Young children, the elderly, the desktop-bewildered still use iPads and touchscreen phones more readily than they ever used desktop UIs. I think as experienced computer-users we easily miss that this has been a genuine revolution in UI reach.
My 3 year old rules any tablet. Can get to the movies and pictures quick. Will even make phone calls when they get hold of a phone. The right phone calls. It is an advance.
What if we put Win98 on a tablet with an application that had Caillou inside of it?
Guarantee they'd be cruising the fuck out of Win98, as well.
I forgot how nice it was to have underlined alt keyboard shortcuts. We got so much right so early in the age of personal computing. Goodbye to all that, hello Ribbon and flatness everywhere. It’s as if we’re in the Middle Ages now looking back at the great ruins of ancient Athens.
The ribbon is actually a good interface, for me at least, much more pleasant to use than toolbars. The flatness and whitespace everywhere though, that can die in a fire.
Nah mate. Biggest issue I’ve ever had with the Ribbon is that 1. I didn’t have to use it very often and 2. It conflates menus and toolbars together and 3. The only time I’ve ever had to use it was when helping a friend find the action they are looking for.
It’s been around for 11 or 12 years and as recently as 2-3 years ago I was still helping friends out with it. The only reason I was ever able to figure out how to find what they were looking for is that I had what was essentially the trivia knowledge of what the Ribbon was meant to be good at rattling around in my head from reading about it years ago and what was left of my experience with the internal hierarchy of the apps from the late 90s. More often than not, it was some thing I knew used to be a menu item.
Menus and toolbars are a bit easier to figure out without prior knowledge, but where’s the fun in sticking with what is known to work well when you can reinvent the wheel and declare it to be a better wheel because it is newer and therefore must be better. Because it is newer.
A generation was raised on usable designs which clearly communicated interactability with a consistent visual language. It is only natural that they would come to think of computers as inherently ordered, understandable devices. Machines had always been this way. It was obvious to this new generation that the affordances of youth were purely redundant. Clutter. Overhead. Junk! Widget by widget, pixel by pixel, bevels…
Idk, my mom found windows 95 etc very hard to use but has no trouble with her iPhone, iPad or even a Mac (let alone the TV or can-speak-to appliance). Maybe part of is it is that a lot of problems that required UI solutions before just work magically now. Like file sharing, networking or dealing with different document formats. You don't need nearly as many controls for the most part so the UI can be simpler.
You think she learned nothing in the years between?
It has the same problem: invisible, undiscoverable UI driven by seemingly random gestures. Who cares if you long press or press harder? You still can't tell it's an option unless you try it on everything.
It's meant to be reserved for advanced features that you only want to offer to users that know how to find them. See: right click.
I don't think right click is in the same category. For one thing, the right mouse button is prominent and next to the left one. For another, there was a pretty well established language that right clicking either did nothing (was harmless) or brought up a contextual menu of advanced actions you could then read.
Just wait a little. Soon there will be a movement for UI consistency and they will reinvent a lot of stuff Apple and MS did about UI in the 90s. Just give it a fancy new name. You can see this on the iPad. Suddenly you have multiple windows, keyboard, just in slightly different form.
And absolutely no documentation on how it works. I've turned the multiple windows stuff off on the iPad because it's so damn inconsistent and incomprehensible.
Documentation? Here you go. Under the “Basics” section. It’s how I learned it.
I think, much of the recent developments in UI design (and its conceptual space) is owed to display technology. Modern displays have different contrast ratios from CRTs. Generally, fine details used to look softer on CRTs. So, when flat displays were introduced, bevels didn't look right, Apple got rid of realistic icons (formerly introduced in OS X), etc. On the other hand, extensive regions of flat color where always a bit of a problem on CRTs (too bright, maybe there were some artefacts from some interference – who remembers the stripes caused by a cell phone placed next to a CRT?), but rendered impressively on flat screens. Meaning, the old UIs didn't work like they used to be on the new technology, while the new displays provided for a few things which had always been a bit problematic on the old ones. Enter double resolution displays and the necessity to render the same content on varying resolutions. Flat design and parametric scaling seems to be the answer. However, there's now a limited range of ways to add unobtrusive visual clues and of compartmentalisation/grouping as compared to the old visual vocabulary. Moreover, with the old vocabulary, a single element could have multiple visual clues attached to it (e.g., a bevel indicated a button, the icon and its color a task and a category, an underline in the associated text a shortcut key, etc), while now a single element can have just a single clue added to it for the most. Reduced visual complexity, as necessitated by the display technology, also meant reduced conceptual complexity.
The Windows 95 UI was inspired by NextStep. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_... Before Windows 95 was released there was CTL3D.DLL which gave a NextStep-like look & feel to Windows 3.1. See this image for the improvement made by CTL3D.DLL: http://www.win3x.org/screens/15nvtbm.gif
Taskbar was a bad clone of RISC OS's iconbar, but without the separation of Application and Window/Document that made it so much better
The ribbon is actually a good interface, for me at least, much more pleasant to use than toolbars. The flatness and whitespace everywhere though, that can die in a fire.
But toolbars are essentially the same thing except they don't waste space, are moveable, resizable, typically customizable, and can be hidden.
Pretty sure having every toolbar open at once would use more space.
Ribbon is dynamic to your current task, using a table? Table tab is available.
I think, much of the recent developments in UI design (and its conceptual space) is owed to display technology. Modern displays have different contrast ratios from CRTs. Generally, fine details used to look softer on CRTs. So, when flat displays were introduced, bevels didn't look right, Apple got rid of realistic icons (formerly introduced in OS X), etc. On the other hand, extensive regions of flat color where alway…
Not sure about that. I personally found Windows 95 (or XP/Windows 7 in classic mode) looked great on flat screens - better than on CRTs actually.