4 ms·

> Me: "I don't like smartphone UIs. Everything is flat, nothing indicates where you can touch or not. I have to randomly try everything on the screen." Respons

• EGreg 4mo ago
  It started with iOS 7 and Jony Ive Steve Jobs was right. Then when he died (after removing Scott Forstall), Jony Ive got to do his hardware minimalism in software too. And everything Steve Jobs favored was suddenly derided as “skeumorphism”. It’s like what USSR did with Stalin under Khrustchev. I still remember when Chrome app just had a big white area where you’re supposed to enter the url and you had no idea unless you randomly happened to click there. And if the website background was white, too? Oh too bad LMAO. Minimalistic! Chrome had no… chrome.
  • falcor84 4mo ago
    I don't remember when I first encountered it (maybe before ios7), but their cardinal sin for me was my struggling for 10 minutes to make the calculator app go into scientific mode, seeing absolutely no setting for that, before eventually discovering from a friend that you have to physically rotate the phone to landscape orientation to get the additional buttons.
    • ConceptJunkie 4mo ago
      That reminds me of that notorious story of the adventure game from the 90s where you had to make a fake mustache out of cat hairs to solve a puzzle.
      • joombaga 4mo ago
        Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. I was happy to find this Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_hair_mustache_puzzle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_hair_mustache_puzzle
      • chrismorgan 4mo ago
        > you had to make a fake mustache out of cat hairs to solve a puzzle It’s worse than that: the guy you have to do this to impersonate doesn’t have a moustache, so you then also have to draw one on his ID card with a marker.
  • ziml77 4mo ago
    Jony Ive is a plague on design. Just a few days ago someone showed me Ferrari's new EV that he designed. I am not a car person and even I can see it looks like crap! That man should just take his big Apple money and fully retire so he doesn't ruin anything else.
  • jen20 4mo ago
    Windows 8 was released a whole year before iOS 7, so the blame here is misplaced (though I won't argue that Ive's approach to UI design was worse than what came before).
  • somat 4mo ago
    I think of skeumorphism as orthogonal to good ui design(it can be a good or bad ui with or without skumorphism) Even in the Steve Jobs era Apple produced some real stinkers of a UI, achingly beautiful but a right pain to use. A specific example was the quicktime player. The bit I hated most was that stupid volume control dial.
• marcosdumay 4mo ago
  My parents never had any problem understanding where they can click on Windows 3.11. They never could understand how to interact with DOS GUIs. Nowadays they have decades of experience with computers. They still can't predict what part of a web-site they can interact with, but they have memorized all the actions they can make on the phone apps they use.
  • exitb 4mo ago
    Let’s look at the very website we on. Would you prefer for every clickable element here to be a button? Or even underlined as a link? Do you ever get confused navigating this website?
    • Telaneo 4mo ago
      > Would you prefer for every clickable element here to be a button? Or even underlined as a link? Yes. > Do you ever get confused navigating this website? No, because I've been browsing the web for a while and know that every website does things their own way.
      • exitb 4mo ago
        Given it’s a website mostly for experienced computer people who, like you, don’t really need those visual cues, don’t you think adding them would be superfluous?
        • Telaneo 4mo ago
          No.
        • CamperBob2 4mo ago
          It's a website for experienced computer people, and I appreciate its minimalist aesthetic, but that doesn't mean there's not enormous room for improvement.
    • ahartmetz 4mo ago
• thewebguyd 4mo ago
  > They were too scared and/or uninterested in computers to even try and find any rules or consistency in it. Yes, and this is still true today. I work for a company with a large very non-technical user base. People absolutely will not explore, click on things outside of what they have memorized, or even try basic troubleshooting steps out of fear of breaking things. It's actually really frustrating when trying to train to certain software or concepts because you have to lay everything out very explicitly, step by step. You cannot leave anything to the imagination or just assume that because the UI is "intuitive" that they will figure it out, because they won't even try. I've encountered some form of that attitude and behavior at nearly every job I've had.
  • neonstatic 4mo ago
    > You cannot leave anything to the imagination I don't know if there's ever going to be a suitable environment to have this conversation, but many people in any society are just not smart enough to experiment with things especially if those things are non-physical or abstract.
  • dieselgate 4mo ago
    > People absolutely will not explore, click on things outside of what they have memorized, or even try basic troubleshooting steps out of fear of breaking things. I agree with this in general but it can be tough for financial/business/order workflows where an irreversible change may be initiated. From the software perspective an audit log or Git-like history would easily mitigate these concerns but they usually don't exist. And "non-technical" users often just want to "know what buttons to click" to do their job. To the point of the main article don't think I ever had the opportunity of using Windows 2000. Remember jumping from 98 to XP? Not sure about ME/Millennium either and if it's the same or a variant of 2000.
    • peanball 4mo ago
      Not the same. ME also came out around 2000 but was based on windows 9x, windows 2000 was based on NT. The UI looked somewhat similar with those two.
    • 4mo ago
• smcg 4mo ago
  The goal of human-computer interaction is to make accessible software that is intuitively easy to use for the most people. We need to make this mandatory in CS education (again).
• ConceptJunkie 4mo ago
  I've witnessed this so much over the years. Much of the time when someone would ask me for help with something on the computer, I would have no idea, but I could discover the answer with a little bit of exploration and a good understanding of how UIs are supposed to work. Windows 2000 was peak Windows UI, and everything since then has been worse. Then Microsoft started thinking it was a good idea to make native applications look and work like webpages, which was a huge step backwards. Fortunately, that stupid idea didn't last too long, but it did have some lasting effects like the advent of "flat UI" style, but it was the beginning of the modern era of flailing around trying to improve on something that didn't need improving with one bad idea after another. These days, I sometimes find that _I_ cannot figure some things out in software like Outlook or Teams that should be obvious because there are so many different styles of UI in these tools, many of which are not very intuitive or discoverable. Mixed metaphors, style over substance, and the idea that "flat" is anything but a way to turn your display into a sludge of rectangles of slightly different shades of grey with little or no differentiation between them, and few or no visual cues as to what elements of windows are clickable. There are certainly things that are better now, like the popularity of "Dark Mode" which took about 30 years too long to happen, but in general, I don't think UI is better than it was 25 years ago, especially after Microsoft wasted 5 years or more on the absolutely misbegotten idea that computers should look like phones. Of course, the legacy is that Windows still has the remnants of about 5 different styles of UI in different places, and I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't a few Windows 3-era UI pieces still hanging around the Control Panel.
  • snarfy 4mo ago
    > Windows 3-era UI pieces still hanging around the Control Panel odbc data sources
  • saratogacx 4mo ago
    > Mixed metaphors, style over substance, and the idea that "flat" is anything but a way to turn your display into a sludge of rectangles of slightly different shades of grey with little or no differentiation between them, and few or no visual cues as to what elements of windows are clickable. It isn't even that any more. Now you have "pills" and "Islands" of random rounded shapes completely disconnected from the context they are supposed to be impacting. things float above or next to things with no connection between them. Content suffers for fobs and exclusive sets (old timers call these radio buttons) or tabs are now just things that happen to be close enough that you should just know they're associated with each other.
• bigfatkitten 4mo ago
  I am an enormous fan of the unambiguous UI design adopted in aircraft cockpit displays. Only six colours are used for text: White - Used for UI labels and other fixed values. Green - Values provided by the crew (e.g. text input.) Cyan - Values provided by the aircraft (e.g. sensor readings.) Amber - Things you need to be aware of and keep an eye on that could be a problem. Red - Things that are an immediate danger to your safety. Magenta - For navigation purposes, where you should be aiming the aircraft. On touch screen UIs, buttons are bevelled grey and so what you can touch and what you can’t is extremely obvious. Activated buttons are a distinctive colour. This colour varies between vendors but at least it’s consistent for a particular aircraft type; usually a light blue on Airbus, green on Boeing. The green seems most consistent with the text colour system, the button is green because the crew pressed it.
  • ruicraveiro 4mo ago
    And I'd argue that an important colour to make this work is black. By this I mean that only information that needs to be displayed is displayed (in all the colours you listed). Everything else is omitted.
• mikewarot 4mo ago
  > for a good potion of them, computers had always been "unpredictable magic". They got by through memorizing some very strict and rigid interaction sequences - "click this icon, then click that menu, then click that button, etc" and prayed nothing unexpected would happen. They were too scared and/or uninterested in computers to even try and find any rules or consistency in it. Sounds like you know quite a few packers[1]. I once knew someone at the extreme packing end of the mapper/packer scale. She constantly needed help with her computer, always for seemingly simple things we had already covered. Once I realized she was a pure packer, I changed my approach. I wrote out a complete, step by step, exact sequence of actions, when to push what, what to expect, etc... and made it as variance free as possible, making zero assumptions, and printed it out on a full page of paper for her. She was delighted, and never needed help again, for years! This could not have worked in a modern environment. We used Windows XP, Office 2000 Professional, with Windows 2000 servers, for as long as humanly possible. No training turnover, just things working. Working so well they didn't need me anymore. ;-) [1] https://wiki.c2.com/?MappersVsPackers https://wiki.c2.com/?MappersVsPackers