUS and CONVENIENT locations. It's ugly because it's designed to be used and not looked at. If a user spends time in my program that isn't related to the task they're doing, I've done something wrong. If someone has to ask me how to do something, it means I have to rethink my design. If users are relying on documentation to navigate my program, I need to redesign. I respect ui designers who build helpful and useful UIs. I don't respect designers who drop all text and sprinkle a dozen abstract images on a vast barren wasteland of screen space. ETA: I'm an engineer and I build engineer style UIs: brutal in their simplicity, and utilitarian above all else. Literally not one person who will ever use my programs will care that it's ugly so long as it works. At some point we've lost the idea that programs should be useful more than they are "pretty". It's a trend that I find frankly abhorrent, and I believe it's one of the major factors that's making software as an entire field worse and not better.