4 ms·

It's pretty established that 90s UI was peak UI. Everything about modern UX is wrong. Just read up on recent UI "improvements" on Firefox, GNOME, Android statu

It's pretty established that 90s UI was peak UI. Everything about modern UX is wrong. Just read up on recent UI "improvements" on Firefox, GNOME, Android status-bar etc. I blame it on job positions that need to churn out "change" for the sake of relevancy. You can't just solve UI, right?

wildrhythms 3y ago
We reward 'shipping features' over actually making the product work the way people expect.
kaba0 3y ago
Funnily enough the new GNOME is quite great according to the listed requirements - everything is discoverable, Fitt’s law is taken into account (the corner has infinite size), but at the same time it is very good for power users, you get super+search, super+mouse wheel to change between desktops, and the best, really smooth gestures on laptops to change between neighboring virtual desktops. If you add that the whole thing is extensible, I really feel like all its criticism comes from “it’s different than what I used”, if not more malicious views.
- bityard 3y ago
  Wow, I disagree with you on almost every point! :) Which is not a bad thing, people naturally have different perspectives after all. I tried to like GNOME for literally years, but as a power user found that it got in my way more often than not: * Features that I got accustomed to and used on a daily basis got removed in order to clean up some module or another, under the justification that "nobody used it anyway." Well, nobody asked me apparently? Requests to bring these features back were politely declined or ignored. * GNOME seemed to go all-in on a "hybrid computing" experience because the developers believed that the future was portable devices that you could both carry around with you and then dock to a keyboard and screen at work or home. That never materialized (or hasn't materialized yet) so now a lot of GNOME functionality is stuck _between_ these two worlds and doesn't mesh cleanly with either. * The GNOME devs' answer to functionality not invented here is to just make an extension for it. Except that installing extensions is (or was?) a burdensome affair, and GNOME breaks the extension API often enough that you might not be able to upgrade your GNOME if the extensions you use haven't been updated by their maintainers. * As a desktop user, I want to be able to resize windows. But, there are no longer any window borders. Instead, there is an area that you can grab with the mouse to resize the window. But it's invisible, you can't _see_ it unless you hover your mouse over it. And it's on the _inside_ of the window, meaning it actually covers up application controls. Thus, you can place your mouse cursor directly over a scroll bar, click, start dragging, and find yourself resizing the window instead of scrolling the document. * Don't get me started on the thicc window title bars. * I prefer focus-follows-mouse and this is just super-duper broken in GNOME, in a number of ways. I think software developers would do well to get away from the idea that their one project can possibly be suitable for all users. We clearly have users with different goals and levels of experience and it's not a bad thing to more narrowly target those users.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    Your first point is literally what I mentioned, “it’s not what I’m used to”. Gnome got completely revamped, and that in itself should not be a criticism of the new thing itself. Gnome did take into account this hybrid way, but as I mentioned didn’t compromise on anything for that. It’s perfectly usable on both desktop and laptop. Gnome is an opinionated desktop environment, and the more customization you allow, the bigger the surface area of your software is. I think gnome struck a good balance between being customizable to a degree, but not making their unpaid job all that harder. I use vanilla gnome for what its worth. As a power user you likely have your hand on the keyboard, so a resize is just super+right mouse, which has a huge target area of almost the whole window. Same for moving. I have tried focus follows many years ago, but can’t say anything about its current state.
famahar 3y ago
Was it really peak UI? Software is so much more complex today and accessibility and UX is actually a thing now. I feel like if you tried to make a modern program with a 90s UI approach, it would have glaring flaws.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Software is so much more complex today It's not, for the most part. But it probably depends on what specific software we're talking about.
gilbetron 3y ago
> It's pretty established that 90s UI was peak UI Huh? No way I'd go back to the 90s for UIs. I'm not saying our modern UIs are perfect, and there is a lot of changes for fashion reasons, but there are generally far better these days on whole.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  I want to move to the alternate universe you are writing this from.
  - gilbetron 3y ago
    Well, either you were there in the 90s and had a very different experience than I did, or you weren't there in the 90s and are romanticizing what you have read about UIs back then. I mean, you can strip out a vast amount of functionality from a modern UI and get back to the simplicity of the 90s, but you'll hardly get anything done.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      I was certainly there in the '90s, and I too think UX was generally better then than it is now.

wildrhythms 3y ago

We reward 'shipping features' over actually making the product work the way people expect.

kaba0 3y ago

Funnily enough the new GNOME is quite great according to the listed requirements - everything is discoverable, Fitt’s law is taken into account (the corner has infinite size), but at the same time it is very good for power users, you get super+search, super+mouse wheel to change between desktops, and the best, really smooth gestures on laptops to change between neighboring virtual desktops. If you add that the whole thing is extensible, I really feel like all its criticism comes from “it’s different than what I used”, if not more malicious views.

bityard 3y ago
Wow, I disagree with you on almost every point! :) Which is not a bad thing, people naturally have different perspectives after all. I tried to like GNOME for literally years, but as a power user found that it got in my way more often than not: * Features that I got accustomed to and used on a daily basis got removed in order to clean up some module or another, under the justification that "nobody used it anyway." Well, nobody asked me apparently? Requests to bring these features back were politely declined or ignored. * GNOME seemed to go all-in on a "hybrid computing" experience because the developers believed that the future was portable devices that you could both carry around with you and then dock to a keyboard and screen at work or home. That never materialized (or hasn't materialized yet) so now a lot of GNOME functionality is stuck _between_ these two worlds and doesn't mesh cleanly with either. * The GNOME devs' answer to functionality not invented here is to just make an extension for it. Except that installing extensions is (or was?) a burdensome affair, and GNOME breaks the extension API often enough that you might not be able to upgrade your GNOME if the extensions you use haven't been updated by their maintainers. * As a desktop user, I want to be able to resize windows. But, there are no longer any window borders. Instead, there is an area that you can grab with the mouse to resize the window. But it's invisible, you can't _see_ it unless you hover your mouse over it. And it's on the _inside_ of the window, meaning it actually covers up application controls. Thus, you can place your mouse cursor directly over a scroll bar, click, start dragging, and find yourself resizing the window instead of scrolling the document. * Don't get me started on the thicc window title bars. * I prefer focus-follows-mouse and this is just super-duper broken in GNOME, in a number of ways. I think software developers would do well to get away from the idea that their one project can possibly be suitable for all users. We clearly have users with different goals and levels of experience and it's not a bad thing to more narrowly target those users.
- kaba0 3y ago
  Your first point is literally what I mentioned, “it’s not what I’m used to”. Gnome got completely revamped, and that in itself should not be a criticism of the new thing itself. Gnome did take into account this hybrid way, but as I mentioned didn’t compromise on anything for that. It’s perfectly usable on both desktop and laptop. Gnome is an opinionated desktop environment, and the more customization you allow, the bigger the surface area of your software is. I think gnome struck a good balance between being customizable to a degree, but not making their unpaid job all that harder. I use vanilla gnome for what its worth. As a power user you likely have your hand on the keyboard, so a resize is just super+right mouse, which has a huge target area of almost the whole window. Same for moving. I have tried focus follows many years ago, but can’t say anything about its current state.

famahar 3y ago

Was it really peak UI? Software is so much more complex today and accessibility and UX is actually a thing now. I feel like if you tried to make a modern program with a 90s UI approach, it would have glaring flaws.

JohnFen 3y ago
> Software is so much more complex today It's not, for the most part. But it probably depends on what specific software we're talking about.

gilbetron 3y ago

> It's pretty established that 90s UI was peak UI Huh? No way I'd go back to the 90s for UIs. I'm not saying our modern UIs are perfect, and there is a lot of changes for fashion reasons, but there are generally far better these days on whole.

shrimp_emoji 3y ago
I want to move to the alternate universe you are writing this from.
- gilbetron 3y ago
  Well, either you were there in the 90s and had a very different experience than I did, or you weren't there in the 90s and are romanticizing what you have read about UIs back then. I mean, you can strip out a vast amount of functionality from a modern UI and get back to the simplicity of the 90s, but you'll hardly get anything done.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I was certainly there in the '90s, and I too think UX was generally better then than it is now.