You can get pretty far with one simple principle:
Things that are the same should look the same. Things that are different should look different.
The end of the nice GTK button
311–320 of 666 posts
Re: The end of the nice GTK button
#312I agree 100% with the author, the old GTK button was gorgeous, it will be missed. > I have had to explain to people tons of times that the random word in the UI somewhere in an application is actually a button they can press to invoke an action. This is one of my biggest complaints with the super flat modern designs. Many widgets lost their skeuomorphic depth, which encoded a lot if visual information (the clickabili…
Borderless buttons to have the right to exist, but you should be very careful with their use. For example, take this UI I made recently: https://mastodon.social/@grishka/107998100334356147 , 2nd screenshot. The button to decline invitation looks like a link (same color) and it's next to a real button. No one would ever get confused by this, it's pretty clear it's clickable. But a black word in a larger font among bla…
Moving the goalposts, but the decline button in your example looks significantly harder to engage than the join button, and engaging with it would cause at least a twinge of anxiety in anticipation of having to essentially coerce the interface to accept that I do not wish to travel the gilded path.
It frustrates me that this sort of design has become not just acceptable but celebrated as 'correct', and I long for the days when interfaces did their best to seek my enthusiastic consent to my chosen course of action.
Re: The end of the nice GTK button
#313I really miss a consistent user experience. A core idea that I as a user can rely on to predict how a new app will work. I was in awe when I discovered as a kid that user interface were a research area. Things like Fitt's Law and so on. It was not just opinion. Today I get the feeling it's mostly just opinion. Either the designer's opinion or the wish to copy the look of something. Whenever I see a hamburger menu I s…
Part of the discussion is that user interface is now a conduit for branding, probably the major conduit for software focused companies. You can't have consistent UI branding across devices unless you replace the UI to suit your branding. So rather than user interface being refined over the years into a consistent usable tool for each platform, by people specifically interested in UI and the paradigms of that platform, it's re-implemented year-over-year, with UX playing second fiddle to branding and design.
Re: The end of the nice GTK button
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
Borderless buttons to have the right to exist, but you should be very careful with their use. For example, take this UI I made recently: https://mastodon.social/@grishka/107998100334356147 , 2nd screenshot. The button to decline invitation looks like a link (same color) and it's next to a real button. No one would ever get confused by this, it's pretty clear it's clickable. But a black word in a larger font among bla…
It does not look like a button. It's just a label floating around. When designing user interfaces, use the mantra: "Don't make me think!" Don't make the user think about whether something is a button or not. Don't make them have to infer that the label is in fact a button due to context. Just make it look like a button!
I am but an ignorant user, but making you think to do complete one action but not another seems to be a significant part of the point. I find it deeply coercive, and hope to see the other side of this trend sooner rather than later.
Re: The end of the nice GTK button
#315It seems like KDE and Plasma is the place where look and feel is constantly but incrementally refined; we've been saved from this flat design trend so far and things keep looking pleasant and modern and being usable. We know they care, and have great attention to details because that's documented weekly [1]. I find the Breeze theme really well done and its GTK port, Brise, is also very nice, to the point Gnome looks…
> we've been saved from this flat design trend so far
That's false, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26582009
Also in System Settings 5.24:
• switch to sidebar view and examine the buttons at the top of the sidebar
• go Workspace → Workspace Behaviour → Desktop Effects and examine the buttons at the right
• go Workspace → Workspace Behaviour → Virtual Desktops and examine the buttons at the right
• go Workspace → Workspace Behaviour → Activities → Activities and examine the buttons at the right
• go Workspace → Window Management → Window Rules and examine the buttons at the right
• go Workspace → Startup and Shutdown → Autostart and examine the buttons at the right
• the most egregious example: go Personalisation → Regional Settings → Formats and examine the whole dialogue, it is entirely made of frobable regions
• go Network → Connections and examine the buttons at the bottom of the connections list
• go Hardware → Printers and examine the buttons at the top of the dialogue
I do not understand what goes on in the responsible programmers' heads. Why does the implementer reinvent buttons badly, instead of using a standard button? Is there no one reviewing? Is there no one saying "no, we cannot burden a KDE user with this bad usability, I will not merge this code"?
Re: The end of the nice GTK button
#316The design of HN has similar issues, honestly, especially on links you've already visited: https://matrix.theblob.org/hn-original-style.png Which parts are links? Which aren't? It's a little more obvious that the main text is a link but not obvious that you can click to view the comments. (It can be inferred, of course, but I don't believe that should be necessary.) A little styling to add underlines back to links, p…
Could you share your style? I'd like to use it too.
Re: The end of the nice GTK button
#317I agree 100% with the author, the old GTK button was gorgeous, it will be missed. > I have had to explain to people tons of times that the random word in the UI somewhere in an application is actually a button they can press to invoke an action. This is one of my biggest complaints with the super flat modern designs. Many widgets lost their skeuomorphic depth, which encoded a lot if visual information (the clickabili…
Borderless buttons to have the right to exist, but you should be very careful with their use. For example, take this UI I made recently: https://mastodon.social/@grishka/107998100334356147 , 2nd screenshot. The button to decline invitation looks like a link (same color) and it's next to a real button. No one would ever get confused by this, it's pretty clear it's clickable. But a black word in a larger font among bla…
It's not very clear to me it's clickable.. Is it an action, or a link to a different page/view? If it's an action (accept/decline invite), make it a button. If it's navigation, make it a text link. You are giving totally disparate cues to the user when the actions taken upon clicking are of the exact same type.
My initial reaction to a piece of text directly next to a button is "why is there random unrelated text there?" and then the sensation of anger as I come to the realization someone consciously decided to make me think about the UI more than I needed to. It's purely a distraction.
Just make it look like a button. There is literally zero reason not to, and you can eliminate the chance of confusion. Why increase the possibility of uncertainty at all? What value does that provide to anyone?
Every UI or design element that causes me to think about it wastes precious moments I could have been thinking about something I actually cared about, for example the actual task I was in the middle of. On top of that, when you use unconventional design, even after someone learns the seemingly-arbitrary, specific quirks of the design you've used, you will cause them to think about it all again later when you redesign the application.
Re: The end of the nice GTK button
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
Almost every desktop application has a File menu whether or not it deals with files. The File menu has an "Exit" item. Does it Exit the File? OBS has "Always on Top" as an option within "File". Or we can look at it from the other side. "Where do I find the settings for this app?". Is it in File, Edit, View, Tools or Help. The answer depends on the app. Menus can be well organized or poorly organized but I don't think…
There are guidelines for what should be in menu bars, what order the items should be in, and how they should behave for different sorts of application. For example, on Mac: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... And on Windows: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/cmd-m... > "Where do I find the settings for this app?". Is it in File, Edit, View, Tools or Help? On Mac, it sh…
Of course there are ancient, rarely updated guidelines that almost all applications ignore. Microsoft indeed has that great guide, and yet their own applications implement it inconsistently, and often incorrectly according to the guidelines. Apple is a tad bit better, but third party apps rarely get it right. The best thing Apple has going for it is specifically on the question of where Settings is: there is a dedicated app menu, so it just makes logical sense to put Settings there. Or was it Preferences? Options.
> On Linux, it should be under the "Edit" menu, and called "Preferences".
This one is a stretch, there are no such consistent and agreed-upon guidelines.
My point here is that just because things can be abused (or even, in the case of desktop applications, are almost _always_ abused), doesn't mean the general concept is useless or should be removed from applications. I would recommend instead of trying to cram a hundred possible actions into a tiny icon bar at the bottom of your iPhone, or removing 97 of those actions from the app itself and leaving just the most basic three down there, to maybe consider building a sensible and well-arranged menu layout _if and when_ you need more than those three that you can fit at the bottom.
Re: The end of the nice GTK button
#319It seems like KDE and Plasma is the place where look and feel is constantly but incrementally refined; we've been saved from this flat design trend so far and things keep looking pleasant and modern and being usable. We know they care, and have great attention to details because that's documented weekly [1]. I find the Breeze theme really well done and its GTK port, Brise, is also very nice, to the point Gnome looks…
> we've been saved from this flat design trend so far That's false, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26582009 Also in System Settings 5.24: • switch to sidebar view and examine the buttons at the top of the sidebar • go Workspace → Workspace Behaviour → Desktop Effects and examine the buttons at the right • go Workspace → Workspace Behaviour → Virtual Desktops and examine the buttons at the right • go Workspa…
Indeed, you are right, those buttons have no border and no background.
Re: The end of the nice GTK button
#320I really miss a consistent user experience. A core idea that I as a user can rely on to predict how a new app will work. I was in awe when I discovered as a kid that user interface were a research area. Things like Fitt's Law and so on. It was not just opinion. Today I get the feeling it's mostly just opinion. Either the designer's opinion or the wish to copy the look of something. Whenever I see a hamburger menu I s…
> And there are a lot of behaviors that are not functioning well.
The worst of which are dropdowns, lists or menus that inserts new items right over where your mouse is so that you accidentally click on the wrong thing.
All browsers do this for the dropdown that appears when typing in the URL bar. I type a few letters, see the site I want is 3 down in the dropdown, hit the down arrow three times and press enter, only to find that the item changed as I was hitting the down arrow.
And don't get me started on user elements that have a new position in the menu system for every release, if they even have a decent menu system.