Comment by mrweasel
10 hours ago
There's so little joy and happiness left in computing. Reverting to the older style of icons, plus perhaps a few UI tweaks, certainly help bring a bit of whimsical back into the macOS platform. That's something many of us would love.
> There's so little joy and happiness left in computing
Preach it! https://daveon.design/creating-joy-in-the-user-experience.ht...
Great article -but the image has issues with Safari (invisible drag corner), and iOS (a mess).
I have found that we need to be very, very careful, when making the UI more "fun."
Things like rounded affordances, short transition animations, easy-to-understand elements, etc., are good. They remove the "friction."
However, cute icons, unprompted animations, and overuse of whitespace for the sake of design aesthetics, can cause the UI to be too prominent.
UI needs to be approachable, useful, and unobtrusive. i.e. "forgettable." Many designers absolutely can't stand the idea of designing stuff that no one pays attention to; but that's actually exactly what most UI needs to be.
The metaphor that I use, is that most waitstaff at restaurants, wear black.
The reason is, is because people don't go to a restaurant to pay attention to the staff (with a couple of ahem exceptions <owl emoji/>). They go for the food, and the ease of having it provided without the need to cook and wash up.
I feel that UI needs to be the same.
I am currently working on a version 2 of a pretty popular app that has been out for a couple of years. The original was almost entirely designed by a professional graphic designer, and he did a great job -for the most part. It looks great, and people like it.
But I am constantly encountering people that have no idea about some of its most important features, mainly because the affordances were deprecated in service to visual aesthetic. The new version uses a distinct "accent color" for elements that can be manipulated, as well as simpler, clearer design. It's working well.
Another example is my "Spinner" UI element[0]. This was a UIKit element that I designed, to provide an interactive "prize wheel" spinner feature for iOS. It works nicely.
But I have never been able to justify actually using it for any of my projects. It's too "in your face."
[0] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Spinner
Thanks, very nice of you to note that, and I'll fix. The SSG behind it has some updates coming to improve mobile rendering for sidenotes etc already, will add more :)
Drag corner... hmm... seems a change in recent browsers - that has not changed in the website implementation since it worked in all three (FireFox, Chrome, Safari.) And I may have to break my no-Javascript ethos to get it working again!
1 reply →
> UI needs to be approachable, useful, and unobtrusive. i.e. "forgettable." Many designers absolutely can't stand the idea of designing stuff that no one pays attention to; but that's actually exactly what most UI needs to be.
You can be all those things without being forgettable. What matters to the user is the cohesiveness of the whole experience, not individual widgets. People use apps, they don’t just stand there looking at it like a video playing.
That's a lovely little article. Thank you.
Liquid Glass was a good step in the right direction imo. A choice to make visual entertainment and beauty a priority over pure function.
I feel like what computers really lost was sounds, we used to have so many joyful sounds and background music on computers while now they are all silent. I think it’s a tragedy the Nintendo switch broke the long history of music in the menus and apps.
People started hating when their computers made sound around the time smartphones became big. This is because companies can not be trusted with the ability to make attention grabbing sounds. Sounds should be used to mean something important is happening. It just so happens what Zuck' thinks is important isn't really important
I wonder if the sound reduction is a result of computers moving into more and more spaces, rather than relegated to a single dedicated area. Beeps and boops going off all the time can be really annoying in public spaces.
> A choice to make visual entertainment and beauty a priority over pure function.
Except that (in my view, which is shared by many others though of course not universal) Liquid Glass is ugly as sin. Even if it worked properly I’d still rather not have it. But there’s also nothing entertaining or beautiful about unreadable overlapping text, flashing UI as you pan, visually cut off scrollbars, excessively rounded corners, or any from a plethora of bad decisions.
Liquid Glass is the worst of both worlds.
macOS used to be both functional and visually entertaining, and they’ve been removing that incompetently and for no apparent reason. One obvious case is removing an app from the Dock: It used to be that it went away in a quick puff of smoke with an appropriate sound; some versions back they removed the puff of smoke but kept the sound.