3 ms·

I think what happened was that a lot of UIs were really bad in the 90s. A bunch of books were research and written pointing out the problems, people made an eff

by antod 3y ago

I think what happened was that a lot of UIs were really bad in the 90s. A bunch of books were research and written pointing out the problems, people made an effort to fix them, and UX became a skillset. But it seemed like the trends that were intended to fix the original problems just kept getting followed and amplified with nobody really noticing they had overshot. Or based on some comments here, new designers without the context of the old UIs just reapplying them to already fixed UIs? Instead of the pendulum coming back - it kinda reached escape velocity.

nvm0n2 3y ago
UX was often pretty poor in the 90s too. There's some rose tinted glasses here. This was the era in which app theming was a huge fad. Relatively few companies attempted to create consistent and usability tested approaches to their UI, and when they did, it was always operating system companies that were writing their own UI toolkits and lots of little bundled applets. They wanted these to be consistent, and they wanted to understand how to make things like file or hardware management easy. This then dovetailed with some other trends: the software industry was moving to GUIs very fast, competitive advantage often came from how quickly you could release a Windows port back then, and the industry was relatively poor. Many big name software firms were like 20 devs and a few admin assistant types at most. So they all used the built-in APIs because that was the only way to actually get a decent GUI to market fast enough, and it outsourced all the thinking and design leadership to successful companies. If you tried to reinvent all that stuff, not only would you arrive late to the GUI party but your app would probably not fit on floppy disks anymore. Towards the end of the 90s the internet started getting good, but OS makers were also getting fat and lazy. They dropped the ball on internet distribution and connectivity, then dropped it on managed code as well. People started writing these new fangled "DHTML Web Apps" along with Java applets to obtain a solution, and also perhaps one day to escape from the Microsoft hegemony. But the web was extremely under-designed. It barely had GUI widgets at all, let alone the large usability tested sets of UX conventions that Windows and macOS had. Java had those widgets but it came from a server company that was just aping whatever the desktop companies had done, they didn't really "get" it and their tech back then wasn't good enough to make it fly. For a while people tried to emulate desktop widgets in JS and DHTML but the results always felt second class. But the combination of easy distribution, a mainframe style app model, open standards and free-beer end user clients was more valuable to people than the classical Windows/Mac OS offering. Not to everyone by any means, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth as developers started abandoning native apps. But distribution dominates everything and OS vendors didn't respond, so, we got the web. With the web most of the old Xerox PARC desktop idioms died due to lack of proper browser support. Menu bars, context menus, files, folders, customizable toolbars, multiple windows ... none of these worked properly on the web. So people learned to make UI within those constraints. Then mobile came along and with it, a new generation of native app idioms. OS leadership was re-established and people started following that, but at the cost of it being inappropriate for productivity apps.
- Ensorceled 3y ago
  > UX was often pretty poor in the 90s too. There's some rose tinted glasses here. Agreed. The thing that is new to me though is PMs and UX/UI designers pushing for things that are so obviously out of whack with what the actual users are asking for AND that it isn't being driven from external forces. Literally no one is asking for all this white space, it's coming from the team responsible for designing the app.
- pfraze 3y ago
  This tracks, thanks for a really interesting take.

by antod 3y ago

nvm0n2 3y ago

UX was often pretty poor in the 90s too. There's some rose tinted glasses here. This was the era in which app theming was a huge fad. Relatively few companies attempted to create consistent and usability tested approaches to their UI, and when they did, it was always operating system companies that were writing their own UI toolkits and lots of little bundled applets. They wanted these to be consistent, and they wanted to understand how to make things like file or hardware management easy. This then dovetailed with some other trends: the software industry was moving to GUIs very fast, competitive advantage often came from how quickly you could release a Windows port back then, and the industry was relatively poor. Many big name software firms were like 20 devs and a few admin assistant types at most. So they all used the built-in APIs because that was the only way to actually get a decent GUI to market fast enough, and it outsourced all the thinking and design leadership to successful companies. If you tried to reinvent all that stuff, not only would you arrive late to the GUI party but your app would probably not fit on floppy disks anymore. Towards the end of the 90s the internet started getting good, but OS makers were also getting fat and lazy. They dropped the ball on internet distribution and connectivity, then dropped it on managed code as well. People started writing these new fangled "DHTML Web Apps" along with Java applets to obtain a solution, and also perhaps one day to escape from the Microsoft hegemony. But the web was extremely under-designed. It barely had GUI widgets at all, let alone the large usability tested sets of UX conventions that Windows and macOS had. Java had those widgets but it came from a server company that was just aping whatever the desktop companies had done, they didn't really "get" it and their tech back then wasn't good enough to make it fly. For a while people tried to emulate desktop widgets in JS and DHTML but the results always felt second class. But the combination of easy distribution, a mainframe style app model, open standards and free-beer end user clients was more valuable to people than the classical Windows/Mac OS offering. Not to everyone by any means, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth as developers started abandoning native apps. But distribution dominates everything and OS vendors didn't respond, so, we got the web. With the web most of the old Xerox PARC desktop idioms died due to lack of proper browser support. Menu bars, context menus, files, folders, customizable toolbars, multiple windows ... none of these worked properly on the web. So people learned to make UI within those constraints. Then mobile came along and with it, a new generation of native app idioms. OS leadership was re-established and people started following that, but at the cost of it being inappropriate for productivity apps.

Ensorceled 3y ago
> UX was often pretty poor in the 90s too. There's some rose tinted glasses here. Agreed. The thing that is new to me though is PMs and UX/UI designers pushing for things that are so obviously out of whack with what the actual users are asking for AND that it isn't being driven from external forces. Literally no one is asking for all this white space, it's coming from the team responsible for designing the app.
pfraze 3y ago
This tracks, thanks for a really interesting take.