3 ms·

This isn't addressing the main issue I have with modern UI Back in the era of Windows 98, buttons were beveled; one corner was light as if the sun was pointing

This isn't addressing the main issue I have with modern UI Back in the era of Windows 98, buttons were beveled; one corner was light as if the sun was pointing at it, and the opposite corner was dark, and it made it look like the button was sticking out of the screen. When you clicked on it, the bevels got mirrored as if it was now sticking into the screen. This showed "I am a button, and you pushed me". But most importantly, it became the universal language for "I am clickable", and you didn't need to hover over it, or click on it, to know that it was clickable. The same bevel was then used for everything. The scroll bar, the resizable borders, and so on and so forth. If you could click it, it looked clickable This got dropped progressively in favor of cooler looking UIs, but what we lost in the process is that now, the UI expects the user to have integrated some baseline of "software logic" (I'm trying to think of a software equivalent of "video game logic") Now to know that something on your screen is clickable, you rely on hovering. So the result now is that it got even harder to onboard who are new to technology. Most often old people. They don't even have a legacy "windows 98" theme on Windows 10 & 11 anymore Even worse is the web, most of the web stopped making links react to hovering, links are not necessarily colored blue or underlined anymore, nothing is unified How would the web feel if you were the kind of person who didn't instinctively know that clicking on your avatar is supposed to bring you to your user's profile? The web isn't built for you anymore, the expectations for the user are higher

chongli 2y ago
Yes. I think your issue is a symptom of a broader problem: the takeover of UI by graphic designers, causing the virtual extinction of usability experts. UIs today, first and foremost, are built for branding and marketing reasons. Usability and information accessibility have fallen way down in priority. I think this is the main reason why we see so much “responsive design” which is really just shoehorning mobile UIs into the desktop browser. To product managers it’s far more important to maintain consistent look and feel / branding across mobile and desktop than it is to achieve optimal usability for each platform.
- sebstefan 2y ago
  Maybe the extinction is the population of users that's entirely unused to graphical user interfaces. You don't need to take that group into consideration anymore, so, goodbye to usability experts. But the obvious result is that now, computer illiterate people are completely fucked I had a father (he was 56 in 2022 so not even that old) who refused to learn how to use technology. But in 2022, he couldn't find an apartment without help, he couldn't find a job without help, he couldn't do his paperwork without help, even finding a restaurant's phone number to make a reservation would take him ages because who the fuck bothers filing for the yellow pages anymore? Are they even still a thing? At some point surely he would've caved and pushed through to get a smartphone and a laptop. But at that point, how hard would it be to learn it all on your own?
  - chongli 2y ago
    Maybe the extinction is the population of users that's entirely unused to graphical user interfaces. You don't need to take that group into consideration anymore, so, goodbye to usability experts. I think that's selling usability experts short. Good UI design isn't just for computer novices. It's also for power users. An extremely well-designed user interface can dramatically enhance productivity and allow a power user to get into highly efficient and satisfying workflows. Conversely, a poor user interface (such as all the modern ones we have today) can be extremely frustrating and unproductive to use, to the point where power users give up on trying to complete their tasks efficiently. You are definitely correct about computer illiterate people. I have several older relatives who are in the same boat as your father was. My father is 73 and he's a capable user of his phone, though he still needs a fair amount of tech support from me.
  - tivert 2y ago
    > Maybe the extinction is the population of users that's entirely unused to graphical user interfaces. You don't need to take that group into consideration anymore, so, goodbye to usability experts. > But the obvious result is that now, computer illiterate people are completely fucked IMHO, the things that "fuck" computer illiterate people also annoy and decrease usability for computer literate people, it's just that the latter group can adapt to the damage. Take those fucking horizontal slider switches, for instance. They're fucking everywhere now. It's fucking medium gray, does that mean on or off? Guess I have to toggle it and see what happens. Oh, the gray got lighter, so it must've been on? Or, the app/website/whatever looked "dated" so they "refresh" it by changing some colors and moving all the the buttons and menus around. Thanks for invalidating my muscle memory, for no good reason. IMHO, usability experts need to design all the UIs (keeping both novices and power users in mind), and give the graphic designers who are concerned about looks very little freedom (i.e. they can make suggestions, but need approval). If they want more freedom, they can design UIs for movie computers (if you want to see a good one, watch Until the End of the World).
bityard 2y ago
One of my biggest issues is that "flat design" by definition also dictates "borderless". Meaning, a dialog or other window adjoins or overlaps another, you sometimes need to stare for a few seconds to tell where one window begins and another ends. Seems to be worse on Windows and Chrome, but I see it on Linux sometimes too and try to file a bug when it happens. Adding at least a 1-pixel border and drop shadows to all windows can go a long way to fixing this, but I don't believe that the latter helps "dark mode" users much. (Of course, a lot of developers these days only use and develop apps and websites in full-screen mode on a tiny 13" laptop screen, so they never see a lot of the issues that "flat" causes.)
- p_l 2y ago
  A lot of oldest GUIs were flat by hw limitations (often 1bpp displays) and they absolutely didn't dictate borderless. Sometimes there wasn't an "always on" border, but a border would show up when your mouse was over a clickable element, sometimes there was a border. Activation of UI element was often done by swapping foreground and background colour, something that was immediately visible.
  - em_te 2y ago
    I think windows were flat on Windows 3.1 too and only adopted the 3D raised borders starting with Windows 95.
    - p_l 2y ago
      Windows 3.0 brought "3d" styling to windows, actually - where available at least. Windows 2.0 had some simple shading or rather "complex borders" if you had colour display, but nowhere close to 3D shading of 3.0
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

chongli 2y ago

Yes. I think your issue is a symptom of a broader problem: the takeover of UI by graphic designers, causing the virtual extinction of usability experts. UIs today, first and foremost, are built for branding and marketing reasons. Usability and information accessibility have fallen way down in priority. I think this is the main reason why we see so much “responsive design” which is really just shoehorning mobile UIs into the desktop browser. To product managers it’s far more important to maintain consistent look and feel / branding across mobile and desktop than it is to achieve optimal usability for each platform.

sebstefan 2y ago
Maybe the extinction is the population of users that's entirely unused to graphical user interfaces. You don't need to take that group into consideration anymore, so, goodbye to usability experts. But the obvious result is that now, computer illiterate people are completely fucked I had a father (he was 56 in 2022 so not even that old) who refused to learn how to use technology. But in 2022, he couldn't find an apartment without help, he couldn't find a job without help, he couldn't do his paperwork without help, even finding a restaurant's phone number to make a reservation would take him ages because who the fuck bothers filing for the yellow pages anymore? Are they even still a thing? At some point surely he would've caved and pushed through to get a smartphone and a laptop. But at that point, how hard would it be to learn it all on your own?
- chongli 2y ago
  Maybe the extinction is the population of users that's entirely unused to graphical user interfaces. You don't need to take that group into consideration anymore, so, goodbye to usability experts. I think that's selling usability experts short. Good UI design isn't just for computer novices. It's also for power users. An extremely well-designed user interface can dramatically enhance productivity and allow a power user to get into highly efficient and satisfying workflows. Conversely, a poor user interface (such as all the modern ones we have today) can be extremely frustrating and unproductive to use, to the point where power users give up on trying to complete their tasks efficiently. You are definitely correct about computer illiterate people. I have several older relatives who are in the same boat as your father was. My father is 73 and he's a capable user of his phone, though he still needs a fair amount of tech support from me.
- tivert 2y ago
  > Maybe the extinction is the population of users that's entirely unused to graphical user interfaces. You don't need to take that group into consideration anymore, so, goodbye to usability experts. > But the obvious result is that now, computer illiterate people are completely fucked IMHO, the things that "fuck" computer illiterate people also annoy and decrease usability for computer literate people, it's just that the latter group can adapt to the damage. Take those fucking horizontal slider switches, for instance. They're fucking everywhere now. It's fucking medium gray, does that mean on or off? Guess I have to toggle it and see what happens. Oh, the gray got lighter, so it must've been on? Or, the app/website/whatever looked "dated" so they "refresh" it by changing some colors and moving all the the buttons and menus around. Thanks for invalidating my muscle memory, for no good reason. IMHO, usability experts need to design all the UIs (keeping both novices and power users in mind), and give the graphic designers who are concerned about looks very little freedom (i.e. they can make suggestions, but need approval). If they want more freedom, they can design UIs for movie computers (if you want to see a good one, watch Until the End of the World).

bityard 2y ago

One of my biggest issues is that "flat design" by definition also dictates "borderless". Meaning, a dialog or other window adjoins or overlaps another, you sometimes need to stare for a few seconds to tell where one window begins and another ends. Seems to be worse on Windows and Chrome, but I see it on Linux sometimes too and try to file a bug when it happens. Adding at least a 1-pixel border and drop shadows to all windows can go a long way to fixing this, but I don't believe that the latter helps "dark mode" users much. (Of course, a lot of developers these days only use and develop apps and websites in full-screen mode on a tiny 13" laptop screen, so they never see a lot of the issues that "flat" causes.)

p_l 2y ago
A lot of oldest GUIs were flat by hw limitations (often 1bpp displays) and they absolutely didn't dictate borderless. Sometimes there wasn't an "always on" border, but a border would show up when your mouse was over a clickable element, sometimes there was a border. Activation of UI element was often done by swapping foreground and background colour, something that was immediately visible.
- em_te 2y ago
  I think windows were flat on Windows 3.1 too and only adopted the 3D raised borders starting with Windows 95.
  - p_l 2y ago
    Windows 3.0 brought "3d" styling to windows, actually - where available at least. Windows 2.0 had some simple shading or rather "complex borders" if you had colour display, but nowhere close to 3D shading of 3.0

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]