6 ms·

100% agreed. Modern software has thrown out the design idioms that were so common throughout the '90s and early '00s in Windows (and Macintosh!) software. I wro

by loeber 3y ago

100% agreed. Modern software has thrown out the design idioms that were so common throughout the '90s and early '00s in Windows (and Macintosh!) software. I wrote a blog post about what happened: https://loeber.substack.com/p/4-bring-back-idiomatic-design https://loeber.substack.com/p/4-bring-back-idiomatic-design

specialist 3y ago
Good OC. Thanks. The Browser Software Era designs are idiomatic. They're based on (CD-ROM era) multimedia and adventure games, not desktop apps. The earliest, most influential web designers had been doing multimedia. The earliest creation tools were tailored for them. That aesthetic has been carried forward, for better or worse.
- andai 3y ago
  Show me one site that still looks/feels like Flash. (Actually, the more the merrier!)
  - brirec 3y ago
    Flash is such a terrible choice for this analogy. Probably the one thing Flash sites all had in common was that they had nothing in common.
    - stanjo 3y ago
      [dead]
- anthk 3y ago
  Multimedia and games were designed to be standalone, they interacted with themselves and that's it. Browsers, OTOH, used to dsplay content to be copied and pasted everywhere. Nowadays there are silos everywhere, and interoperatibiity sucks.
hnick 3y ago
It feels like you jumped past something that I remember being a big deal - The Ribbon. I remember when Office introduced it, and people hated it. It goes against your comment on using words instead of icons. But it seems like a useful solution for programs as feature lists grow and menus (and even sub-menus) become unwieldy so I've made my peace. Personally, I think the Windows OS itself is one of the most problematic offenders. How can you expect better from third party developers, when MS uses at least 3 different UI paradigms for system settings? And F1 doesn't bring up help - it brings up a web browser!
- mihaaly 3y ago
  Since ribbons it is difficult to find what you are looking for, slows down the use of the software. To day I did not make my peace with it.
- cykros 3y ago
  In Excel, I love the ribbon, as someone who looks to make use of some of the more advanced data manipulation and display features it has. If all I wanted to do was handle some basic lists with perhaps a formula here or there, perhaps I'd feel differently. And this is why I DO feel differently about Word, which does take up way too much space with a ribbon full of tools that really aren't of interest. In word, I'm usually writing something, and then spending a small percentage of the time changing formatting. Quite different from Excel, where it's more often than not working with large datasets pulled either from a csv online or directly from a SQL server and the various tools and functions are central to the task at hand. I guess the point is, it really depends on use case as for whether the ribbon makes sense, and it should be left to the user to decide to use the old menu based system or the new ribbon based system based on how much time is spent composing vs. manipulating the existing data. Right tool for the job.
  - hnick 3y ago
    I never thought about that Word vs Excel ribbon dichotomy before, but it makes sense and mirrors how I feel. The good news is we can hide it, at least. In whatever version I have, selecting text popups a mini toolbar up which usually has exactly what I need anyway.
magic_hamster 3y ago
> We are in an era of individually well-designed, useful web applications, and they’re all unique. This sounds pretty great to me. If the applications are well designed, they can do their own thing. I don't see why we need to conform to a centralized idiom. It's great that you can immediately tell which app you're in just from a glance. And also it's more interesting when applications have their own character. I would say idioms should maybe play a role at a company level, i.e. it makes sense that Google products will share design principles. But I wouldn't impose the same principles to all applications just so it will be slightly more familiar to some people.
- allarm 3y ago
  > I don't see why we need to conform to a centralized idiom. Exactly for the same reason why humanity has come up with an idea of standards. Same set of reasons I would even say. > But I wouldn't impose the same principles to all applications just so it will be slightly more familiar to some people. This is because design choices are more important to you than users' comfort and productivity. Some argue that it should be the other way around, though.
  - eviks 3y ago
    > same reason why humanity has come up with an idea of standards and the same reasons are there why humanity has come up with the idea of breaking or ignoring bad standards You can't resolve these type of issues in the abstract, some olden design paradigms are better than what we have now, but then there were plenty of awful decisions "standardized" as well
    - allarm 3y ago
      That’s not “breaking”, that’s “ignorant disregard without sufficient understanding of what the standard actually is”.
      - eviks 3y ago
        Nope, "smart disregard for bad UI practices standardized by ignorant people of the past" is also there
robinsonb5 3y ago
The decline in UI drives me crazy, too. There's some irony in using a screenshot from MS Word in that blog post, given that back in the day Office was notorious for having subtly non-standard UI elements (menus which remove little-used items after a while, destroying muscle memory, custom file dialogs...) - though they were at least using familiar idioms, albeit slightly jarring implementations of them. Of course in typical MS fashion rather than fix it, they moved from subtly non-standard to overtly non-standard UI elements! Personally I blame the shift to mobile as much as the shift to web for this - that's what drove the much-hated Windows 8 interface (leveraging the desktop computer monopoly to try and give the Windows Phone offerings a familiarity advantage), all coinciding with Gnome jumping the shark and Ubuntu shifting to something new. Ironic that during the end of the 'naughties' Apple were the pioners of touchscreen UI on commodity devices, but seemed to be the only player who understood that the desktop was a completely separate space, and should remain so.
- gymbeaux 3y ago
  But these days macOS and iOS are as similar as ever. I’m actually hoping Apple releases an iPad that runs macOS or a MacBook with a touch screen. I think they will do one or both eventually.
- tjoff 3y ago
  > There's some irony in using a screenshot from MS Word in that blog post, given that back in the day Office was notorious for having subtly non-standard UI elements (menus which remove little-used items after a while, destroying muscle memory, custom file dialogs...) This is word/office 97 though, peak office, which came before all of that. Menus removing "unused" items must be one of the worst UI decisions of all time. Imagine how many user stories, thousands of tests and interviews resulted in that abomination. Sometimes you just can't beat common sense. Problem is to know when you can and when you can not.
  - Narishma 3y ago
    > This is word/office 97 though, peak office, which came before all of that. I believe that's Word 2002 in the article.

by loeber 3y ago

specialist 3y ago

Good OC. Thanks. The Browser Software Era designs are idiomatic. They're based on (CD-ROM era) multimedia and adventure games, not desktop apps. The earliest, most influential web designers had been doing multimedia. The earliest creation tools were tailored for them. That aesthetic has been carried forward, for better or worse.

andai 3y ago
Show me one site that still looks/feels like Flash. (Actually, the more the merrier!)
- brirec 3y ago
  Flash is such a terrible choice for this analogy. Probably the one thing Flash sites all had in common was that they had nothing in common.
  - stanjo 3y ago
    [dead]
anthk 3y ago
Multimedia and games were designed to be standalone, they interacted with themselves and that's it. Browsers, OTOH, used to dsplay content to be copied and pasted everywhere. Nowadays there are silos everywhere, and interoperatibiity sucks.

hnick 3y ago

It feels like you jumped past something that I remember being a big deal - The Ribbon. I remember when Office introduced it, and people hated it. It goes against your comment on using words instead of icons. But it seems like a useful solution for programs as feature lists grow and menus (and even sub-menus) become unwieldy so I've made my peace. Personally, I think the Windows OS itself is one of the most problematic offenders. How can you expect better from third party developers, when MS uses at least 3 different UI paradigms for system settings? And F1 doesn't bring up help - it brings up a web browser!

mihaaly 3y ago
Since ribbons it is difficult to find what you are looking for, slows down the use of the software. To day I did not make my peace with it.
cykros 3y ago
In Excel, I love the ribbon, as someone who looks to make use of some of the more advanced data manipulation and display features it has. If all I wanted to do was handle some basic lists with perhaps a formula here or there, perhaps I'd feel differently. And this is why I DO feel differently about Word, which does take up way too much space with a ribbon full of tools that really aren't of interest. In word, I'm usually writing something, and then spending a small percentage of the time changing formatting. Quite different from Excel, where it's more often than not working with large datasets pulled either from a csv online or directly from a SQL server and the various tools and functions are central to the task at hand. I guess the point is, it really depends on use case as for whether the ribbon makes sense, and it should be left to the user to decide to use the old menu based system or the new ribbon based system based on how much time is spent composing vs. manipulating the existing data. Right tool for the job.
- hnick 3y ago
  I never thought about that Word vs Excel ribbon dichotomy before, but it makes sense and mirrors how I feel. The good news is we can hide it, at least. In whatever version I have, selecting text popups a mini toolbar up which usually has exactly what I need anyway.

magic_hamster 3y ago

> We are in an era of individually well-designed, useful web applications, and they’re all unique. This sounds pretty great to me. If the applications are well designed, they can do their own thing. I don't see why we need to conform to a centralized idiom. It's great that you can immediately tell which app you're in just from a glance. And also it's more interesting when applications have their own character. I would say idioms should maybe play a role at a company level, i.e. it makes sense that Google products will share design principles. But I wouldn't impose the same principles to all applications just so it will be slightly more familiar to some people.

allarm 3y ago
> I don't see why we need to conform to a centralized idiom. Exactly for the same reason why humanity has come up with an idea of standards. Same set of reasons I would even say. > But I wouldn't impose the same principles to all applications just so it will be slightly more familiar to some people. This is because design choices are more important to you than users' comfort and productivity. Some argue that it should be the other way around, though.
- eviks 3y ago
  > same reason why humanity has come up with an idea of standards and the same reasons are there why humanity has come up with the idea of breaking or ignoring bad standards You can't resolve these type of issues in the abstract, some olden design paradigms are better than what we have now, but then there were plenty of awful decisions "standardized" as well
  - allarm 3y ago
    That’s not “breaking”, that’s “ignorant disregard without sufficient understanding of what the standard actually is”.
    - eviks 3y ago
      Nope, "smart disregard for bad UI practices standardized by ignorant people of the past" is also there

robinsonb5 3y ago

The decline in UI drives me crazy, too. There's some irony in using a screenshot from MS Word in that blog post, given that back in the day Office was notorious for having subtly non-standard UI elements (menus which remove little-used items after a while, destroying muscle memory, custom file dialogs...) - though they were at least using familiar idioms, albeit slightly jarring implementations of them. Of course in typical MS fashion rather than fix it, they moved from subtly non-standard to overtly non-standard UI elements! Personally I blame the shift to mobile as much as the shift to web for this - that's what drove the much-hated Windows 8 interface (leveraging the desktop computer monopoly to try and give the Windows Phone offerings a familiarity advantage), all coinciding with Gnome jumping the shark and Ubuntu shifting to something new. Ironic that during the end of the 'naughties' Apple were the pioners of touchscreen UI on commodity devices, but seemed to be the only player who understood that the desktop was a completely separate space, and should remain so.

gymbeaux 3y ago
But these days macOS and iOS are as similar as ever. I’m actually hoping Apple releases an iPad that runs macOS or a MacBook with a touch screen. I think they will do one or both eventually.
tjoff 3y ago
> There's some irony in using a screenshot from MS Word in that blog post, given that back in the day Office was notorious for having subtly non-standard UI elements (menus which remove little-used items after a while, destroying muscle memory, custom file dialogs...) This is word/office 97 though, peak office, which came before all of that. Menus removing "unused" items must be one of the worst UI decisions of all time. Imagine how many user stories, thousands of tests and interviews resulted in that abomination. Sometimes you just can't beat common sense. Problem is to know when you can and when you can not.
- Narishma 3y ago
  > This is word/office 97 though, peak office, which came before all of that. I believe that's Word 2002 in the article.