3 ms·

I think the whitespace issue is mostly due to the ubiquity of touch interfaces. Even a good chunk of laptops do have touchscreens now, so deskop designers have

I think the whitespace issue is mostly due to the ubiquity of touch interfaces. Even a good chunk of laptops do have touchscreens now, so deskop designers have to consider them even if they didn't eat the adaptive pill. With computer mouse you can use much smaller and denser controls of course.

dumdumchan 3y ago
Windows phones are gone. Why would they want to make MS Office touch friendly? I don't understand why they removed the lines between buttons. This is what made the old UI look organized.
- citrin_ru 3y ago
  Mobile first touch friendly design dominates designer minds. It looks modern and fresh. Desktop friendly UI unfortunately looks dated, old-school and rarely used nowadays even for desktop only apps.
  - Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
    I predict that in a couple years, someone will produce an app that uses old "dated" UI styles and people will suddenly praise it for being clear and intuitive. Maybe I'm just dreaming.
- tiagod 3y ago
  >Windows phones are gone. Why would they want to make MS Office touch friendly? To sell Microsoft Surface, among other things.
- dspillett 3y ago
  > Windows phones are gone. Why would they want to make MS Office touch friendly? Windows Phones are gone, but people still use Office on touch devices: MS Surface tablet, and other manufacture's Windows tablets or hybrid laptop/tablet devices, or just touch-screen laptops¹ which are a thing, and increasingly the web versions of office that might be used on anything modern including iPads. > I don't understand why they removed the lines between buttons. The usual reason for things like this is that it makes things look cleaner, or more modern⁴, which it does. Though IMO it has a detrimental effect on discoverability (it that a button, a link, or just some text?!) and navigation, even for the modern touch-first idea it is sometimes aiming at (where are the edges of what I can touch?). My biggest irritation with modern UIs is focus indication on the desktop. It has been a problem for many years but only gets worse as time goes on: it can be difficult to see at a glance, especially over multiple screens, which window currently has input focus because many app families use different window decorations and even within one app the active/not distinction can come down to the difference between one shade of off-white/black and another shade of off-white/black (MS Office and Firefox are both guilty of this). -- [1] I know people really like touching their screen where possible instead of using a mouse or trackpad, I sometimes find it preferable myself² though not for Office & similar tasks. [2] and for the most part I'm an old-fashioned keyboard-or-die person, regularly bemoaning bad design decisions³ (or simple laziness of not implementing standard shortcuts) that force me to leave the keyboard to mouse/trackpad/touch [3] which can't be good for accessibility reasons, as well as not-irritating-the-like-of-me reasons [4] though given how quickly fashion changes, I'm of the opinion that “to look modern” should never be a design consideration in a product intended to last into next year!
mihaaly 3y ago
Designers design UI for touchscreen even when there is no touchscreen in sight? That's smart! : )
ajsnigrutin 3y ago
But we're just weak humans and not strong gorillas to hold our hands up and horizontal to do stuff on a laptop touchscreen for hours... just try doing some excell stuff, where you need to click the cells many, many, many times and hold our hand up for that. And if using a touchscreen for that is a pain, then at least optimize for a mouse instead of something noone will actually use.
- stanjo 3y ago
  [dead]
wildrhythms 3y ago
Not just touch interfaces, but designers have been tasked with making a UI that works on both mobile and desktop, using the same BRANDING, and that branding comes in the form of UI elements. Managers don't really care about the user experience until the thing conveys the brand first and foremost. So the lower common denominator (mobile) which demands the most whitespace seeps its way onto every other user surface.

dumdumchan 3y ago

Windows phones are gone. Why would they want to make MS Office touch friendly? I don't understand why they removed the lines between buttons. This is what made the old UI look organized.

citrin_ru 3y ago
Mobile first touch friendly design dominates designer minds. It looks modern and fresh. Desktop friendly UI unfortunately looks dated, old-school and rarely used nowadays even for desktop only apps.
- Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
  I predict that in a couple years, someone will produce an app that uses old "dated" UI styles and people will suddenly praise it for being clear and intuitive. Maybe I'm just dreaming.
tiagod 3y ago
>Windows phones are gone. Why would they want to make MS Office touch friendly? To sell Microsoft Surface, among other things.
dspillett 3y ago
> Windows phones are gone. Why would they want to make MS Office touch friendly? Windows Phones are gone, but people still use Office on touch devices: MS Surface tablet, and other manufacture's Windows tablets or hybrid laptop/tablet devices, or just touch-screen laptops¹ which are a thing, and increasingly the web versions of office that might be used on anything modern including iPads. > I don't understand why they removed the lines between buttons. The usual reason for things like this is that it makes things look cleaner, or more modern⁴, which it does. Though IMO it has a detrimental effect on discoverability (it that a button, a link, or just some text?!) and navigation, even for the modern touch-first idea it is sometimes aiming at (where are the edges of what I can touch?). My biggest irritation with modern UIs is focus indication on the desktop. It has been a problem for many years but only gets worse as time goes on: it can be difficult to see at a glance, especially over multiple screens, which window currently has input focus because many app families use different window decorations and even within one app the active/not distinction can come down to the difference between one shade of off-white/black and another shade of off-white/black (MS Office and Firefox are both guilty of this). -- [1] I know people really like touching their screen where possible instead of using a mouse or trackpad, I sometimes find it preferable myself² though not for Office & similar tasks. [2] and for the most part I'm an old-fashioned keyboard-or-die person, regularly bemoaning bad design decisions³ (or simple laziness of not implementing standard shortcuts) that force me to leave the keyboard to mouse/trackpad/touch [3] which can't be good for accessibility reasons, as well as not-irritating-the-like-of-me reasons [4] though given how quickly fashion changes, I'm of the opinion that “to look modern” should never be a design consideration in a product intended to last into next year!

mihaaly 3y ago

Designers design UI for touchscreen even when there is no touchscreen in sight? That's smart! : )

ajsnigrutin 3y ago

But we're just weak humans and not strong gorillas to hold our hands up and horizontal to do stuff on a laptop touchscreen for hours... just try doing some excell stuff, where you need to click the cells many, many, many times and hold our hand up for that. And if using a touchscreen for that is a pain, then at least optimize for a mouse instead of something noone will actually use.

stanjo 3y ago
[dead]

wildrhythms 3y ago

Not just touch interfaces, but designers have been tasked with making a UI that works on both mobile and desktop, using the same BRANDING, and that branding comes in the form of UI elements. Managers don't really care about the user experience until the thing conveys the brand first and foremost. So the lower common denominator (mobile) which demands the most whitespace seeps its way onto every other user surface.