Comment by Macuyiko
10 years ago
Very interesting. Seeing this I can't help but feel how much more tangible and solid the old Windows interface was looking. I miss buttons that look like buttons and Window edges that are so hard-lined they're easy to grab and visually separate from underlying windows.
You're very much right and I agree that modern designs like making stuff flat is a huge step backwards. If you want to remove 3d widgets, then at least implement mouse over highlighting so that one can see what can be interacted with. Another regression is making stuff larger and occupying screen space with big title bars or empty white spaces.
Something similar happens in web pages where you're supposed to click a link but the styling doesn't it allow to be a conventional link, so you don't know where to click. Interface designers have a responsibility to not break usability if they diverge from well known widget styles.
"Another regression is making stuff larger and occupying screen space with big title bars or empty white spaces."
Or ... making some stuff larger but not others.
In OSX, I can use a slider to make stuff 'bigger' in Finder, but... it only increases the icon size, not the text size, which makes using the UI from a distance impossible, even though they've got "make stuff bigger" built in.
I really wish Apple had kept the Classic MacOS UI when moving to OS X. It was so much more usable (and elegant).
OS X is freaking gaudy and I hate it. Apple as a whole just has no freaking taste these days. I just want a clean, intuitive interface that lets me run my programs and stays out of my way.
The Amiga Workbench (well, 2.0 onwards. The bright orange-on-blue color scheme of 1.x was rather distracting) was really quite nice.
I mean, there is a separate option for text size too. It seems reasonable to adjust them separately.
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Odd, isn't Quartz completely made of scalable vectors, including images? I mean, it's a derivative of Display PostScript.
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Yes! The current flat design trend makes it difficult to distinguish clickable from non-clickable elements due to the fact that they are all flat. Android "Material Design" is even worse because of the dreadful pastel color scheme which makes things even worse.
That's interesting you find Material Design to be a further regression compared to flat design. Material Design's primary goal is re-establishing depth and dimension to interfaces with implied shadows and volumes across multiple depth planes, a move designed to reclaim what flat design has taken away.
It still looks like someone mounted binoculars on my eyes (everything's huge and zoomed in).
In principle, yes. I remember being left with a positive impression after viewing the first Material Design demo. None of those features materialised in practice, though.
Pretty much everything is clickable though. At some point the UI chrome starts outweighing the content.
Even in Windows 95, each program in the programs list didn't look like a 3D button. That inconsistency can be confusing too.
The programs list was a standard menu though, and those did have a 3D appearance.
In a way, a menu is a large button with horizontally separated segments (each row of text is its own clickable area, and there's nothing else in the menu).
Yes, even things that aren't actually clickable will give you the same visual feedback as a button, the same appearance and the same behaviour when clicked. It's madness.
Thank you! I knew there had to be somebody else who can't stand flat design!
IMO, pseudo-3D appearances like Windows 95, NeXTStep, Mac OS 8, and early KDE/GNOME were the pinnacle of aesthetic GUI design (and Windows 95 in particular is the pinnacle of UX as a whole), and everything since then has been a step backward.
I think about the only GUI aesthetic I can stand that's come out of the 21st century has been the use of transparent glass on some elements, and that fad has already died off, sadly. I have my KDE configured to look like a Windows 95-ish design (i.e. pseudo-3D and gray) for most things, but render a small handful of other things with glass, and it works pretty well for me.
There are plenty of us :-).
While I do hope that this is "just a phase", I don't think it will pass too quickly. The one thing that flat design excels at is quickly and cheaply creating "compliant" UIs and associated elements.
A former colleague of mine sketched the situation bitterly over a few beers; ten years ago or so, he'd spend days, sometimes even a week on an OS X application's icon. It was exhausting and it was hard to convince clients to pay him a week's worth of hourly fee for a damn icon. Nowadays (well, nowadays was about two years ago, I think), he could have two or three mockups ready in an evening and the hip entrepreneurs he worked for on the side would fall off their chairs gasping at how "clean" and "intrinsically meaningful" those blobs of colour were.
We joked around that a lot of the activity could be automated by just writing clever software that takes a 3D picture or a good enough photo of something and makes a "flat" version of it, requiring only a little intervention on a vectorized version to get something final-ish. Voila, icon "design" as a service.
I got to boot a Pentium III desktop (Dell Dimension XPS 1450) few monthes ago. I missed nothing about today's UX. It was no brainer yet not restricting for 90% of your needs. Extremely light and fast (the whole OS runs in less memory than an average webpage). I almost tried to build emacs and a scheme and live in heaven forever.
There was a classical canonical sweet spot in this era design mindset. Kinda like going into a country side cabin. No fancy stuffy, yet most things are just like they need to.
ps: It's hard to remove nostalgia / habit bias; but I consider myself far from prejudiced, having gone into almost all UX fads since I had a keyboard and a mouse. I accept qualities in all systems be it Apple, Linux, Amiga, SGI, HP handeld calcs and all kinds of different ergonomics (CAD, Compositing, Video, Audio, code, shell, IDEs, Smalltalk) ... And even after seeing all of this, Old Windows (until 2K) had a nice sweet spot feel.
I definitely agree with you! The first computer I could call my own was a hand-me-down eMachines eTower 733i Mini-tower desktop with a 733MHz Celeron, upgraded to 256MB of RAM, and a 20GB HDD I was gifted around 2004. I installed a copy of Windows 2000 on it and used it daily for another 2-3 years. I miss the minimal, no-frills UI that caused little-to-no performance hiccups. And I definately feel similar about the Classic MacOS "Platinum" interface (Mac OS 8 thru 9). Despite both sharing what many percieve as a "boring" gray color scheme, the 3D look of the buttons and UI elements made things easy to see and understand their function. I currently work at a company where I find myself often using monitors connected to KVM switches, often with improperly adjusted contrast and brightness. Modern flat web application GUIs in this setting are barely usable, forcing the user to struggle to determine where a button or text area's boundaries are. Though I have to hope this environment is not the norm for 90% of users, I wish modern interface design encouraged such "GUI robustness" and functional minimalism whereby the UI remains functional despite the display's configuration. A similar poor-contrast situation could arise when viewing a display from an improper angle or in a very bright environment.
Not only that, but buttons usually had hotkeys (underlined letters) that made the OS very easy to use without a mouse. Until we moved away from Windows 2000, colleagues used to be amazed at how fast I navigated. With the precedent set by XP, many UI's became HTML-like, and instead of buttons, we'd have links. Mouseless navigation became impossible with more and more apps. And now, I've lost that habit.
I don't use Windows these days, but Linux GUI programs are not as well-designed as the old Windows programs, so I find myself reaching for the mouse every now and then.
Linux GUIs follow different standards for different toolkits. Some try to use a relatively consistent core (GNOME, KDE, and xfce4 to an extent, I think), others can diverge widely. If you're old enough, or like collecting old software, you'll know several wildly inconsistent scrollbar metaphors and controls....
I find it slightly useful -- I can usually visually guestimate a tool's graphics toolkit and predict its behavior, but novice users will almost certainly get confused.
Like you I find environments I cannot keyboard control are hugely unproductive.
Note that this was violated pretty soon thereafter, as one of the first Office versions made toolbar buttons flat. Heck, basically every Office version introduce some new UI stuff, often nicer looking yet conceptually impure.
Plus ca change...