I think it's just a matter of the rapid pace of innovation in the mobile space right now. The common pattern in innovation is to diverge and then converge. We're already seeing the convergence around a couple of paradigms like pull down to refresh and sidebar menus and we're going to see more of them as we slowly figure out what's the best solution to a design problem.
The death of consistency in UI design
41–50 of 61 posts
Re: The death of consistency in UI design
#42Repost from OSnews comments: This philosophy of putting consistency on this giant pedestal reminds me of the strict non-expressive philosophy of 60s modernist graphic design. They use Helvetica for everything, because Helvetica is neutral, believe that type should never be expressive because the meaning is in the content. Today many like the style , but very few share the philosophy that design should not be expressi…
Allow me to explain to you why you're wrong.
My computer is my computer. Not Apple's computer when I'm using iTunes (hah, as if I'd ever use that piece of crap, but stay with me here), not Microsoft's when I'm using Windows Media Player, not Google's when I'm using Chrome and not Mozilla's when I'm using Thunderbird.
I know what I want my user interface to look like. I know what fonts, colours and relative sizes I want things to be. All in exactly the same way that I know what colour I want the walls to be painted in my home and where I want my furniture.
By breaking UI conventions because some idiot thinks that he knows what colours and shapes my monitor should display, I am unable to dictate what my own things should look like. Instead of a designer spending his time on designing a theme for a GUI toolkit and skinning all of the applications on my computer at once, he wastes time on coming up with a visual theme for just one of them.
Intelligence 101 - tend towards abstraction as much as possible. This recent trend clearly has it's roots in the idiot depart... ahem, sorry, I mean marketing department where the thinking went something like "but we need to solidify our brand experience by making our application stand out!". Yeah, buddy, yours and everybody elses. Give me my shit back, provide the functionality I'm buying from you and design a nice theme for KDE or Windows if you feel so inclined.
To hammer the point in further with another example, CSS was designed with, err, designers in mind and look at what a head-fuck that turned out to be. Leave the thinking to people who know how to think - we'll tell you what needs prettying up and how to do it right.
To throw out an idea of how things could be better - why can't GUI toolkits support fluid designs which can be manipulated by central themes? Why can't some people opt for ribbon menus while others use the old drop down menus just by changing a theme? What about if I want all my menus to be ribbon style but in a vertical fashion? Or if I want that list of porn actresses names' to be on the right rather than on the left of the porn database application I use to track my stalking habits? GUI's should adapt to how the individual thinks as opposed to the other way round as it currently is. That is the smart way to do it. This recent trend in UI's and, frankly, many other things, is taking the stupid approach to the problem.
Re: The death of consistency in UI design
#43Repost from OSnews comments: This philosophy of putting consistency on this giant pedestal reminds me of the strict non-expressive philosophy of 60s modernist graphic design. They use Helvetica for everything, because Helvetica is neutral, believe that type should never be expressive because the meaning is in the content. Today many like the style , but very few share the philosophy that design should not be expressi…
Allow me to explain to you why you're wrong. My computer is my computer. Not Apple's computer when I'm using iTunes (hah, as if I'd ever use that piece of crap, but stay with me here), not Microsoft's when I'm using Windows Media Player, not Google's when I'm using Chrome and not Mozilla's when I'm using Thunderbird. I know what I want my user interface to look like. I know what fonts, colours and relative sizes I wa…
If you are that particular about your tools you should consider making them yourself, or using software you can really claim ownership of. iTunes and Chrome are not your software in any meaningful sense. Even less so probably because they are free (gratis).
With Mozilla you might have a claim, and I assume you are free to make your own version that has the columns in your preferred order or whatnot. For official support you just have to convince a sufficient number of like-minded programmers that yours is a problem worth solving, and then some minor technical bits like "What determines the central theme?" and "What scripting language shall we standardize on?"
Re: The death of consistency in UI design
#44I remember when there was consistency in UI design: everything looked like Windows95
Actually, Windows 95 looked better than KDE does today. So... yeah, I probably wouldn't mind if my current desktop looked like win95.
Re: The death of consistency in UI design
#45Repost from OSnews comments: This philosophy of putting consistency on this giant pedestal reminds me of the strict non-expressive philosophy of 60s modernist graphic design. They use Helvetica for everything, because Helvetica is neutral, believe that type should never be expressive because the meaning is in the content. Today many like the style , but very few share the philosophy that design should not be expressi…
Allow me to explain to you why you're wrong. My computer is my computer. Not Apple's computer when I'm using iTunes (hah, as if I'd ever use that piece of crap, but stay with me here), not Microsoft's when I'm using Windows Media Player, not Google's when I'm using Chrome and not Mozilla's when I'm using Thunderbird. I know what I want my user interface to look like. I know what fonts, colours and relative sizes I wa…
> I know what I want my user interface to look like. I know what fonts, colours and relative sizes I want things to be.
You do? Wow. I sure don't.
Designing an user interface is mostly not about picking your favorite font and color. It sounds like you use the word "design" for what is actually "theming" or "skinning".
Re: The death of consistency in UI design
#46This is going to be a serious problem for the adoption of web apps. Current problems with web apps are things like lack of keyboard shortcuts (without the browser getting in the way). Browser chrome wasting space in the UI and an overall more "laggy" feeling than a native app. All of these problems however can (have?) be improved upon. UI consistency will be the last great bastion however, whenever I use a web app I…
The defacto-standard already seems to be happening with Twitter Bootstrap. Give it another few years and I expect this will spread into more well-known apps (or the current startups using it will become more prominent).
And I do think people are addressing the other issues. Chrome's Web-App API can open pages in new windows without the browser UI, and Firefox is due to have their similar API available soon.
Things like keyboard shortcuts will likely sort themselves out eventually: for example, Github's issue tracking tries to mirror the keyboard shortcuts of gmail wherever the actions are similar.
Re: The death of consistency in UI design
#47Can't you make the argument that the web killed consistency in UI design a long time ago? The web has always been a completely blank slate from a UI perspective and what happened was that defacto UI/UX "standards" continue to grow and evolve. Someone will always try to do something completely different. But thats okay it pushes the boundaries a bit. You'll still have a lot of apps that use the consistent tried and tr…
Initially all apps looked and felt different. It wasn't until apps started to live within a window on the desktop that consistency became a popular topic and concern.
My thoughts exactly. Every piece of software on the 8-bits and prior had a drastically different feel, even given the technical constraints.
But in the wake of MacOS and Windows 3.1, "native look" suddenly became a highly-touted feature. I think now that this was a result of low experience with desktop apps leading managers to "fake it till they made it" - presumably the OS makers invested more time in UX than the average app developer, so aping look+feel would get them a little closer to a "good" app.
Re: The death of consistency in UI design
#48The thing I hate most about modern UIs is the lack of information. Instead of buttons with text, it's just a whole bunch of mysterious icons. Give me at least some idea of what will happen when I click your icon, and please try and make it look clickable, rather than some background glyphs. Oh, and mobile OSes need to come up with some sort of analog for keyboard shortcuts. Consistency is nice, but usability and disc…
Google seems to be worst with this. In addition to having confusing icons, they're not even consistent with themselves. The Gmail archive icon on my Android phone is a picture of a filing cabinet. The archive icon on their main web app is a box with an arrow pointing down. They're two completely different icons for the exact same action.
They balance that by elsewhere using the same icon for completely different actions, like the sealed envelope that means Compose as well as Mark Unread.
Re: The death of consistency in UI design
#49I couldn't agree more with what this guy is saying. But, mobile applications aren't actually the worst offenders here. At the very least, both platforms have their guidelines for developers to follow if they want to make their apps consistent with the rest of system. And I wouldn't be so sure this is not important: snazzy looks might gain you more installs, but UX that silently and subtly uses established patterns fi…
But mobile OSes are constantly changing the guidelines. Every new phone has a whole new UI language. Gingerbread, ICS, vendor mods, etc.
Re: The death of consistency in UI design
#50Repost from OSnews comments: This philosophy of putting consistency on this giant pedestal reminds me of the strict non-expressive philosophy of 60s modernist graphic design. They use Helvetica for everything, because Helvetica is neutral, believe that type should never be expressive because the meaning is in the content. Today many like the style , but very few share the philosophy that design should not be expressi…
Allow me to explain to you why you're wrong. My computer is my computer. Not Apple's computer when I'm using iTunes (hah, as if I'd ever use that piece of crap, but stay with me here), not Microsoft's when I'm using Windows Media Player, not Google's when I'm using Chrome and not Mozilla's when I'm using Thunderbird. I know what I want my user interface to look like. I know what fonts, colours and relative sizes I wa…
^ the truth. hurts, doesn't it.