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> “So, how was it to use a WYSIWYG web page editor from over 20 years ago? Quite pleasant, actually.” The dirty secret of web apps is that we’ve mostly gone ba

by pavlov 3y ago

> “So, how was it to use a WYSIWYG web page editor from over 20 years ago? Quite pleasant, actually.” The dirty secret of web apps is that we’ve mostly gone backwards in usability compared to native desktop apps from 25 years ago. Web apps are a mishmash of paradigms. Pieces of desktop UI are reproduced using a woefully limited framework inside a static request-based page navigation model. The user never quite knows whether an action will trigger a multi-second page refresh, whether the back button does anything useful, etc. Desktop UIs had professionally designed human interface guidelines based on decades of actual research. On the web, designers are primarily graphics artists who pick fonts and pride on making buttons look like nobody else’s buttons. Icons are nowadays tiny monochrome line scribbles without labels. Just pray there are tooltips so you can figure out what happens if you press one of these icon buttons in a web app. (Or maybe it’s just an icon and not a button? No way of knowing, since the conventions that made buttons obvious have been thrown away.) The web is the worst application delivery platform of the past 30 years, so of course it’s the one we got stuck with. Worse often wins by its simplicity and ubiquity. Everybody could author a HTML page and some gradually built their skills towards apps. This review of old Netscape Composer reminds of how important that was.

Valodim 3y ago
This is a wildly pessimistic take, to the point it just reads like old man yelling at cloud
- lostlogin 3y ago
  > yelling at cloud Yes, yes I am. Maybe it’ll work if I turn it off and on again.
- layer8 3y ago
  General usability degradation is absolutely the experience of those who grew up before the smartphone revolution. Those who came later, one must presume, don’t know what they’re missing.
  - helf 3y ago
    [dead]
  - Valodim 3y ago
    I'm not denying that perception, but as with everything that has ever changed, there is a factor of resistance to change and idealization of the past to it. The audience of apps since smartphones came up (let's say 20 years ago) has vastly diversified, from previously mostly professionals and enthusiasts, to a far more general audience. That adds new requirements, and shifts priorities - it's more important now that simple things are simple, and it's less important that difficult things are possible at all. And from an inclusion pov, that's a good thing! I'm not saying that everything has strictly improved, nothing ever does. But it certainly hasn't gotten strictly worse, nothing ever does either. It's just the tradeoffs that are different, and no longer target as specifically those folks who tend to yell at clouds on HN these days.
    - layer8 3y ago
      The issue is that it has degraded even in software that is purely targeted towards professionals and enthusiasts. And it’s not just the UX designers’ fault, the UI tech stacks have degraded in that respect and make it difficult. I’m also hard-pressed to come up with anything that has improved on the desktop.
- yungporko 3y ago
  being "pessmistic" doesn't somehow magically make it untrue.
yashasolutions 3y ago
While we have more option when building app for desktop, the reason the web took over is because of the fragmentation of desktop experiences (+ potential complexity required to install desktop app) so overall, it seems it was more important to achieve interoperability and simplicity of deployment than powerful UX. Even in recent history, if you take Figma vs Sketch (which was a serious contender to Figma in terms of features and UX) Figma won because interops + no need to install.
graemep 3y ago
I think what you are missing here is that desktop UIs have got worse too, largely because of design trends that prioritise aesthetics over usability.
lostlogin 3y ago
> ubiquity I thought you were referring to the Ubiquiti web app. It almost works in that sentence.
tossandthrow 3y ago
I agree, and I do have an addition. As a software engineer it some times kills me that product development is all done through Figma. * Professional opinions drawn in higher ranked stakeholders whims * It drown visibility and attention to other processes of software development such as infrastructure, integrations, etc. However, that also gives some nice things: Stakeholders and designers can fight in their own corner.
- SebFender 3y ago
  So true, but at the same time I don't want things to change too much as it creates lots of work for my security team ; )
Keyframe 3y ago
Of course you'll get shit when you have people who have no background or experience working on user interfaces. We came few cycles into that already, ever since web democratized access to doing such things. There was even Mystery meat navigation as a term way back in 1998: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation This is nothing new. Amateurs going pro. DTP saw something similar, video as well.. lots of things. What's new however is in mobile age, what are you even designing for? It's a moving target between device aspect ratio and screen sizes. No wonder it's all a giant galleria abominate.
dspillett 3y ago
> The dirty secret of web apps is that we’ve mostly gone backwards in usability compared to native desktop apps from 25 years ago. I wasn't aware it was a secret! Though it certainly isn't just web apps: the desktop has taken steps backwards too, and not just where bad web apps are hosted in simple desktop wrappers. Back in the 90s and 00s I remember a strong push for consistency and discoverability, where now that often takes a back seat to aesthetic matters and shiny new things. And it isn't just the apps: whole OS UIs have fallen apart, with levels of inconsistency well beyond that which Mac and Windows people used to poke fun at the Unix world for. It is amazing how hard it can be sometimes to see at a glance which app currently has input focus on a Windows desktop, particularly with multiple screens. There are several parts to the consistency problem, and the overall UX-is-more-shite-these-days problem, including: 1. The conflicting priorities of the range of devices (trying to make something work on a small touch-based mobile and a large desktop environment, often creating something that is imperfect on both). 2. The desire to be subtle and pretty, even where this makes things less obvious (some flat designs are particularly bad for this: little indication of what is actionable, scrollbars becoming single lines of pixels or invisible entirely, title bar text being slightly-whiter-than-mid-grey when active and slightly-darker-than-mid-grey otherwise and sometimes the reverse). 3. The desire to have an app that is easier to monetise where a plain web-app would be better (so you get something that is trying to optimise for four distinct UX arenas: web, mobile web, mobile app, desktop app). 4. The desire for everything to be online-first, so you can more easily justify charging for a subscription (and so you don't have to worry about sync issues inherent in offline-first design) even in cases where entirely offline would be the better choice for the user. 5. The desire to be hip and new with UI design completely overriding years of earlier UX research because form sells better than function. Yes, some of those research results may have been questionable, and some that weren't are less relevant to today's environments, but they all seem to have been thrown away in many places. It isn't all bad though, some things are still well-designed from a UX standpoint, or if not well-designed at least not brain-dead. I live in hope that people will learn from the few good examples, and we'll have a swing back towards caring about properly optimising for UX instead of just looks & monetisation.
madeofpalk 3y ago
Ugh. Not this HN trope again. "Web is bad, the old days were good, designers are the worst, developers are the best" Lazy, inaccurate, and offensive. How is this limited to the web? 'The Desktop' suffers significantly more from not having a single, understandable paradigm. Is this UI modal? If I click this will it 'pop' me to another view? Or will it open a new window? Is that window represented in task bar/switcher/dock/whatever? How do I get back to where I was before? Not to mention the issue that both macOS and Windows suffers from being in the middle of a UI-kit transition, with a bunch of half-and-half apps across the system, with the new system being of... dubious quality (I'm staring at you, new macOS Settings) I think overall, I think there is a positive trend for usability of software on both the web and 'desktop' (whatever that means). But still, just like 20 years ago, people can still make bad software. Edit: lol - just now as I'm trying to uninstall some AMD drivers, I get a dialogue box asking me to visit a long Microsoft Store URL, and it's neither clickable nor copyable. Desktop is perfect!
- immibis 3y ago
  Microsoft webified the Windows desktop. That doesn't mean the desktop desktop is or was bad, as opposed to the web desktop.
- blowski 3y ago
  The demands on UX and UI have fast outpaced the ability of designers and their software to deliver on it. As new requirements come along, we are forced to make different trade-offs to those we made in the past, and perhaps that leaves those of us who don't need the new requirements feeling like the software has "got worse", ignoring the benefits to others. To take one example, 99% of monitors in 1997 were 1024x768 CRT with single pixel density, which freed designers to assume that's what their end user was on. No such standard exists today.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  Even if parent was a bit stuck in a rant (which I'm guilty of) I think a few forces were at play during the 90s desktop apps. Limitations made apps more focused on bringing rapid enough functionality in a stable manner. Web does offer too much rope to hang your users with. My bet it that, if computing doesn't evaporate in the next decade, there will be a middle-ground solution.
NoGravitas 3y ago
You're mostly right, but there were absolutely terrible native apps 25 years ago. Consider a WinForms form-filling app, with basically no organization of form fields, except that each one of them is surrounded by a different color of angry fruit salad.
- TheCleric 3y ago
  And the tab to next field could behaved unexpectedly because either the tab order was unspecified or specified wrong.
ivanhoe 3y ago
Desktop business apps maybe looked better - at least those few that were not designed by the same engineers writing the code - but they all were a lot harder to deploy and maintain. You'd be happy that someone finally bought your app, only to discover that each department in the company has a different version of OS/hardware, with different network & security rules, and people installing all kinds of private stuff on their machines and messing w/ settings. A nightmare. It would take days for us to deploy new version, only to find out that half of the printers stopped printing for some unknown reason. Great, let's waste another week debugging that, while clients are screaming at us for not being able to do their work. When I fully switched into the web dev world around Y2K, it felt so liberating. Never regretted it for the second...
- SJC_Hacker 3y ago
  That's an odd perspective - around that time didn't you have to deal with the shitshow of browser incompatabilitw, and user-agent detection?

by pavlov 3y ago

Valodim 3y ago

This is a wildly pessimistic take, to the point it just reads like old man yelling at cloud

lostlogin 3y ago
> yelling at cloud Yes, yes I am. Maybe it’ll work if I turn it off and on again.
layer8 3y ago
General usability degradation is absolutely the experience of those who grew up before the smartphone revolution. Those who came later, one must presume, don’t know what they’re missing.
- helf 3y ago
  [dead]
- Valodim 3y ago
  I'm not denying that perception, but as with everything that has ever changed, there is a factor of resistance to change and idealization of the past to it. The audience of apps since smartphones came up (let's say 20 years ago) has vastly diversified, from previously mostly professionals and enthusiasts, to a far more general audience. That adds new requirements, and shifts priorities - it's more important now that simple things are simple, and it's less important that difficult things are possible at all. And from an inclusion pov, that's a good thing! I'm not saying that everything has strictly improved, nothing ever does. But it certainly hasn't gotten strictly worse, nothing ever does either. It's just the tradeoffs that are different, and no longer target as specifically those folks who tend to yell at clouds on HN these days.
  - layer8 3y ago
    The issue is that it has degraded even in software that is purely targeted towards professionals and enthusiasts. And it’s not just the UX designers’ fault, the UI tech stacks have degraded in that respect and make it difficult. I’m also hard-pressed to come up with anything that has improved on the desktop.
yungporko 3y ago
being "pessmistic" doesn't somehow magically make it untrue.

yashasolutions 3y ago

While we have more option when building app for desktop, the reason the web took over is because of the fragmentation of desktop experiences (+ potential complexity required to install desktop app) so overall, it seems it was more important to achieve interoperability and simplicity of deployment than powerful UX. Even in recent history, if you take Figma vs Sketch (which was a serious contender to Figma in terms of features and UX) Figma won because interops + no need to install.

graemep 3y ago

I think what you are missing here is that desktop UIs have got worse too, largely because of design trends that prioritise aesthetics over usability.

lostlogin 3y ago

> ubiquity I thought you were referring to the Ubiquiti web app. It almost works in that sentence.

tossandthrow 3y ago

I agree, and I do have an addition. As a software engineer it some times kills me that product development is all done through Figma. * Professional opinions drawn in higher ranked stakeholders whims * It drown visibility and attention to other processes of software development such as infrastructure, integrations, etc. However, that also gives some nice things: Stakeholders and designers can fight in their own corner.

SebFender 3y ago
So true, but at the same time I don't want things to change too much as it creates lots of work for my security team ; )

Keyframe 3y ago

Of course you'll get shit when you have people who have no background or experience working on user interfaces. We came few cycles into that already, ever since web democratized access to doing such things. There was even Mystery meat navigation as a term way back in 1998: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation This is nothing new. Amateurs going pro. DTP saw something similar, video as well.. lots of things. What's new however is in mobile age, what are you even designing for? It's a moving target between device aspect ratio and screen sizes. No wonder it's all a giant galleria abominate.

dspillett 3y ago

> The dirty secret of web apps is that we’ve mostly gone backwards in usability compared to native desktop apps from 25 years ago. I wasn't aware it was a secret! Though it certainly isn't just web apps: the desktop has taken steps backwards too, and not just where bad web apps are hosted in simple desktop wrappers. Back in the 90s and 00s I remember a strong push for consistency and discoverability, where now that often takes a back seat to aesthetic matters and shiny new things. And it isn't just the apps: whole OS UIs have fallen apart, with levels of inconsistency well beyond that which Mac and Windows people used to poke fun at the Unix world for. It is amazing how hard it can be sometimes to see at a glance which app currently has input focus on a Windows desktop, particularly with multiple screens. There are several parts to the consistency problem, and the overall UX-is-more-shite-these-days problem, including: 1. The conflicting priorities of the range of devices (trying to make something work on a small touch-based mobile and a large desktop environment, often creating something that is imperfect on both). 2. The desire to be subtle and pretty, even where this makes things less obvious (some flat designs are particularly bad for this: little indication of what is actionable, scrollbars becoming single lines of pixels or invisible entirely, title bar text being slightly-whiter-than-mid-grey when active and slightly-darker-than-mid-grey otherwise and sometimes the reverse). 3. The desire to have an app that is easier to monetise where a plain web-app would be better (so you get something that is trying to optimise for four distinct UX arenas: web, mobile web, mobile app, desktop app). 4. The desire for everything to be online-first, so you can more easily justify charging for a subscription (and so you don't have to worry about sync issues inherent in offline-first design) even in cases where entirely offline would be the better choice for the user. 5. The desire to be hip and new with UI design completely overriding years of earlier UX research because form sells better than function. Yes, some of those research results may have been questionable, and some that weren't are less relevant to today's environments, but they all seem to have been thrown away in many places. It isn't all bad though, some things are still well-designed from a UX standpoint, or if not well-designed at least not brain-dead. I live in hope that people will learn from the few good examples, and we'll have a swing back towards caring about properly optimising for UX instead of just looks & monetisation.

madeofpalk 3y ago

Ugh. Not this HN trope again. "Web is bad, the old days were good, designers are the worst, developers are the best" Lazy, inaccurate, and offensive. How is this limited to the web? 'The Desktop' suffers significantly more from not having a single, understandable paradigm. Is this UI modal? If I click this will it 'pop' me to another view? Or will it open a new window? Is that window represented in task bar/switcher/dock/whatever? How do I get back to where I was before? Not to mention the issue that both macOS and Windows suffers from being in the middle of a UI-kit transition, with a bunch of half-and-half apps across the system, with the new system being of... dubious quality (I'm staring at you, new macOS Settings) I think overall, I think there is a positive trend for usability of software on both the web and 'desktop' (whatever that means). But still, just like 20 years ago, people can still make bad software. Edit: lol - just now as I'm trying to uninstall some AMD drivers, I get a dialogue box asking me to visit a long Microsoft Store URL, and it's neither clickable nor copyable. Desktop is perfect!

immibis 3y ago
Microsoft webified the Windows desktop. That doesn't mean the desktop desktop is or was bad, as opposed to the web desktop.
blowski 3y ago
The demands on UX and UI have fast outpaced the ability of designers and their software to deliver on it. As new requirements come along, we are forced to make different trade-offs to those we made in the past, and perhaps that leaves those of us who don't need the new requirements feeling like the software has "got worse", ignoring the benefits to others. To take one example, 99% of monitors in 1997 were 1024x768 CRT with single pixel density, which freed designers to assume that's what their end user was on. No such standard exists today.
agumonkey 3y ago
Even if parent was a bit stuck in a rant (which I'm guilty of) I think a few forces were at play during the 90s desktop apps. Limitations made apps more focused on bringing rapid enough functionality in a stable manner. Web does offer too much rope to hang your users with. My bet it that, if computing doesn't evaporate in the next decade, there will be a middle-ground solution.

NoGravitas 3y ago

You're mostly right, but there were absolutely terrible native apps 25 years ago. Consider a WinForms form-filling app, with basically no organization of form fields, except that each one of them is surrounded by a different color of angry fruit salad.

TheCleric 3y ago
And the tab to next field could behaved unexpectedly because either the tab order was unspecified or specified wrong.

ivanhoe 3y ago

Desktop business apps maybe looked better - at least those few that were not designed by the same engineers writing the code - but they all were a lot harder to deploy and maintain. You'd be happy that someone finally bought your app, only to discover that each department in the company has a different version of OS/hardware, with different network & security rules, and people installing all kinds of private stuff on their machines and messing w/ settings. A nightmare. It would take days for us to deploy new version, only to find out that half of the printers stopped printing for some unknown reason. Great, let's waste another week debugging that, while clients are screaming at us for not being able to do their work. When I fully switched into the web dev world around Y2K, it felt so liberating. Never regretted it for the second...

SJC_Hacker 3y ago
That's an odd perspective - around that time didn't you have to deal with the shitshow of browser incompatabilitw, and user-agent detection?