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The Death of Personality (2017)

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Re: The Death of Personality (2017)

#21

Post by throwaway82388 »

In my admittedly imperfect memory, I thought it was Microsoft and not Apple that led the charge with the first wave of “flat” interface design, Google quickly following. iOS 7 was a round of catching up, and could only have happened after Steve Jobs.

Remember the much-derided Corinthian leather of the OS X address book, inspired by his personal Gulfstream? He loved that visual approach.

iOS 7 was sold as bringing the software more in line with the minimal hardware design philosophy. But it was really a response to industry trends.

Re: The Death of Personality (2017)

#22

Post by tartoran »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #19
flax wrote: post #9

Google has recently screwed this up too with Material You where every single icon looks basically the same. App icons should be distinct. They are there for you to recognize the app! Monochrome and uniform shape does not help with this.

Perhaps this is deliberate? The user "discovers" a new Google app by accidentally clicking on it when they really wanted Gmail or Maps?

Yes, im speculating its distruptive design meant to produce some form of anxiety in the user base, add some hard to pinpoint friction so users pay more of their mental cycles in the said software and cause them stockholm syndrome so they’re hooked. It could also be nothing of this but mere incompetence, producing change to resell the old at a future time. Regardless, it’s all to mess with your mind because as a user you never have the option to keep the old familiar and you always have to relearn stupid interfaces, ocasionally click the wrong button, be forced out of the happy path and sometimes get angry and but options to disable this/that.

Im at the point that if something gets annoying I simply drop off. If ads for example become unavoidable Id stop consuming, %99 is utter waste of time anyway. End of rant

Re: The Death of Personality (2017)

#23

Post by q7xvh97o2pDhNrh »

redelbee wrote: post #16
chaos_emergent wrote: post #6

Au contraire: HN’s interface. I know no one who is displeased with the simplicity of design except designers themselves*. Just like premature optimization for engineers, it feels like designers are building for themselves rather than their customer. In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity. -Hendry Wadsworth

I was a newspaper layout designer in a previous life. The only complaint I have about HN is the line length on large-ish screens. In my newspaper days we stuck to around 60 characters as an optimal line length for readability. I've seen up to 80, but even that seems to be pushing it. Once you stretch out the lines so much it's hard to track back and forth from the end of one line to the beginning of the next line. I'…

> I was a newspaper layout designer in a previous life.

Such a cool-sounding job! Any fun stories to share from those days?

> Reading anything of length on this screen is decidedly uncomfortable when browsing HN.

Agreed. I always browse HN in a window that's half the width of my monitor.

There is something nice about the ultra-simplistic CSS that goes as wide as your window, though. Then, the user can just resize their window to find the sweet spot for themselves. The sites that force a fixed width for reading on everyone really miss the point, I think.

Re: The Death of Personality (2017)

#24

Post by jd3 »

redelbee wrote: post #16
chaos_emergent wrote: post #6

Au contraire: HN’s interface. I know no one who is displeased with the simplicity of design except designers themselves*. Just like premature optimization for engineers, it feels like designers are building for themselves rather than their customer. In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity. -Hendry Wadsworth

I was a newspaper layout designer in a previous life. The only complaint I have about HN is the line length on large-ish screens. In my newspaper days we stuck to around 60 characters as an optimal line length for readability. I've seen up to 80, but even that seems to be pushing it. Once you stretch out the lines so much it's hard to track back and forth from the end of one line to the beginning of the next line. I'…

This is something that has consistently bothered me about the web for most of my life. Why sites like Wikipedia (and many blogs) don't limit line length by default is beyond me. I usually just end up zooming in and/or limiting the width of my browser window.

Re: The Death of Personality (2017)

#26

Post by alpaca128 »

redelbee wrote: post #16
chaos_emergent wrote: post #6

Au contraire: HN’s interface. I know no one who is displeased with the simplicity of design except designers themselves*. Just like premature optimization for engineers, it feels like designers are building for themselves rather than their customer. In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity. -Hendry Wadsworth

I was a newspaper layout designer in a previous life. The only complaint I have about HN is the line length on large-ish screens. In my newspaper days we stuck to around 60 characters as an optimal line length for readability. I've seen up to 80, but even that seems to be pushing it. Once you stretch out the lines so much it's hard to track back and forth from the end of one line to the beginning of the next line. I'…

The line length even seems to be limited already, just at a (too) high number. WHen I maximize the browser window the comment texts use about 2/3 of the width.

I just tried and Firefox' reader mode automatically limits the width, though unfortunately that's not made for interactive use. I guess it might be a good idea for a browser plugin (if it doesn't already exist), similar to the ones forcing dark color themes on websites using CSS.

Re: The Death of Personality (2017)

#27

Post by userbinator »

redelbee wrote: post #16
chaos_emergent wrote: post #6

Au contraire: HN’s interface. I know no one who is displeased with the simplicity of design except designers themselves*. Just like premature optimization for engineers, it feels like designers are building for themselves rather than their customer. In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity. -Hendry Wadsworth

I was a newspaper layout designer in a previous life. The only complaint I have about HN is the line length on large-ish screens. In my newspaper days we stuck to around 60 characters as an optimal line length for readability. I've seen up to 80, but even that seems to be pushing it. Once you stretch out the lines so much it's hard to track back and forth from the end of one line to the beginning of the next line. I'…

I'm reading the parent, top-level comment on a Macbook Air with a 13 inch screen and the first line is a whopping 194 characters long.

...resize your browser window? The text is as wide as you want it to be.

On the other hand, I absolutely hate it when I want wider or narrower lines, and resizing the window either causes useless whitespace or a scrollbar to appear.

Re: The Death of Personality (2017)

#28

Post by ChildOfChaos »

To be honest, maybe i'm in the minority, but I don't want my tech/UI/designed stuff to have 'personality'. I want it to fade into the background as if it isn't there so i can get on and live my life.

I want it to be simple, to get out of my way and do what it is supposed to do. I feel like the world and particularly tech products are overwhelmingly noisy.

I yearn for everything to be more simple. Less notifications, less ads, lets annoyance. Don't take over or interrupt my life, enhance it with functionality then get out of the way. I don't want it to have a 'personality'

Re: The Death of Personality (2017)

#29

Post by reb »

Worry not, HN: there are plenty of upstarts building interesting tools and platforms drenched in personality. UI centrism will continue to refine itself forever, but that still leaves plenty of room for fun apps to shine.

An example I bumped into just this week: https://www.artbreeder.com/

P.S. "visual design doesn’t involve UX design" is not a common designer belief. "UI !== UX" (the reference I'm assuming they're making) means something else entirely.

Re: The Death of Personality (2017)

#30

Post by masswerk »

Regarding Mac and dock icons, I prefer an unobtrusive (but static) dock at the side, which results in rather tiny icon sizes. While this used to worked great, starting with ADock on classic Mac OS, with Big Sur this has become something like the following (on grey background and transparencies disabled): the terminal is the black, square blob, the calculator is the tiny bar I'd never associate with a calculator, Preview is the invisible one, Maps is the one I don't even see, the Bin is the one I wouldn't even recognise for its lack of contrast, weren't it not for its position at the very end, etc. None of these icons communicate to me in any way or sense. – Well done. (That is, if you were aiming for the heat death of your design universe.)
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