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Yeah, the video player ended up being a so-so example. :) The point is that it's common to have UI elements that can go one way or the other and it's often pos

Yeah, the video player ended up being a so-so example. :) The point is that it's common to have UI elements that can go one way or the other and it's often possible to justify either way. As far as why there's a lot of experimentation, I think it's just because designers are trying to find the pattern that will make people go "wow, look at this, this is so cool/smart". Look for example at the praise Loren Brichter got for pull-to-refresh. (it was indeed cool and smart) I think a lot of people are experimenting to see if they can find the same kind of pattern that end up sprouting all over the place. I don't know if this is really something new though.

Gormo 14y ago
There's certainly historically been a great deal of UI experimentation out there, but in the past, it's been limited in context: entirely new UI paradigms, as I remember, we're often tested out in entirely new products designed around the UI concept - which often succeeded or failed in the market due to the UI's influence - or we're gradually fleshed out as R&D projects over long periods of time. But anything more than incremental UI paradigms used to have to prove themselves before they ended up as the default UI of well-established software products' shipping releases. It just seems like there's a tendency for new versions of existing products to have in their release notes something along the lines of "added: entirely new grounds-up UI design, based on experimental concepts, that bears little resemblance to previous UI". E.g. Ubuntu Unity, Gnome 3, Windows 8; ironically, Apple currently offers the most conservative and predictable desktop UI among currently-shipping OSes. This doesn't really relate to the state-vs.-action question directly, except that I thing both may be related to a current tendency to emphasize visual aesthetics over functional consistency.

Gormo 14y ago

There's certainly historically been a great deal of UI experimentation out there, but in the past, it's been limited in context: entirely new UI paradigms, as I remember, we're often tested out in entirely new products designed around the UI concept - which often succeeded or failed in the market due to the UI's influence - or we're gradually fleshed out as R&D projects over long periods of time. But anything more than incremental UI paradigms used to have to prove themselves before they ended up as the default UI of well-established software products' shipping releases. It just seems like there's a tendency for new versions of existing products to have in their release notes something along the lines of "added: entirely new grounds-up UI design, based on experimental concepts, that bears little resemblance to previous UI". E.g. Ubuntu Unity, Gnome 3, Windows 8; ironically, Apple currently offers the most conservative and predictable desktop UI among currently-shipping OSes. This doesn't really relate to the state-vs.-action question directly, except that I thing both may be related to a current tendency to emphasize visual aesthetics over functional consistency.