5 ms·

Hilarious. Web devs discovering UX from Win95. What's next, 3d buttons?

ProxCoques 1mo ago
I know right? It's like interaction design came and went over a period of 30 years and now we're back to the beginning again.
- quacked 1mo ago
  I spend a lot of time seething at how poorly modern software interaction is, and I've come to the belief that they basically solved most of the window-based GUI computing interactivity problems by around XP, and have just been gutting them since then. My three most-hated modern trends - Disappearing scroll bar with content that you have to scroll for - Pills going across the top of the screen that are "most-used" filters instead of a real filtering menu - Clickable text and non-clickable text appearing the same. I mean come on. Who the fuck is designing these things? That's the one I can't wrap my mind around. How can a self-respecting programmer put out a UI where the display and clickable elements look exactly the same? What are we doing man
  - nxc18 1mo ago
    I think the real problem is we don’t have a native-quality UX toolkit on the web - the built in controls are just horrible. So every app has to reinvent the wheel from scratch, or use one of a few hundred (thousand) web component libraries that have all also had to reinvent the wheel from scratch (I guess a div and some text rendering isn’t scratch per se but you get my point)
    - thaumasiotes 1mo ago
      Well, Microsoft was interested in making it easy to develop Windows applications, and also in making it easy and pleasant to use Windows applications. They had reason to invest in learning how that could be done and in writing utilities that would let you benefit from their knowledge; doing that made more money for them. Browsers are different. They don't really benefit from being written for, or from being used. This seems like enough to explain the difference. They provide some functionality, and giving your users a good experience is your problem, not theirs. I feel like I've seen complaints that Apple has forgotten things it already knew about how to design a usable interface; that wouldn't be explained by this model.
  - MathMonkeyMan 1mo ago
    It's phones. Nobody uses computers anymore (for some statistical definition of "nobody"). There's no pressure to make precise and consistent UIs because poke poke poke poke.
    - actionfromafar 1mo ago
      You forgot swipe up down, down down, double tap, left, up.
tgv 1mo ago
MacOS had it even earlier. I think it's because there's not a mature UI framework out there. They come, have their moment in the spotlight, and are replaced. There's also a ton of them. And they are often written by a very small group of people without deeper understanding of ergonomics, and don't live long enough to get this level of attention. You should be glad if it still gets bug fixes after 2 years.
tiborsaas 1mo ago
Yes, carmakers are discovering 3D buttons, ackchyually

I know right? It's like interaction design came and went over a period of 30 years and now we're back to the beginning again.

quacked 1mo ago
I spend a lot of time seething at how poorly modern software interaction is, and I've come to the belief that they basically solved most of the window-based GUI computing interactivity problems by around XP, and have just been gutting them since then. My three most-hated modern trends - Disappearing scroll bar with content that you have to scroll for - Pills going across the top of the screen that are "most-used" filters instead of a real filtering menu - Clickable text and non-clickable text appearing the same. I mean come on. Who the fuck is designing these things? That's the one I can't wrap my mind around. How can a self-respecting programmer put out a UI where the display and clickable elements look exactly the same? What are we doing man
- nxc18 1mo ago
  I think the real problem is we don’t have a native-quality UX toolkit on the web - the built in controls are just horrible. So every app has to reinvent the wheel from scratch, or use one of a few hundred (thousand) web component libraries that have all also had to reinvent the wheel from scratch (I guess a div and some text rendering isn’t scratch per se but you get my point)
  - thaumasiotes 1mo ago
    Well, Microsoft was interested in making it easy to develop Windows applications, and also in making it easy and pleasant to use Windows applications. They had reason to invest in learning how that could be done and in writing utilities that would let you benefit from their knowledge; doing that made more money for them. Browsers are different. They don't really benefit from being written for, or from being used. This seems like enough to explain the difference. They provide some functionality, and giving your users a good experience is your problem, not theirs. I feel like I've seen complaints that Apple has forgotten things it already knew about how to design a usable interface; that wouldn't be explained by this model.
- MathMonkeyMan 1mo ago
  It's phones. Nobody uses computers anymore (for some statistical definition of "nobody"). There's no pressure to make precise and consistent UIs because poke poke poke poke.
  - actionfromafar 1mo ago
    You forgot swipe up down, down down, double tap, left, up.

tgv 1mo ago

MacOS had it even earlier. I think it's because there's not a mature UI framework out there. They come, have their moment in the spotlight, and are replaced. There's also a ton of them. And they are often written by a very small group of people without deeper understanding of ergonomics, and don't live long enough to get this level of attention. You should be glad if it still gets bug fixes after 2 years.

tiborsaas 1mo ago

Yes, carmakers are discovering 3D buttons, ackchyually