4 ms·

I don't care if it feels like a place to get real work done or not. Whether I do get real work done matters of course, but I want it to look like a really nicel

I don't care if it feels like a place to get real work done or not. Whether I do get real work done matters of course, but I want it to look like a really nicely designed space too. And by nice design I mean beautiful to look at, not merely "designed to get work done" in the industrial design sense. Just like working in an office effectively shouldn't mean it has to be decorated with complete utilitarianism at every turn, nor should by screen. Am I strange to tend to like app and OS redesigns if they make things look fresh, even when they might slow me down slightly, or even slow my machine down? I just wanted to be the contrarian voice here. Redesign all you want. It's ok to say "Let's choose just a little bit of form over function here". I usually like the new better than the old. No, Win2000 wasn't the pinnacle of Windows neither in function nor design. There I said it.

cuddlyogre 4y ago
The occasional refresh is expected. Revamping the UI every two years is not. It makes it impossible to do anything other than watch youtube. Supporting a network with a mixture of OSs that kind of match but not really is an exercise in frustration.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
tjrDL6MjB2Zwwa 4y ago
The problem is that it's gone too far to the other side, aesthetics with little respect for function. It's akin to that office that has no desk because it would ruin the aesthetics. The desk has to be there, your challenge is (should be) to design around the functional requirements.
- atoav 4y ago
  Good designers try to reach a good solution where multiple (seemingly opposed to each other) requirements are covered in such a way, they enhance each other's qualities. That being said, designers work with customers and as a former freelance designer I can tell you that wrangling the customer is basically half the job. This is true even in a company setting. Design is one of those fields where everybody thinks they know what works and everybody thinks they have taste (spoiler alert: they don't). I ultimately stopped working in the field because you literally had to manipulate customers into making okay choices instead of horrible ones and even then you had the occasional CEO just overriding weeks of work with some bullshit idea he had on the shitter. Everybody blames designers, but designers rarely make the choices that lead to the results everybody sees. Designers just try to get paid.
  - alkonaut 4y ago
    I don't know who told me that this is a common thing among designers but it does ring true to me: The designer described how every time they had to show a draft for a stakeholder such as a client or manager, they polished their design and then added some obvious design flaw like making something clearly off-center that should have been centered or similar. Then when they show their initial design, the manager says "Looks good but make that thing centered properly". If the design had been flawless, the manager would find something else to object to, which would invariably make the design worse. So showing off the imperfect design leads to the perfect outcome: the manager or customer gets to feel like they contributed to the design but the design stays the way the designer intended.
    - throwaway744678 4y ago
      I first saw that idea mentioned in a (deleted) 2010 StackOverflow thread [1]. [1] http://archive.today/EeAw7 http://archive.today/EeAw7
      - mananaysiempre 4y ago
        This trick was used against Soviet censors as far back as 1968[1]. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062759/trivia?item=tr1788197 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062759/trivia?item=tr1788197
    - toyg 4y ago
      This is one of the Laws of Consulting, iirc, and it applies to anything, not just design: find something for your counterparts to object to and hand it to them, so that they can feel empowered. More broadly, it's just political management of assemblies. Most governments do the same with controversial legislation: attach some wildly-outrageous clause to something slightly-less-outrageous, focus opposition on that, then strike it out. You then have the space to pass the bulk of it, which was your real objective all along, while claiming you "listened".
  - tjrDL6MjB2Zwwa 4y ago
    By designers I mean people who are involved in the design, I don't care what their official title is. Having said that, at no point do I really believe the role isn't involved in decisions like hiding the randomize button in iphone music player.
gambiting 4y ago
>>And by nice design I mean beautiful to look at, not merely "designed to get work done" in the industrial design sense. Yes, so.....win98/win2000 interface. I don't have any idea why you'd look at the attrocity that is win 11 and say it's "beautiful". It's not. It's mostly just empty coloured boxes that don't have any inherent meaning.
- alkonaut 4y ago
  It depends on what parts we're looking at I guess, but I think flat looks good these days, I don't mind the rounded corners, I like the use of the palette in Win11 compared to Win10 (And definitely compared to Win98/2000 etc. which used too much contrast). A lot of this is simply because the newer designs are based on large screens while Win98/2000 was hampered by the requirement to being readable at 800x600 and 256 colors. Using gradients, negative space and was a luxury not afforded in 2000 but it does help.
  - RedShift1 4y ago
    In the Win98/2000 days 32 bit color was already commonplace. 1024x768 was also becoming mainstream.
    - dfox 4y ago
      In fact Windows 2000 use different color pallete than 9x as it does not try to fit into the 16 color RGBI CGA palette. The difference is subtle, but significant.
- d4rti 4y ago
  Is there a good theme for KDE that hews closely to the w2k/w2k3 look and feel? I have fond memories of using wxpx64 which was basically w2k3 desktop edition.
- ilyt 4y ago
  >Yes, so.....win98/win2000 interface. I honestly hate how it looks and I think it is fucking ugly. Yet I still defaulted to switching back to it (back when that was simple, don't think it's an option in win 10 anymore) just because the new one was so anti-functional. It was that bad. I wouldn't be surprised if many users did once they knew that it was even an option. Peak of "traditional" while still looking decent was honestly XFCE for me. Since then I went full geek and set up i3 tiling manager with basically workspace/screen per app, as I realized near-everything I do is just "running 2 full screen apps on 2 screens" so I optimized for that.
pedrogpimenta 4y ago
> Am I strange to tend to like app and OS redesigns if they make things look fresh, even when they might slow me down slightly, or even slow my machine down? It's not strange to like redesigns. But if they slow you or your machine down? Yes, it's strange! Would you prefer a car that changed every year to a more "fresh" design, but each year make it harder to open the door and would let you go 5(km/m)/h slower? I definitely wouldn't and it's strange that you would, yes.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ddalex 4y ago
  > make it harder to open the door You mean like in the BMW i8 ? https://www.youtube.com/shorts/T-upswNkRqE https://www.youtube.com/shorts/T-upswNkRqE
  - pedrogpimenta 4y ago
    Exactly!
- jordanwallwork 4y ago
  I guess it would depend on what you're looking to get out of your car. I only open the door twice - once to get in, once to get out - so a small nuisance like being harder to open wouldn't bother me as it's only a fraction of the time spent engaging with the car. However I have family members with terrible arthiritis who struggle opening car doors anyway, so it'd definitely be a factor for them. I'm also not typically in a rush when I'm driving, so if the car is a little slower that doesn't bother me as much as whether I'm comfortable and enjoying the drive. Or even if the car was no more comfortable, but just looked better, I might actually feel some pride in it and that would give me a lift and result in an improvement to my mood. If my goal was to get from A-B as fast as possible though, then it absolutely would bother me.
  - pedrogpimenta 4y ago
    I agree with this. Regular computer users are fin and like these UI changes. Most professional users don't, because it hinders them. You want to have all the horsepower available and to be able to work quickly, not prettier. But I guess we're the minority!
prohobo 4y ago
What you're talking about is "juicy" design. It's what takes UX up a notch and makes applications a pleasure to use, similar to games. I think what people are trying to do is combine the legibility of Windows 98 design with the juiciness of modern UIs, which as far as I know hasn't been done yet and is why this keeps getting brought up.
Santosh83 4y ago
Your point is very valid except aesthetic redesign shouldn't impose performance penalties. Or if they do, they should ideally be opt in settings. Other than that, yes, computers can also be used as a creative space to explore art & aesthetics. They don't have to be only focused on brutalist functionality. But UI updates in many, even most, cases, somehow manage to bloat the app or impose tiny inefficiencies, which over several such updates, tend to add up. But this is a secondary concern to the primary one with periodic UI redesign, which is to make the app more and more unintuitive to use, even though the very reason for these redesigns is the opposite end. This I feel happens when UI refreshes are done for their own sake rather than genuine need, and also when adhering too religiously to the prevailing industry UI fashion trends, and no real user testing/feedback.
- ilyt 4y ago
  Right but form follows function should be adhered 100% with no exceptions for software which only use case is to enable running and quick navigation between other pieces of software and related stuff. If your artstyle(s) doesn't fit usability patterns, change it or find someone else.
forgotmypw17 4y ago
I can't say that I agree at all. My computer is sort of like a toolshed. There's a workbench. There are some tools hanging up on the walls. There are some storage cabinets. Whether I designed it or someone else, I'm here to work, and over time I get used to how things are arranged. If tomorrow I come in and everything is different, it will be difficult for me to find my tools, and my efficiency will be reduced. If the tools are rearranged in a way that makes them permanently less efficient, I may get irate. It's different if we're talking about the living room or even the bathroom. It's different if it's my casual clothes or the garden. But my computer is none of those things, it is my workstation. And if anything gets in the way of that, I get rid of it and find a replacement.
- jq-r 4y ago
  I like your analogy. I got a shed myself and I like working on my bikes. Got loads of tools and it is so relaxing and satisfactory finding the tools you need at exactly the same place you left them. When my brother and me were living together, I would get furious when he would leave tools somewhere else (and vice versa) so I feel the pain. Thinking a bit about this though, say Microsoft could argue that the toolshed isn't really yours. That you're merely renting/"licensing" it and they reserve the right to rearrange their tools at a whim, and they usually won't touch tools you own. I don't know how to counter-argue this though.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    I think if Microsoft - and Apple, and an increasing number of software vendors - were being a bit more honest, they'd argue the computer isn't a toolshed in the first place. It's a theme park. You're supposed to "use it" to enjoy a controlled experience, and get monetized along the way. You can see it in the language used in UI design these days. It's all about user experience and their journey. Not much about what they want to actually do with help from software.
  - forgotmypw17 4y ago
    > Thinking a bit about this though, say Microsoft could argue that the toolshed isn't really yours. That you're merely renting/"licensing" it and they reserve the right to rearrange their tools at a whim, and they usually won't touch tools you own. I don't know how to counter-argue this though. This is exactly the case, and why I don't use their toolshed anymore.
usrusr 4y ago
You write as if you assumed that people back then did not care for aesthetics at all. But they did, quite a lot actually. Those designers just happened to be lucky to be working in an era when any novelty desires they or anyone in the audience had could be perfectly satisfied just by using the possibilities of then-latest technology. Very much unlike these days, inn which novelty is limited to details and subtleties unless they force it in destructive ways. Which apparently "they" really like to do, and get the reaction they deserve. And while we are into ending a post with random opinion statements, yes, 2k was the pinnacle of Windows design.
seydor 4y ago
Yes some people want their computer interface to fade into the background. I want my own photos and wallapper to be more beautiful than the computer. Too much ornamentation is not a good thing. The contrast is better.
yreg 4y ago
I agree with you that design and aesthetics matter, but I think Win 98 looked great.
Ruq 4y ago
Just remember that if you have a little inconvenience from a redesign, that regular non-technical users have that inconvenience magnified a hundred times over.
DavidPeiffer 4y ago
>Let's choose just a little bit of form over function here All I can think about is the Windows 10 Calculator. Prior to Windows 10, you could type Windows Key + R, Calc, and immediately type my equation. Amazing for when you're in the middle of a meeting and just need to calculate something right away. But now it's a stupid app that takes a few seconds to load regardless of how fast your computer is. Needless bloat which seemed to have only only made things look pretty.
- hulitu 4y ago
  The best feature: it will fill the screen. Good luck using the mouse.

cuddlyogre 4y ago

The occasional refresh is expected. Revamping the UI every two years is not. It makes it impossible to do anything other than watch youtube. Supporting a network with a mixture of OSs that kind of match but not really is an exercise in frustration.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

tjrDL6MjB2Zwwa 4y ago

The problem is that it's gone too far to the other side, aesthetics with little respect for function. It's akin to that office that has no desk because it would ruin the aesthetics. The desk has to be there, your challenge is (should be) to design around the functional requirements.

atoav 4y ago
Good designers try to reach a good solution where multiple (seemingly opposed to each other) requirements are covered in such a way, they enhance each other's qualities. That being said, designers work with customers and as a former freelance designer I can tell you that wrangling the customer is basically half the job. This is true even in a company setting. Design is one of those fields where everybody thinks they know what works and everybody thinks they have taste (spoiler alert: they don't). I ultimately stopped working in the field because you literally had to manipulate customers into making okay choices instead of horrible ones and even then you had the occasional CEO just overriding weeks of work with some bullshit idea he had on the shitter. Everybody blames designers, but designers rarely make the choices that lead to the results everybody sees. Designers just try to get paid.
- alkonaut 4y ago
  I don't know who told me that this is a common thing among designers but it does ring true to me: The designer described how every time they had to show a draft for a stakeholder such as a client or manager, they polished their design and then added some obvious design flaw like making something clearly off-center that should have been centered or similar. Then when they show their initial design, the manager says "Looks good but make that thing centered properly". If the design had been flawless, the manager would find something else to object to, which would invariably make the design worse. So showing off the imperfect design leads to the perfect outcome: the manager or customer gets to feel like they contributed to the design but the design stays the way the designer intended.
  - throwaway744678 4y ago
    I first saw that idea mentioned in a (deleted) 2010 StackOverflow thread [1]. [1] http://archive.today/EeAw7 http://archive.today/EeAw7
    - mananaysiempre 4y ago
      This trick was used against Soviet censors as far back as 1968[1]. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062759/trivia?item=tr1788197 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062759/trivia?item=tr1788197
  - toyg 4y ago
    This is one of the Laws of Consulting, iirc, and it applies to anything, not just design: find something for your counterparts to object to and hand it to them, so that they can feel empowered. More broadly, it's just political management of assemblies. Most governments do the same with controversial legislation: attach some wildly-outrageous clause to something slightly-less-outrageous, focus opposition on that, then strike it out. You then have the space to pass the bulk of it, which was your real objective all along, while claiming you "listened".
- tjrDL6MjB2Zwwa 4y ago
  By designers I mean people who are involved in the design, I don't care what their official title is. Having said that, at no point do I really believe the role isn't involved in decisions like hiding the randomize button in iphone music player.

gambiting 4y ago

>>And by nice design I mean beautiful to look at, not merely "designed to get work done" in the industrial design sense. Yes, so.....win98/win2000 interface. I don't have any idea why you'd look at the attrocity that is win 11 and say it's "beautiful". It's not. It's mostly just empty coloured boxes that don't have any inherent meaning.

alkonaut 4y ago
It depends on what parts we're looking at I guess, but I think flat looks good these days, I don't mind the rounded corners, I like the use of the palette in Win11 compared to Win10 (And definitely compared to Win98/2000 etc. which used too much contrast). A lot of this is simply because the newer designs are based on large screens while Win98/2000 was hampered by the requirement to being readable at 800x600 and 256 colors. Using gradients, negative space and was a luxury not afforded in 2000 but it does help.
- RedShift1 4y ago
  In the Win98/2000 days 32 bit color was already commonplace. 1024x768 was also becoming mainstream.
  - dfox 4y ago
    In fact Windows 2000 use different color pallete than 9x as it does not try to fit into the 16 color RGBI CGA palette. The difference is subtle, but significant.
d4rti 4y ago
Is there a good theme for KDE that hews closely to the w2k/w2k3 look and feel? I have fond memories of using wxpx64 which was basically w2k3 desktop edition.
ilyt 4y ago
>Yes, so.....win98/win2000 interface. I honestly hate how it looks and I think it is fucking ugly. Yet I still defaulted to switching back to it (back when that was simple, don't think it's an option in win 10 anymore) just because the new one was so anti-functional. It was that bad. I wouldn't be surprised if many users did once they knew that it was even an option. Peak of "traditional" while still looking decent was honestly XFCE for me. Since then I went full geek and set up i3 tiling manager with basically workspace/screen per app, as I realized near-everything I do is just "running 2 full screen apps on 2 screens" so I optimized for that.

pedrogpimenta 4y ago

> Am I strange to tend to like app and OS redesigns if they make things look fresh, even when they might slow me down slightly, or even slow my machine down? It's not strange to like redesigns. But if they slow you or your machine down? Yes, it's strange! Would you prefer a car that changed every year to a more "fresh" design, but each year make it harder to open the door and would let you go 5(km/m)/h slower? I definitely wouldn't and it's strange that you would, yes.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ddalex 4y ago
> make it harder to open the door You mean like in the BMW i8 ? https://www.youtube.com/shorts/T-upswNkRqE https://www.youtube.com/shorts/T-upswNkRqE
- pedrogpimenta 4y ago
  Exactly!
jordanwallwork 4y ago
I guess it would depend on what you're looking to get out of your car. I only open the door twice - once to get in, once to get out - so a small nuisance like being harder to open wouldn't bother me as it's only a fraction of the time spent engaging with the car. However I have family members with terrible arthiritis who struggle opening car doors anyway, so it'd definitely be a factor for them. I'm also not typically in a rush when I'm driving, so if the car is a little slower that doesn't bother me as much as whether I'm comfortable and enjoying the drive. Or even if the car was no more comfortable, but just looked better, I might actually feel some pride in it and that would give me a lift and result in an improvement to my mood. If my goal was to get from A-B as fast as possible though, then it absolutely would bother me.
- pedrogpimenta 4y ago
  I agree with this. Regular computer users are fin and like these UI changes. Most professional users don't, because it hinders them. You want to have all the horsepower available and to be able to work quickly, not prettier. But I guess we're the minority!

prohobo 4y ago

What you're talking about is "juicy" design. It's what takes UX up a notch and makes applications a pleasure to use, similar to games. I think what people are trying to do is combine the legibility of Windows 98 design with the juiciness of modern UIs, which as far as I know hasn't been done yet and is why this keeps getting brought up.

Santosh83 4y ago

Your point is very valid except aesthetic redesign shouldn't impose performance penalties. Or if they do, they should ideally be opt in settings. Other than that, yes, computers can also be used as a creative space to explore art & aesthetics. They don't have to be only focused on brutalist functionality. But UI updates in many, even most, cases, somehow manage to bloat the app or impose tiny inefficiencies, which over several such updates, tend to add up. But this is a secondary concern to the primary one with periodic UI redesign, which is to make the app more and more unintuitive to use, even though the very reason for these redesigns is the opposite end. This I feel happens when UI refreshes are done for their own sake rather than genuine need, and also when adhering too religiously to the prevailing industry UI fashion trends, and no real user testing/feedback.

ilyt 4y ago
Right but form follows function should be adhered 100% with no exceptions for software which only use case is to enable running and quick navigation between other pieces of software and related stuff. If your artstyle(s) doesn't fit usability patterns, change it or find someone else.

forgotmypw17 4y ago

I can't say that I agree at all. My computer is sort of like a toolshed. There's a workbench. There are some tools hanging up on the walls. There are some storage cabinets. Whether I designed it or someone else, I'm here to work, and over time I get used to how things are arranged. If tomorrow I come in and everything is different, it will be difficult for me to find my tools, and my efficiency will be reduced. If the tools are rearranged in a way that makes them permanently less efficient, I may get irate. It's different if we're talking about the living room or even the bathroom. It's different if it's my casual clothes or the garden. But my computer is none of those things, it is my workstation. And if anything gets in the way of that, I get rid of it and find a replacement.

jq-r 4y ago
I like your analogy. I got a shed myself and I like working on my bikes. Got loads of tools and it is so relaxing and satisfactory finding the tools you need at exactly the same place you left them. When my brother and me were living together, I would get furious when he would leave tools somewhere else (and vice versa) so I feel the pain. Thinking a bit about this though, say Microsoft could argue that the toolshed isn't really yours. That you're merely renting/"licensing" it and they reserve the right to rearrange their tools at a whim, and they usually won't touch tools you own. I don't know how to counter-argue this though.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  I think if Microsoft - and Apple, and an increasing number of software vendors - were being a bit more honest, they'd argue the computer isn't a toolshed in the first place. It's a theme park. You're supposed to "use it" to enjoy a controlled experience, and get monetized along the way. You can see it in the language used in UI design these days. It's all about user experience and their journey. Not much about what they want to actually do with help from software.
- forgotmypw17 4y ago
  > Thinking a bit about this though, say Microsoft could argue that the toolshed isn't really yours. That you're merely renting/"licensing" it and they reserve the right to rearrange their tools at a whim, and they usually won't touch tools you own. I don't know how to counter-argue this though. This is exactly the case, and why I don't use their toolshed anymore.

usrusr 4y ago

You write as if you assumed that people back then did not care for aesthetics at all. But they did, quite a lot actually. Those designers just happened to be lucky to be working in an era when any novelty desires they or anyone in the audience had could be perfectly satisfied just by using the possibilities of then-latest technology. Very much unlike these days, inn which novelty is limited to details and subtleties unless they force it in destructive ways. Which apparently "they" really like to do, and get the reaction they deserve. And while we are into ending a post with random opinion statements, yes, 2k was the pinnacle of Windows design.

seydor 4y ago

Yes some people want their computer interface to fade into the background. I want my own photos and wallapper to be more beautiful than the computer. Too much ornamentation is not a good thing. The contrast is better.

yreg 4y ago

I agree with you that design and aesthetics matter, but I think Win 98 looked great.

Ruq 4y ago

Just remember that if you have a little inconvenience from a redesign, that regular non-technical users have that inconvenience magnified a hundred times over.

DavidPeiffer 4y ago

>Let's choose just a little bit of form over function here All I can think about is the Windows 10 Calculator. Prior to Windows 10, you could type Windows Key + R, Calc, and immediately type my equation. Amazing for when you're in the middle of a meeting and just need to calculate something right away. But now it's a stupid app that takes a few seconds to load regardless of how fast your computer is. Needless bloat which seemed to have only only made things look pretty.

hulitu 4y ago
The best feature: it will fill the screen. Good luck using the mouse.