31–40 of 176 posts
Some of the greatest UX of all time. Shame how far we have fallen in the current flat world.
A few people are trying to claim it back! My current favorite - https://github.com/dremin/RetroBar
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Designers are the gatekeepers though, maybe they should stand up to these folks more often.
I think one of the main problems is that a surface-level argument can easily be made that user engagement represents the quality of the user experience (i.e. "users that spend a lot of time in the app clearly like it"), despite falling apart if you dig deeper than the surface. The allure of short-term profits makes such an argument attractive to upper leadership. It also makes it more difficult for a lower-level empl…
The world we could have had...
I was playing with a Win98 computer the other day, and it is amazing how well most of the UX has held up even now. And it's so fast , especially considering the limitations of the hardware it was running on. Really interesting seeing some of the design process that resulted in it.
I think the next leap in UI and visual design from Microsoft was...Windows Phone 8 (2012). It was a refreshing and different approach to mobile design. The visual language 'Metro' worked well on mobile touch screens. But Microsoft took the bad decision to transplant 'Metro' (flat design) to the desktop. The result is a clumsy, jumble of inconsistent screens. It simply doesn't work.
Back then you could test your UI on people that were a completely blank slate, having possible never used a computer before. You could focus on making the best possible UI there is. Now, users come already with certain habits and expectations developed by years of of computer use. This means, even if you really cared about the user experience of your customers you would only be able to make incremental improvements t…
Isn't this a good thing, though? Creating software that most current users out there can be easily onboarded with and be productive and familiar with quickly, without too much work put into it.
I recently did an article on using Linux as my daily driver for a week and admittedly picking a really boring desktop environment (XFCE) was a pleasant experience: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/a-week-of-linux-instead-of-...
Sure, things were occasionally broken for technical reasons, but at least the UX itself wasn't what was causing problems or friction. It's very much like using something like LibreOffice (with the default dropdown interface, or the optional ribbon one) after other office packages - it feels close enough to what you're used to not to be completely jarring, even if there might be other issues with it.
> Not that certain standards are not also valuable but it still a sobering thought that we are in a local optimum that we will never be able to escape from. (And I fear most products are not even hitting the local optimum but are getting worse when it comes to UI design but that is besides the point.)
In my eyes, not challenging the status quo and making incremental improvements is a good idea for the majority of developers out there (even in web development, where you have your navbars and your sidebars and so on), let the trendsetters take the big risks and take what is proven to work in the long run from them, without being impacted negatively by their failures.
I do, however, support the idea of usability studies and looking for what might be better than what we currently have, but redesigns for the sake of being "modern" or "trendy" just seems like designers going for the fun low hanging fruit, like large companies just changing around all of their product icons, instead of working on, say, accessibility, text contrast and so on.
I think windows 95/98 era was the peak of UI discoverability. As a kid, I and my friends could learn and explore how a program worked just by expanding all the menus and opening the various dialogs. Dialogs which were filled with fields and their descriptions! Before then, it was the world of DOS and you had to know what you were doing ahead of time. And now, UIs are dynamic, initially hiding stuff from the user and…
I wouldn't be surprised if when we were kids, there were older people saying just how bloated and inefficient Windows 95's UI was, with all the mouse clicking and things hidden behind menus, etc etc...
Too bad they didn't read these notes before gutting the taskbar in Win11. It's so unusable, so slow when you can't "ungroup" stuff. Made me actually reinstall and go back to Win10.
Or the task bar grouping in Windows 7 that I've found most people actually don't prefer when you reveal that it's optional. A lot of people also like it, maybe as much as 40% or so, but when I look over someone's shoulder (who had been using 7 for ages already) and I wondered out loud how they manage to work with that task bar, they were usually happy to learn of a way to just see open programs instead of having this…
On Windows 11, it's very rare to have to use the old Control Panel. It still exists for some uncommon settings, but nearly everything has been moved to the new settings. And everything is actually intelligently grouped. I only wish you could have multiple Settings windows open at once.
I think windows 95/98 era was the peak of UI discoverability. As a kid, I and my friends could learn and explore how a program worked just by expanding all the menus and opening the various dialogs. Dialogs which were filled with fields and their descriptions! Before then, it was the world of DOS and you had to know what you were doing ahead of time. And now, UIs are dynamic, initially hiding stuff from the user and…
I think the big key in your comment is "As a kid,..". Maybe you think this is the easiest to learn/discover UI because it is the UI that you used to learn and discover. I see "kids these days" navigating around flat, touch-based interfaces with ease, in the same way that I found the desktop paradigm of the late-90s to be incredibly natural. I think a lot of us came of age during that time, and as such see it as the u…
[EDIT] The move away from native toolkits and to very-custom UI for everything is also plainly bad. Java and Flash got the ball rolling on that (and both rightly caught shit for it) but Webtech junk is what really made that awful pattern take off. "Corporate really wants to make sure our checkbox elements are on-brand" OH MY GOD what an incredible waste of money, when you consider the total cost to the industry as a whole, in order to make UIs worse.
I think windows 95/98 era was the peak of UI discoverability. As a kid, I and my friends could learn and explore how a program worked just by expanding all the menus and opening the various dialogs. Dialogs which were filled with fields and their descriptions! Before then, it was the world of DOS and you had to know what you were doing ahead of time. And now, UIs are dynamic, initially hiding stuff from the user and…
I think the big key in your comment is "As a kid,..". Maybe you think this is the easiest to learn/discover UI because it is the UI that you used to learn and discover. I see "kids these days" navigating around flat, touch-based interfaces with ease, in the same way that I found the desktop paradigm of the late-90s to be incredibly natural. I think a lot of us came of age during that time, and as such see it as the u…
It came as quite an eye-opener to me recently to realise younger people now entering the workforce view the mouse as an archaic input device.
Some of the greatest UX of all time. Shame how far we have fallen in the current flat world.
I keep wondering, if flat is the new hot thing, why don't people just use libXaw to build their modern, cutting-edge UIs and not hobble my computer's performance in the process?