3 ms·
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 cou
by 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.
- hallole 4mo agoI can recall a time when it felt rewarding to explore and poke around in software, clicking through the menus and the icons, seeing what conveniences and neat features might be hiding in there... Now, that's often not my experience. You can find some of the worst examples in anything made by Microsoft; Teams and Outlook are particularly bad, as you said. I don't poke around out of curiosity, I fumble around out of frustration with their slow, ugly, bloated, unreadable software. Apple sucks too, except, instead of being unbearably slow, they're honing in on making their UIs less readable and less intuitive than anything that came before.
- RAM-bunctious 3mo agoMaybe it's just me, but exploring the settings without a specific aim used to be a pretty fun. It was like seeing a vista of possibilities opening up. Now I often find it a frustrating experience, because, while I appreciate the attempt at organisation, settings are hidden behind so many sub-menus that it feels like a slog to click to deeper levels to find only a few settings, even if there are a lot of settings in total.
- vrighter 3mo agoi did just that on kde yesterday, no kidding
- SebastianKra 4mo ago> 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. I don't get this. Many things like changing the IP or audio devices were so unintuitive that I just memorized them. They're still burned into my brain. In Win 11, you just search for 'IP', click 'Ethernet-Settings', done. Same for the signifiers: In the Win 11 Settings, give me an example of an element that is not obviously clickable. Everything has button shapes, or step-in indicators. To be clear, I'm neutral towards that settings app. But UI back then was nowhere near as good as claimed here, and flat design (at least the current iteration) isn't to blame for Teams being bad.
- ahartmetz 3mo agoUI at the time was often clunky (the file search dialog in Windows was an infamous example), but the basic UI elements were fine. Today, the basic UI elements are not fine.
- SebastianKra 3mo agoDepends on the app, but mostly they're better than in the past.