8 ms·

To me, peak usability was 25 years ago, when most applications had a toolbar and a menu that followed a standard pattern. If you're a frequent, non-power-user,

by hliyan 2y ago

To me, peak usability was 25 years ago, when most applications had a toolbar and a menu that followed a standard pattern. If you're a frequent, non-power-user, you use the toolbar (e.g. "insert row" button). If you're an infrequent non-power-user, you go through the menu (Insert > Row Above). If you're a power user, you remember the shortcuts indicated through underlined letters in menu labels (e.g. Alt, I, A). If you want to change settings, you open the settings dialog (Tools > Settings), and it as tabs like "General", "Fonts and colors" etc. Most people were a lot less computer literate back then, but they were able to use most applications with little help. If they really needed help, the help system was built into the application. The goal back then was to have the user get the work done as efficiently as possible, in effect, minimizing the time the user pends on the application. Modern UX doctrine aims for the opposite goal -- to keep people "engaged" as much as possible. This might be okay for consumer apps, but maddeningly, the same doctrine gets applied to enterprise applications as well. I've literally heard non-techie employees of a Fortune 100 company ask for their legacy green screen terminals back because the new, flashy SPA was slowing them down.

998244353 2y ago
> This might be okay for consumer apps, but maddeningly, the same doctrine gets applied to enterprise applications as well. I've literally heard non-techie employees of a Fortune 100 company ask for their legacy green screen terminals back because the new, flashy SPA was slowing them down. Applying general design principles without taking actual use cases into account is the worst. A common one is putting heaps of whitespace around each cells in a table. Visually appealing, sure. But unusable if I need to look at more than 8 rows at the same time.
- hliyan 2y ago
  Agreed. Most user experience work today are done by people who ironically have little experience as a user. E.g. they will design a table in Figma, make it look nice. They may even go so far as understand that this table will typically contain 2500 rows and introduce pagination and filtering by most commonly used attributes. But if they load some sample data into a functional mock system and simulate a typical user's day (e.g. they have to wade through this table multiple times per hour, while on the phone with a customer), they will immediately realize the feel good factor of white spaces, pastel colours and high contrast icons are very low priority.
  - arkh 2y ago
    You forgot one awesome feature of those SPA: once your user finally manage to get some muscle memory in, you can push a new UI redesign so get them back to square one. Because you have to give work to do to your frontend people.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    > Most user experience work today are done by people who ironically have little experience as a user So many upvotes for this. While the provided thing might technically work, if it is clunky for the users, the users will not like it. I understand those making the thing will probably never use the thing. The problem comes when those making do not listen to those using. There have been many times where I've made the thing, but then when I went to use the thing I wanted nasty things to happen to the person that made it. I've been in some very contentious UAT rounds where I was the user and the devs refused to listen to valid complaints.
    - whstl 2y ago
      The funny thing is that a lot of those problems are known during development time, by the people who have to actually "use" the product at all times during development, a.k.a. the developers.
      - dylan604 2y ago
        Not sure I follow. The situations I've built appear fine during testing during development. I go to the UI, click the buttons, get the correct result. Test complete. The type of thing I'm thinking about is when the user does that many many times in a day, but to get to the button that is on one part of the screen which is very inefficient compared to if the button was moved closer to something else so that the UX is improved. Sure, what the dev did "worked", but it might not feel clunky when you test it once or twice. That's the difference that drives most UX<=>Dev disagreements. Dev: but it works User: yes, but it sux using it. it can be better for us if change X, Y, Z Dev: but it works. ticket closed It doesn't matter if it works while everyone hates using it. I don't care what the devs think. If the user's request is reasonable, rational, and will improve the UX, stop fighting it. This situation is precisely my experience that happens when there's no designer.
- andrepd 2y ago
  > Visually appealing, sure. It's not even.
- whstl 2y ago
  Reading about whitespace on tables infuriates me so much. At a previous job we had an actual good designer figure out what users wanted and she found out users wanted denser information. So she designed a more compact table. It was quite smart, used the whole screen, but still looked amazing and didn't feel cramped. Then my company released it as a library for the whole company to use and the first thing one of the product managers did was requesting margins AND frames around it, plus a lot of whitespace between cells. Now instead of displaying around 25 items on the screen at a given time, this other system can only display around 10. The cherry on top: it looks horrible with the frame and with the unbalanced margins.
  - rojcyk 2y ago
    I worked on a couple of internal frameworks as a designer and thats exactly what happened to our frameworks. Throwing away all the research and optimization out of the window for one unnecessary “we really need this” scenario.
sokratus 2y ago
> Modern UX doctrine aims for the opposite goal -- to keep people "engaged" as much as possible. In many larger orgs, usually design doesn’t work in isolation. Some of these goals like engagement, retention come from senior leaders of different functions. The design proposals are evaluated and signed off against these goals. However, when these designs and flows appear on platforms like Mobbin, they often lack context about their design rationale. This can create a network effect where other designers replicate similar designs for their own experiences without fully understanding the underlying reasoning.
conductr 2y ago
At all times, people that are proficient at a green screen terminal application will prefer it to a web based or GUI based experience. They have muscle memory and a lot of codes memorized to switch back and forth from screen to screen extremely fast and exactly how many tabs to hit to fill out a form. It has nothing to do with SPA or whatever is currently new and flashy this has been going on for decades. The fact they have to remove their hand from keyboard to mouse pretty frequently is the biggest productivity loss, then drop down boxes and forms that aren’t very keyboard friendly and the page render times are incredibly slow in comparison. I myself made this complaint a few times. When I was using medical erp once then again using a banking system. Both you could navigate by typing a chain of commands that would register even if you typed faster than the screens would render in the terminal. Hell, in the banking one I completely automated my job by writing an excel macro and sendkey commands to the terminal, then I sold it to the bank for a small sum after I quit (they asked me how I accomplished so much after realizing 3 people couldn’t handle my workload)
- nostrademons 2y ago
  You could still do this in the GUIs of 25 years ago, you'd just memorize the keyboard shortcuts and use them. They'd buffer so you could type a series of operations faster than the screen could render them, and basically every function was accessible from the keyboard. But the GUI had the advantage of discoverability - if you didn't know the keyboard shortcut, you could just work your way through the menus and find it.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    But it’s true that the menu systems often made the accelerations and afterthought, and regularly used functions for some people had no shortcuts and no way to set them. I still think a World of Warcraft style action bar, user configurable and multilayered, would work just fine for power users. You can put anything you want in position eight but most people have the same things set for 1-5.
  - conductr 2y ago
    While possible, the uptake/usage is very low once it requires lots of CTRL / ALT / CMD button sequences. Take something like Excel, which many users use daily for work, but most people likely only use less than a dozen common keyboard shortcuts. Practically nobody navigates the ribbon with their keyboard. I'm in a role of Finance / Excel "super user" in my profession. There's a subculture of keyboard shortcut enthusiasts, but generally everyone is using their mouse a lot. I myself have about 20 that I use and rarely incorporate a new one into the mix, it has to be an action I perform repetitively for me to care enough to memorize seek out and learn the shortcut. I find navigating the ribbon usually requires too many keypresses and I instead have a custom quick access bar that I put everything I want access to so I don't have to toggle differing ribbons, I still use my mouse even though I know I could use my keyboard. It doesn't feel easier
loeber 2y ago
I agree with this, so much so that I wrote a long essay about this Modern web design has completely lost the design idioms that so much thought went into during the desktop software wave of the 90s and early 2000s. This is a great loss for usability. https://loeber.substack.com/p/4-bring-back-idiomatic-design https://loeber.substack.com/p/4-bring-back-idiomatic-design
- troupo 2y ago
  Not just web design. Design, period. Here's what Apple is producing these days: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1899392713323147633 https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1899392713323147633
  - dlivingston 2y ago
    That is most likely what their iOS & macOS design language will be going forward: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/03/10/ios-19-visionos-redesign-rumors/ https://www.macrumors.com/2025/03/10/ios-19-visionos-redesig... With that said, the design sins it commits are pretty standard in the age of minimalist/flat UI. It looks pretty similar to Apple's current design language, just with some stylistic tweaks. Not defending it, as some of those design decisions drive me up a wall. Is this text a button or just an input field? Can I click this image or is it static? Which directions can I swipe? Does this grey text mean it's a disabled button or placeholder text on an input field? I am not nostalgic for the blocky, grey, in-your-face design of classic UIs like Windows 98. But sacrificing functionality and discoverability on the alter of pretty design is, unironically, bad design.
    - troupo 2y ago
      > But sacrificing functionality and discoverability on the alter of pretty design is, unironically, bad design. The irony is that it's not even pretty a lot of the time :)
psadri 2y ago
The root cause is that web browsers were designed for document delivery but are used for building application UIs. The browsers don’t offer a standard set of common application UI components, so every team builds their own leading to inconsistency and half baked implementations. In contrast, when you build a native app, developers can draw on a standard set of OS provided UI widgets.
- su8898 2y ago
  Developers always had the flexibility to create custom UI elements/colors etc even in native apps (albeit not as easily as using CSS). Even in SPAs, most UI elements follow the same style or pattern more or less (bootstrap/tailwind etc). It's the entire UI design itself that's not user friendly for enterprise/business apps (excessive padding, comically large UI elements etc).
- nostrademons 2y ago
  I think the root cause goes deeper than that, and has to do with economic incentives. Up through the 90s, the predominant business model was you sell a product, people use it to get work done, if they're happy they tell their friends and you sell more product. Starting in the 00s, the business model became you give a service away for free, get people hooked, make them so dependent upon it that they can't look away, and then either jack up prices to extort as much money from them as possible, sell advertisements so that other people can do the same, or sell their personal data so that other people can target them with sales pitches. Actually getting any work done became secondary to making the transaction happen. This applies just as much to enterprise software as consumer software, because the purchaser of enterprise software is usually some IT department, purchasing department, or executive who doesn't have to actually use the software, and they will probably move on to the next company before the consequences of their purchasing decision being useless become visible. We are reaping the consequences of that now, where lots of transactions are happening that don't actually make anyone happy or productive. But you can see how that would filter down into UI design. When your incentive is to make people happy and productive, you spend time studying how people actually use the product, and then optimize that so they can use the product more efficiently. When your incentive is to turn people into mindless consumers that keep coming back for more ads, you spend time studying what sort of content holds the user's attention, and then optimize that so you can work as many ads into the stream as possible without them turning away. When your incentive is to sell enterprise software, you spend time studying what sales pitches will get the budget-holder to open their company's wallets, and then optimize the sales funnel to the extent of actual product usability. Even if your users hate you, they don't get to decide whether they keep using you.
savolai 2y ago
”Modern ux” can be a very political term on HN. Yes, uxers have to balance business and user needs. That is the power dynamic of business we live in, it’s not typically the driving force of actual uxers themselves. At the core the ethos of the human centered design (HCD) is being an advocate for the needs of actual users. Being seen as the ”enemy” on HN feels demoralizing, as a person that sits on both sides of the fence. I feel gladness about seeing the truth of my experience about this. I would like there to be more camaraderie between uxers and developers, and of course it being a more common scenario to be able to drive a genuinely shared vision also with business leadership. If you have a source for ”modern ux doctrine”, i’d love to hear about it to have an actual discourse.
- swesour 2y ago
  > uxers have to balance business and user needs. What does this mean? It seems that compromising the UX for a "business need" is just lazy user experience design.
  - edu 2y ago
    The UX designer doesn’t have absolute authority. Typically, they need approval from PMs and other stakeholders, which is where the need for compromise comes in.
rich_sasha 2y ago
One of the most expensive pieces of software around is a Bloomberg Terminal, with base price starting at 20k/yr/license, plus more for extra data. And the UI, when you first use it, is beyond clunky. It looks seriously like a piece of stone age technology, adapted from clay tablets. Even the styling is like 80s films about edgy hackers and their punch cards. Except when you talk to the grey hairs, you realize that UI has never, ever changed - it is backwards compatible back to, well, stone age of computers. It is quirky, but once you learn it, you're done for life - no refreshed new looks or skins or dark modes (well, it's always in dark mode) or rewrites in Svelte or whatever. That's basically because the power user is essentially the only user that matters. They know all the arcane key bindings and weird abbreviations, and Bloomberg knows better than to mess with it. I hated it at first but grew to love the stability of it.
- eviks 2y ago
  > you realize that UI has never, ever changed - it is backwards compatible back to, well, stone age of computers. It is quirky, but once you learn it, you're done for life True power users could customize to remove the quirks and also be set for life, but at a better level of ergonomics. Or they could even use the best customization from one of those gray beards who cared about ergonomics more ever back in the day And none of of the cheap criticisms of skins would change it since skins for power users are optional
  - dacryn 2y ago
    You fail to grasp the value of bloomberg terminal. The UI has in fact, evolved, but it has never changed. For example, higher DPI screen sizes, the UI is now instrumented in a web browser, no longer the the old TUI. It is fast, it is familiar, it's the same, but it evolves, if that makes sense. If you know how to use it in company A in decade 1980, you know how to use it in company B today. That doesn't mean it hasn't improved or improved ergonomics. It's a beautiful piece of engineering that got the basics right. Power users add whatever they need to it, modular, but it's not like Vim or VSCode where you are basically useless without a large effort when moving into a blank new updated version, let alone things like the ribbon design vs the old design in office.
DidYaWipe 2y ago
And controls were demarcated as controls, not disguised as plan text or a decoration. You could tell if a function was activated by looking at the outline of the button; if the "bevel" shadowing went inward, the button was depressed and the function was on. "Flat" design is simply derelict design. Fortunately there has been some backlash and we might be returning to legitimate GUIs.
seanwilson 2y ago
> To me, peak usability was 25 years ago, when most applications had a toolbar and a menu that followed a standard pattern. Some things were good, but there were lots of problems too like features hidden behind right-clicks, not knowing if you had to double or single click, being required to read help/manuals to find features, too much jargon and technical language, and overuse of modals. UIs have got incrementally better in lots of ways that really add up that I don't see people mention e.g. right-clicking and double-clicking is avoided, help is integrated into the UI where you need it, inline editing vs modals, options to edit an object appear next to it (locality) rather than you having to hunt in a menu, less technical jargon where appropriate, better onboarding, better undo/redo/autosave (which avoids clunky confirmation modals).
- wvbdmp 2y ago
  > Some things were good, but there were lots of problems too like features hidden behind right-clicks, not knowing if you had to double or single click, being required to read help/manuals to find features, too much jargon and technical language, and overuse of modals. I dunno… all of these issues are still very prevalent. The one that probably disappeared the most is the right click context menu, which I would argue was actually great for discoverability. Personally, I lament its demise. Of course context menus still exist, but it used to be a pretty reliable universal convention.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - seanwilson 2y ago
    Right-click is fine for power users and professional tools if there isn't a better alternative, but right-click (and long tap on mobile) is super undiscoverable because there's no indication or hint it'll do anything. Whenever I help non-tech friends with software problems, I'm always reminded most people don't feel comfortable hunting around for functionality and for sure don't try right-clicking things on the chance it might do something.
    - 2y ago
squeedles 2y ago
Exactly the reason I still write most of my code in emacs. I’ll use visual studio when I need to do GUI work, but I feel like I’m at a casino with a thousand flashing lights all vying for my attention. I also find swapping back and forth between keyboard and mouse to be a slowdown. I know some of the VS keyboard shortcuts but find many of them to be more convoluted than emacs (and I won’t even comment on the VS faux emacs bindings!) Luckily I spend a lot of time building libraries, where I can keep my hands on the keyboard and focus on the problems I am trying to solve
robertlagrant 2y ago
> This might be okay for consumer apps, but maddeningly, the same doctrine gets applied to enterprise applications as well I think this is a great point. I was consulting with a customer and their key goal in a complex system that had a time-sensitive user workflow was "minimise clicks". I said to them that that makes sense, but saving 0.5s on a click every two hours is not as impactful as (insert example of a change that would speed up the workflow by 10 minutes every two hours). And it's as you say: they come from the consumer world, where minimising clicks keeps customers involved. But it's not the only thing to consider.
bewo001 2y ago
yes, IBM's CUA wasn't that bad. 'F1' for help is one remnant of this. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access)
CalRobert 2y ago
I desperately miss keyboard mnemonics.
harrison_clarke 2y ago
those menus started to slip a long time ago. they got larger, less organized, and got lazier about mentioning the keyboard shortcut. the new MS paint does a good blend of that style and a newer look the current text editor trend of having a "command palette" is pretty nice. it's got a hard job to do, with the sheer number of commands and extensibility to add more, but search is pretty good for discoverability (as long as people name/tag/describe the commands well)
hakaneskici 2y ago
Good old times :) I miss F1 help, which was usually very good and contextual. On a Settings dialog? Press F1 to view help just for that dialog - offline, instant. For me, Norton Commander specifically, among other TUIs, was very influential in shaping my keyboard shortcut preferences. I used to rely heavily on Function keys; both for lightning fast file management, and also for code navigation and debugging.
kccqzy 2y ago
The problem here is the fact that the expected cost of software has become zero. 25 years ago most productivity apps would charge money. There might be a free trial but you need to pay for it. These days most expect software to be free of charge. A lot of the regression in software quality and usability can be traced back to this.
jayd16 2y ago
Ok well a lot of that UX depends on hover states and right clicks that don't exist for touch screens. Key bindings? What keys? That's the major reason we dont have the same toolbars. We can be cynical about engagement and free software but try to make a mobile app the old way. You can't.
mbar84 2y ago
One definite UX improvement over the past 25 years have been command menus. In the most simple implementation, press Ctrl+P start typing to filter a list of commands down and hit enter.
- IIsi50MHz 2y ago
  If only this worked properly in Excel! It has them, via Alt-Q, but there's always a delay before it activates. And you can't just press Enter to accept the first result, like most type-ahead command menus; no, you have to arrow down once, or Excel stares blankly at you.
- hulitu 2y ago
  > press Ctrl+P ... and open the Print dialog. /s
DiggyJohnson 2y ago
Are there any Bloomberg Emulators or similar to mess around in? Essentially the equivalent of Lemmy to Reddit.
pkphilip 2y ago
True. The UI of the applications from the late 90s to the early 2000s was way better than it is now - especially when you compare it to what is there in the web apps now. Besides keyboard shortcuts, the following capabilities haven't really been implemented in web apps: - Context menus - Macros and the ability to record macros and create your own shortcuts to these macros. - Terminal prompts built into applications such as in Autodesk - in some senses similar to the REPL in Clojure but built into the application
Suppafly 2y ago
>To me, peak usability was 25 years ago, when most applications had a toolbar and a menu that followed a standard pattern. I've done different sorts of tech support since grade school and people always ask me how I got so 'good at computers', I they never believe that actually reading the menus is 90% of it and that once you learn the common ways programs are arranged and some common shortcuts you pretty much know how to use all of them.

by hliyan 2y ago

998244353 2y ago

> This might be okay for consumer apps, but maddeningly, the same doctrine gets applied to enterprise applications as well. I've literally heard non-techie employees of a Fortune 100 company ask for their legacy green screen terminals back because the new, flashy SPA was slowing them down. Applying general design principles without taking actual use cases into account is the worst. A common one is putting heaps of whitespace around each cells in a table. Visually appealing, sure. But unusable if I need to look at more than 8 rows at the same time.

hliyan 2y ago
Agreed. Most user experience work today are done by people who ironically have little experience as a user. E.g. they will design a table in Figma, make it look nice. They may even go so far as understand that this table will typically contain 2500 rows and introduce pagination and filtering by most commonly used attributes. But if they load some sample data into a functional mock system and simulate a typical user's day (e.g. they have to wade through this table multiple times per hour, while on the phone with a customer), they will immediately realize the feel good factor of white spaces, pastel colours and high contrast icons are very low priority.
- arkh 2y ago
  You forgot one awesome feature of those SPA: once your user finally manage to get some muscle memory in, you can push a new UI redesign so get them back to square one. Because you have to give work to do to your frontend people.
- dylan604 2y ago
  > Most user experience work today are done by people who ironically have little experience as a user So many upvotes for this. While the provided thing might technically work, if it is clunky for the users, the users will not like it. I understand those making the thing will probably never use the thing. The problem comes when those making do not listen to those using. There have been many times where I've made the thing, but then when I went to use the thing I wanted nasty things to happen to the person that made it. I've been in some very contentious UAT rounds where I was the user and the devs refused to listen to valid complaints.
  - whstl 2y ago
    The funny thing is that a lot of those problems are known during development time, by the people who have to actually "use" the product at all times during development, a.k.a. the developers.
    - dylan604 2y ago
      Not sure I follow. The situations I've built appear fine during testing during development. I go to the UI, click the buttons, get the correct result. Test complete. The type of thing I'm thinking about is when the user does that many many times in a day, but to get to the button that is on one part of the screen which is very inefficient compared to if the button was moved closer to something else so that the UX is improved. Sure, what the dev did "worked", but it might not feel clunky when you test it once or twice. That's the difference that drives most UX<=>Dev disagreements. Dev: but it works User: yes, but it sux using it. it can be better for us if change X, Y, Z Dev: but it works. ticket closed It doesn't matter if it works while everyone hates using it. I don't care what the devs think. If the user's request is reasonable, rational, and will improve the UX, stop fighting it. This situation is precisely my experience that happens when there's no designer.
andrepd 2y ago
> Visually appealing, sure. It's not even.
whstl 2y ago
Reading about whitespace on tables infuriates me so much. At a previous job we had an actual good designer figure out what users wanted and she found out users wanted denser information. So she designed a more compact table. It was quite smart, used the whole screen, but still looked amazing and didn't feel cramped. Then my company released it as a library for the whole company to use and the first thing one of the product managers did was requesting margins AND frames around it, plus a lot of whitespace between cells. Now instead of displaying around 25 items on the screen at a given time, this other system can only display around 10. The cherry on top: it looks horrible with the frame and with the unbalanced margins.
- rojcyk 2y ago
  I worked on a couple of internal frameworks as a designer and thats exactly what happened to our frameworks. Throwing away all the research and optimization out of the window for one unnecessary “we really need this” scenario.

sokratus 2y ago

> Modern UX doctrine aims for the opposite goal -- to keep people "engaged" as much as possible. In many larger orgs, usually design doesn’t work in isolation. Some of these goals like engagement, retention come from senior leaders of different functions. The design proposals are evaluated and signed off against these goals. However, when these designs and flows appear on platforms like Mobbin, they often lack context about their design rationale. This can create a network effect where other designers replicate similar designs for their own experiences without fully understanding the underlying reasoning.

conductr 2y ago

At all times, people that are proficient at a green screen terminal application will prefer it to a web based or GUI based experience. They have muscle memory and a lot of codes memorized to switch back and forth from screen to screen extremely fast and exactly how many tabs to hit to fill out a form. It has nothing to do with SPA or whatever is currently new and flashy this has been going on for decades. The fact they have to remove their hand from keyboard to mouse pretty frequently is the biggest productivity loss, then drop down boxes and forms that aren’t very keyboard friendly and the page render times are incredibly slow in comparison. I myself made this complaint a few times. When I was using medical erp once then again using a banking system. Both you could navigate by typing a chain of commands that would register even if you typed faster than the screens would render in the terminal. Hell, in the banking one I completely automated my job by writing an excel macro and sendkey commands to the terminal, then I sold it to the bank for a small sum after I quit (they asked me how I accomplished so much after realizing 3 people couldn’t handle my workload)

nostrademons 2y ago
You could still do this in the GUIs of 25 years ago, you'd just memorize the keyboard shortcuts and use them. They'd buffer so you could type a series of operations faster than the screen could render them, and basically every function was accessible from the keyboard. But the GUI had the advantage of discoverability - if you didn't know the keyboard shortcut, you could just work your way through the menus and find it.
- hinkley 2y ago
  But it’s true that the menu systems often made the accelerations and afterthought, and regularly used functions for some people had no shortcuts and no way to set them. I still think a World of Warcraft style action bar, user configurable and multilayered, would work just fine for power users. You can put anything you want in position eight but most people have the same things set for 1-5.
- conductr 2y ago
  While possible, the uptake/usage is very low once it requires lots of CTRL / ALT / CMD button sequences. Take something like Excel, which many users use daily for work, but most people likely only use less than a dozen common keyboard shortcuts. Practically nobody navigates the ribbon with their keyboard. I'm in a role of Finance / Excel "super user" in my profession. There's a subculture of keyboard shortcut enthusiasts, but generally everyone is using their mouse a lot. I myself have about 20 that I use and rarely incorporate a new one into the mix, it has to be an action I perform repetitively for me to care enough to memorize seek out and learn the shortcut. I find navigating the ribbon usually requires too many keypresses and I instead have a custom quick access bar that I put everything I want access to so I don't have to toggle differing ribbons, I still use my mouse even though I know I could use my keyboard. It doesn't feel easier

loeber 2y ago

I agree with this, so much so that I wrote a long essay about this Modern web design has completely lost the design idioms that so much thought went into during the desktop software wave of the 90s and early 2000s. This is a great loss for usability. https://loeber.substack.com/p/4-bring-back-idiomatic-design https://loeber.substack.com/p/4-bring-back-idiomatic-design

troupo 2y ago
Not just web design. Design, period. Here's what Apple is producing these days: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1899392713323147633 https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1899392713323147633
- dlivingston 2y ago
  That is most likely what their iOS & macOS design language will be going forward: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/03/10/ios-19-visionos-redesign-rumors/ https://www.macrumors.com/2025/03/10/ios-19-visionos-redesig... With that said, the design sins it commits are pretty standard in the age of minimalist/flat UI. It looks pretty similar to Apple's current design language, just with some stylistic tweaks. Not defending it, as some of those design decisions drive me up a wall. Is this text a button or just an input field? Can I click this image or is it static? Which directions can I swipe? Does this grey text mean it's a disabled button or placeholder text on an input field? I am not nostalgic for the blocky, grey, in-your-face design of classic UIs like Windows 98. But sacrificing functionality and discoverability on the alter of pretty design is, unironically, bad design.
  - troupo 2y ago
    > But sacrificing functionality and discoverability on the alter of pretty design is, unironically, bad design. The irony is that it's not even pretty a lot of the time :)

psadri 2y ago

The root cause is that web browsers were designed for document delivery but are used for building application UIs. The browsers don’t offer a standard set of common application UI components, so every team builds their own leading to inconsistency and half baked implementations. In contrast, when you build a native app, developers can draw on a standard set of OS provided UI widgets.

su8898 2y ago
Developers always had the flexibility to create custom UI elements/colors etc even in native apps (albeit not as easily as using CSS). Even in SPAs, most UI elements follow the same style or pattern more or less (bootstrap/tailwind etc). It's the entire UI design itself that's not user friendly for enterprise/business apps (excessive padding, comically large UI elements etc).
nostrademons 2y ago
I think the root cause goes deeper than that, and has to do with economic incentives. Up through the 90s, the predominant business model was you sell a product, people use it to get work done, if they're happy they tell their friends and you sell more product. Starting in the 00s, the business model became you give a service away for free, get people hooked, make them so dependent upon it that they can't look away, and then either jack up prices to extort as much money from them as possible, sell advertisements so that other people can do the same, or sell their personal data so that other people can target them with sales pitches. Actually getting any work done became secondary to making the transaction happen. This applies just as much to enterprise software as consumer software, because the purchaser of enterprise software is usually some IT department, purchasing department, or executive who doesn't have to actually use the software, and they will probably move on to the next company before the consequences of their purchasing decision being useless become visible. We are reaping the consequences of that now, where lots of transactions are happening that don't actually make anyone happy or productive. But you can see how that would filter down into UI design. When your incentive is to make people happy and productive, you spend time studying how people actually use the product, and then optimize that so they can use the product more efficiently. When your incentive is to turn people into mindless consumers that keep coming back for more ads, you spend time studying what sort of content holds the user's attention, and then optimize that so you can work as many ads into the stream as possible without them turning away. When your incentive is to sell enterprise software, you spend time studying what sales pitches will get the budget-holder to open their company's wallets, and then optimize the sales funnel to the extent of actual product usability. Even if your users hate you, they don't get to decide whether they keep using you.

savolai 2y ago

”Modern ux” can be a very political term on HN. Yes, uxers have to balance business and user needs. That is the power dynamic of business we live in, it’s not typically the driving force of actual uxers themselves. At the core the ethos of the human centered design (HCD) is being an advocate for the needs of actual users. Being seen as the ”enemy” on HN feels demoralizing, as a person that sits on both sides of the fence. I feel gladness about seeing the truth of my experience about this. I would like there to be more camaraderie between uxers and developers, and of course it being a more common scenario to be able to drive a genuinely shared vision also with business leadership. If you have a source for ”modern ux doctrine”, i’d love to hear about it to have an actual discourse.

swesour 2y ago
> uxers have to balance business and user needs. What does this mean? It seems that compromising the UX for a "business need" is just lazy user experience design.
- edu 2y ago
  The UX designer doesn’t have absolute authority. Typically, they need approval from PMs and other stakeholders, which is where the need for compromise comes in.

rich_sasha 2y ago

One of the most expensive pieces of software around is a Bloomberg Terminal, with base price starting at 20k/yr/license, plus more for extra data. And the UI, when you first use it, is beyond clunky. It looks seriously like a piece of stone age technology, adapted from clay tablets. Even the styling is like 80s films about edgy hackers and their punch cards. Except when you talk to the grey hairs, you realize that UI has never, ever changed - it is backwards compatible back to, well, stone age of computers. It is quirky, but once you learn it, you're done for life - no refreshed new looks or skins or dark modes (well, it's always in dark mode) or rewrites in Svelte or whatever. That's basically because the power user is essentially the only user that matters. They know all the arcane key bindings and weird abbreviations, and Bloomberg knows better than to mess with it. I hated it at first but grew to love the stability of it.

eviks 2y ago
> you realize that UI has never, ever changed - it is backwards compatible back to, well, stone age of computers. It is quirky, but once you learn it, you're done for life True power users could customize to remove the quirks and also be set for life, but at a better level of ergonomics. Or they could even use the best customization from one of those gray beards who cared about ergonomics more ever back in the day And none of of the cheap criticisms of skins would change it since skins for power users are optional
- dacryn 2y ago
  You fail to grasp the value of bloomberg terminal. The UI has in fact, evolved, but it has never changed. For example, higher DPI screen sizes, the UI is now instrumented in a web browser, no longer the the old TUI. It is fast, it is familiar, it's the same, but it evolves, if that makes sense. If you know how to use it in company A in decade 1980, you know how to use it in company B today. That doesn't mean it hasn't improved or improved ergonomics. It's a beautiful piece of engineering that got the basics right. Power users add whatever they need to it, modular, but it's not like Vim or VSCode where you are basically useless without a large effort when moving into a blank new updated version, let alone things like the ribbon design vs the old design in office.

DidYaWipe 2y ago

And controls were demarcated as controls, not disguised as plan text or a decoration. You could tell if a function was activated by looking at the outline of the button; if the "bevel" shadowing went inward, the button was depressed and the function was on. "Flat" design is simply derelict design. Fortunately there has been some backlash and we might be returning to legitimate GUIs.

seanwilson 2y ago

> To me, peak usability was 25 years ago, when most applications had a toolbar and a menu that followed a standard pattern. Some things were good, but there were lots of problems too like features hidden behind right-clicks, not knowing if you had to double or single click, being required to read help/manuals to find features, too much jargon and technical language, and overuse of modals. UIs have got incrementally better in lots of ways that really add up that I don't see people mention e.g. right-clicking and double-clicking is avoided, help is integrated into the UI where you need it, inline editing vs modals, options to edit an object appear next to it (locality) rather than you having to hunt in a menu, less technical jargon where appropriate, better onboarding, better undo/redo/autosave (which avoids clunky confirmation modals).

wvbdmp 2y ago
> Some things were good, but there were lots of problems too like features hidden behind right-clicks, not knowing if you had to double or single click, being required to read help/manuals to find features, too much jargon and technical language, and overuse of modals. I dunno… all of these issues are still very prevalent. The one that probably disappeared the most is the right click context menu, which I would argue was actually great for discoverability. Personally, I lament its demise. Of course context menus still exist, but it used to be a pretty reliable universal convention.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- seanwilson 2y ago
  Right-click is fine for power users and professional tools if there isn't a better alternative, but right-click (and long tap on mobile) is super undiscoverable because there's no indication or hint it'll do anything. Whenever I help non-tech friends with software problems, I'm always reminded most people don't feel comfortable hunting around for functionality and for sure don't try right-clicking things on the chance it might do something.
  - 2y ago

squeedles 2y ago

Exactly the reason I still write most of my code in emacs. I’ll use visual studio when I need to do GUI work, but I feel like I’m at a casino with a thousand flashing lights all vying for my attention. I also find swapping back and forth between keyboard and mouse to be a slowdown. I know some of the VS keyboard shortcuts but find many of them to be more convoluted than emacs (and I won’t even comment on the VS faux emacs bindings!) Luckily I spend a lot of time building libraries, where I can keep my hands on the keyboard and focus on the problems I am trying to solve

robertlagrant 2y ago

> This might be okay for consumer apps, but maddeningly, the same doctrine gets applied to enterprise applications as well I think this is a great point. I was consulting with a customer and their key goal in a complex system that had a time-sensitive user workflow was "minimise clicks". I said to them that that makes sense, but saving 0.5s on a click every two hours is not as impactful as (insert example of a change that would speed up the workflow by 10 minutes every two hours). And it's as you say: they come from the consumer world, where minimising clicks keeps customers involved. But it's not the only thing to consider.

bewo001 2y ago

yes, IBM's CUA wasn't that bad. 'F1' for help is one remnant of this. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access)

CalRobert 2y ago

I desperately miss keyboard mnemonics.

harrison_clarke 2y ago

those menus started to slip a long time ago. they got larger, less organized, and got lazier about mentioning the keyboard shortcut. the new MS paint does a good blend of that style and a newer look the current text editor trend of having a "command palette" is pretty nice. it's got a hard job to do, with the sheer number of commands and extensibility to add more, but search is pretty good for discoverability (as long as people name/tag/describe the commands well)

hakaneskici 2y ago

Good old times :) I miss F1 help, which was usually very good and contextual. On a Settings dialog? Press F1 to view help just for that dialog - offline, instant. For me, Norton Commander specifically, among other TUIs, was very influential in shaping my keyboard shortcut preferences. I used to rely heavily on Function keys; both for lightning fast file management, and also for code navigation and debugging.

kccqzy 2y ago

The problem here is the fact that the expected cost of software has become zero. 25 years ago most productivity apps would charge money. There might be a free trial but you need to pay for it. These days most expect software to be free of charge. A lot of the regression in software quality and usability can be traced back to this.

jayd16 2y ago

Ok well a lot of that UX depends on hover states and right clicks that don't exist for touch screens. Key bindings? What keys? That's the major reason we dont have the same toolbars. We can be cynical about engagement and free software but try to make a mobile app the old way. You can't.

mbar84 2y ago

One definite UX improvement over the past 25 years have been command menus. In the most simple implementation, press Ctrl+P start typing to filter a list of commands down and hit enter.

IIsi50MHz 2y ago
If only this worked properly in Excel! It has them, via Alt-Q, but there's always a delay before it activates. And you can't just press Enter to accept the first result, like most type-ahead command menus; no, you have to arrow down once, or Excel stares blankly at you.
hulitu 2y ago
> press Ctrl+P ... and open the Print dialog. /s

DiggyJohnson 2y ago

Are there any Bloomberg Emulators or similar to mess around in? Essentially the equivalent of Lemmy to Reddit.

pkphilip 2y ago

True. The UI of the applications from the late 90s to the early 2000s was way better than it is now - especially when you compare it to what is there in the web apps now. Besides keyboard shortcuts, the following capabilities haven't really been implemented in web apps: - Context menus - Macros and the ability to record macros and create your own shortcuts to these macros. - Terminal prompts built into applications such as in Autodesk - in some senses similar to the REPL in Clojure but built into the application

Suppafly 2y ago

>To me, peak usability was 25 years ago, when most applications had a toolbar and a menu that followed a standard pattern. I've done different sorts of tech support since grade school and people always ask me how I got so 'good at computers', I they never believe that actually reading the menus is 90% of it and that once you learn the common ways programs are arranged and some common shortcuts you pretty much know how to use all of them.