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Uniformity in user interfaces is an emergent property when many website owners optimize for UI ease of use. Who would want to sacrifice pageviews, conversion ra

by vdaniuk 13y ago

Uniformity in user interfaces is an emergent property when many website owners optimize for UI ease of use. Who would want to sacrifice pageviews, conversion rates, purchases for non-standard interfaces? Also Bootstrap is very easy to use and solves the problem for website owners and users.

keithpeter 13y ago
Could be a founder principle: A few successful Web sites use a given UI approach, people get used to that, so new Web sites copy approach to minimise learning time. Couple that with Bootstrap's availability. Example: Windows 95, 98, ME, and XP all had a panel at the bottom with a menu ('start') button on the left. That became normal for a computer. Anything different (Canonical's Unity, Gnome's Gnome-Shell) is seen as 'problematic'. Reference: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the bit about the early history of motorbikes and the surprising range of arrangements.
- Pacabel 13y ago
  The Windows taskbar and start menu allow for certain levels of usability and efficiency. The approaches offered by newer systems like Unity, GNOME Shell, and Windows 8 all fall well, well below these levels set by the earlier approaches, however. They're seen as "problematic", to use your terminology, because they are inherently inferior to earlier approaches in many important ways. They leave users worse off. So of course they will be seen in a negative light.
  - zanny 13y ago
    The Windows taskbar was radically changed in 7 to turn it into a dock rather than an active windows bar. And the start menu was radically changed twice - the transition to Vista, where they added semantic search, and in 8 when they made it pretty much only semantic search. I'm confused how that makes Unity "well below these levels" since their meta-key function is effectively a more robust search and their taskbar is a dock, that is just on the side of your screen. Or Gnome, where their meta functionality is, again, search. And their dock just requires you to hit meta to access, as if its always hidden. And you get window presentation that way. The only significant loss - and I would agree it is significant, maybe its one of the reasons I use KDE - is the lack of a categorized tree graph of all installed programs, for when you don't know what you want, you don't have it pinned, and need a way to narrow your options down. That doesn't happen easily in Gnome or Unity (you can present applications by group by searching the group) but a novice user wouldn't know that.

by vdaniuk 13y ago

keithpeter 13y ago

Could be a founder principle: A few successful Web sites use a given UI approach, people get used to that, so new Web sites copy approach to minimise learning time. Couple that with Bootstrap's availability. Example: Windows 95, 98, ME, and XP all had a panel at the bottom with a menu ('start') button on the left. That became normal for a computer. Anything different (Canonical's Unity, Gnome's Gnome-Shell) is seen as 'problematic'. Reference: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the bit about the early history of motorbikes and the surprising range of arrangements.

Pacabel 13y ago
The Windows taskbar and start menu allow for certain levels of usability and efficiency. The approaches offered by newer systems like Unity, GNOME Shell, and Windows 8 all fall well, well below these levels set by the earlier approaches, however. They're seen as "problematic", to use your terminology, because they are inherently inferior to earlier approaches in many important ways. They leave users worse off. So of course they will be seen in a negative light.
- zanny 13y ago
  The Windows taskbar was radically changed in 7 to turn it into a dock rather than an active windows bar. And the start menu was radically changed twice - the transition to Vista, where they added semantic search, and in 8 when they made it pretty much only semantic search. I'm confused how that makes Unity "well below these levels" since their meta-key function is effectively a more robust search and their taskbar is a dock, that is just on the side of your screen. Or Gnome, where their meta functionality is, again, search. And their dock just requires you to hit meta to access, as if its always hidden. And you get window presentation that way. The only significant loss - and I would agree it is significant, maybe its one of the reasons I use KDE - is the lack of a categorized tree graph of all installed programs, for when you don't know what you want, you don't have it pinned, and need a way to narrow your options down. That doesn't happen easily in Gnome or Unity (you can present applications by group by searching the group) but a novice user wouldn't know that.