Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

applypixels.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 193 posts

Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#51

Post by 8ytecoder »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #23
nathanaldensr wrote: post #2

Of course this author's happy--they're a designer . Meanwhile, everyone else has to absorb the burden of the "pendulum" ceaselessly swinging, retraining their brains yet again to absorb new visual memories and habits. There seems to be no such concept as "good enough."

Programming is currently hating on OOP, in love with strong typing, and somewhere on the way from loving microservices to disowning ever to have spoken in their favor. Ten years ago, it was the opposite. So this particular quirk of thinking in groups doesn't seem to be confined to the design domain. Nor do "swings of pendulum" preclude the pendulum also having some forward momentum in sum. Think of it as a skier's wa…

Some of the things you mentioned are pure aesthetics - and they change with time - forward and backward. Some others change with the advent of tools and other developments. Micro services are hard to do right and they have been hard. But people rushed into it. With better tools in the future that might change.

Same with beginner/new projects embracing dynamic programming. It’s perfect for a new code add. It bites only later; when the enthusiasm has died off and you got to keep the codebase and tests up to date and things start slipping here and there.

Go is a darling now because it’s constraining. It skipped passed the last three decades of advancement in languages like they never happened. And then as it becomes way more popular people will ask for the same set of features that other languages have had forever.

Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#52

Post by kd5bjo »

JoBrad wrote: post #48
sjwright wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I miss since iOS 7 is buttons that look like buttons. BUTTONS THAT LOOK LIKE BUTTONS. Is that too much to ask!?! Why are we stuck with sometimes plain blue text, especially when the use of that blue in UI "elements" isn't even consistent with regards to function or behaviour.

As a user, I like where flat design has taken us, generally. But I absolutely agree with you: the loss of “functionality hinting” (I’m sure there’s an actual term for this, but I don’t know what it is) is pretty bad. You can stumble around a design that isn’t in your language, if the cues are strong enough. But all-text directions throw that right out.

> “functionality hinting” (I’m sure there’s an actual term for this, but I don’t know what it is)

“Affordance” is the term you’re looking for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance#As_perceived_action...

Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#53

Post by shaan7 »

paulcole wrote: post #27
vffhfhf wrote: post #6

What if we could give complete control of visuals to user? I use kde nowadays and the amount of customization is awesome. I am using chrome OS theme with tela icon pack and a cool ass animated mouse pack. And its frankly awesome. I feel like Apple is stagnating.

> What if we could give complete control of visuals to user? This would be a terrible idea. People complain (in the comments on this very page) that Apple’s professional designers do a terrible job. You think my uncle is going to do better?

> You think my uncle is going to do better?

Yes he will, because he has to only care about what he needs, and he is the best judge of that.

Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#54

Post by harrygeez »

gambiting wrote: post #20
alxlaz wrote: post #10

I don't really care about "fun", but I just can't find the words to explain how happy I am that there's a chance we might put all this flat madness behind us. I'm looking forward to: * Not having this conversation with my mom (who, at 60+, is remarkably adept with computers but hey, we all run into trouble sometimes) over the phone anymore: Me: Okay mom, now press the "Edit" button Mom: Which one's the edit button? M…

100% with you. I absolutely hate the material design, it's the least intuitive way to use a computer. Paired with touch-first interfaces it's one of the worst thing to happen to computers.

Not saying material design is great, but it's a great step up from Holo UI and anything before that in Android.

I just dislike that it became so ubiquitous now and it's a train wreck on desktop

Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#55

Post by shaan7 »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #15
vffhfhf wrote: post #6

What if we could give complete control of visuals to user? I use kde nowadays and the amount of customization is awesome. I am using chrome OS theme with tela icon pack and a cool ass animated mouse pack. And its frankly awesome. I feel like Apple is stagnating.

I kinda like the ability to customize the Linux desktop. But in practice, I always end up with some major problems and many edge cases where my choices just don't work. A recent example was some web view showing a change log that respected the font color settings but not the background, resulting in white-on-white text with my dark UI. I'm probably far more willing to spend time on such issues. But I never got to a p…

> And the only possible conclusion is that Apple and Linux are measured on widely different scales.)

+1

They are simply designed for different end users - and that is fine. I used macOS for ~5 years before getting fed up with the limited window management - but I understand why it is that way - most people don't care. So people who do, can just use KDE et al, peace.

Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#56

Post by cletus »

How about instead of "fun" we work on "fixing bugs" and "usability"? Just off the top of my head:

- I miss the old copy and paste UI that Apple originally had on iOS. The magnifying glass worked so well. Now we have the "pure" design where you just drag the cursor. This is partially obscured by your finger and it can be so difficult to get that cursor between narrow letters (like "i" and "l", mainly because they're sans serif pretty much always). If you overshoot you can backspace and type in. If you go too far to the left you have to repeat the whole process. It's just dumb.

- Face ID is so dumb, I miss Touch ID. I get you want to have the full front face for the screen. Do what Samsung did and put a sensor on the back. Apple argues there are too many false positives on Touch ID. I don't care about that. I do however care about all the false negatives on Face ID.

- Let me control security. 5 failures of Face ID = a prompt for your PIN code. I don't want this but I can't change it. Because of all the false negatives I have to enter my PIN code way too often;

- Swipe up is a terrible replacement to the Home button. Again, this is all in the name of screen real estate. I've heard it says that design is the art of compromise. What made the Macbook Air amazing was that it was the "correct" compromise. Fast forward to Johnny Ive's war on thickness and you have the disaster that was the 12" Macbook. That's what happen when you optimize for one thing only to the extreme. So for the edge-to-edge screen we have this swipe up nonsense. Why is it bad? Because which way you swipe depends on which way the app is oriented. Some don't change orientation with the phone so it's a side swipe "up". Some do but the trigger to change orientation fails for some reason. The gestures to get to app selection (with a weird swipe up and right) are strictly worse than a double press of the Home button;

- I swear swiping for text entry continues to get worse. As one example, if you try and swipe something and get, say, "Rome" instead of "tome", you now have a capitalized word. Delete it and swipe in "tome" and it'll appear as "Tome" because obviously you meant to keep capitalization even though you never chose capitalization in the first place.

- Often the keyboard will end up obscuring my messages, like iMessage fails to account for it being there so I have to dismiss it and open it again and it'll scroll up like it should've done. This bug has been around for months;

- Flat design is stupid. The pendulum has swung too far from skeuomorphic design. The whole point of the old design was to give affordances to prompt user behaviour. The designers have gone insane and completely thrown out this key element of UI/UX design.

So before we think about "fun" how about we first tick off "functional"?

Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#57

Post by harrygeez »

mekster wrote: post #8

Thank god the designs are being reconsidered from cheap flat looks but they now kind of look like toys with rounded corners for everything and are all square instead of having their own sizes. I'd still take iOS 6 design any day for iOS. Snow Leopard and iOS6 were their OS' peak.

I agree with you on macOS but I also like the current design. It's not that big of a departure and it looks modern without sacrificing anything. Can't say the same about Big Sur though...

I used to feel the same about iOS but if you search screenshots of it now at least to me it really didn't stand the test of time.

Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#58

Post by paulcole »

shaan7 wrote: post #53
paulcole wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if we could give complete control of visuals to user? This would be a terrible idea. People complain (in the comments on this very page) that Apple’s professional designers do a terrible job. You think my uncle is going to do better?

> You think my uncle is going to do better? Yes he will, because he has to only care about what he needs, and he is the best judge of that.

Ha, that’s exactly why he says he won’t wear a mask!

Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#60

Post by jansan »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #14
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #13

Anyone remember Kai's Power Tools? Now that was an interesting UI. https://www.mprove.de/script/99/kai/2Software.html?utm_sourc...

Does anyone know what happened to Kai Krause? Last I heard he was working on Something Interesting, and then silence.

Kai bought a castle in Germany that he intended to use as an incubator, called ByteBurg (burg being German for "castle"). I am not sure how successful it was, but ByteBurg II was cancelled. The latest news that I could find are from 2016 that claim that Kai would never sell the castle.

He had a blog that he did not update after a while. This blog's web address is now being used for some sort of penis enhancement service, which I find rather bizarre.

Post reply on HN