Why did UI’s turn from practical to form over function?
E.g. Office 2003 vs Microsoft 365
It’s easy to remember where everything is with a toolbar and menu bar, which allows access to any option in one click and hold move.
Seriously? Big ribbon and massive padding wasting space, as well as the ribbon being clunky to use.
Why did this happen?
I’m so tired of neck beards assuming that any spacing in a design is a waste, as if a good design packs every milimeter with stuff. Proper application of negative space is common in art and throughout design.
You are among the first people I’ve seen online who hasn’t circlejerked about any level padding/spacing being too much padding.
People on Reddit/Lemmy always talk about how unusably shit any modern design is, and how UX/UI from 20+ years ago was so much better.
Yet do they use ancient copies of the software that broadly still performs the tasks people need of them? No.
Do they theme their system to look like the oh-so-superior Win98? No.
Don’t get me wrong, sometimes I see a design change I dislike. But as a general rule, UI has definitely got better over the years.
And don’t get me wrong, part of me feels great nostalgia at seeing old UX’s, because it reminds me of the “good old days” when I bought my first computer in 1999. It’s fun to Go back and use systems from back then. And at first you think AAAAA this is so cool, I remember all this, this looks neat, but after that nostalgia wears off you think *“thank god modern UIs aren’t inconsistent, cramped and cluttered like this”
Nostalgia goggles are a powerful thing.
People spend lots of money to buy big screens, only for apps/websites to use a fraction of it.
I cannot control how every application or website I have to use looks, but where I can, I try to find solutions.
When I am occasionally on reddit, I use old.reddit. I use addons for youtube, to remove unecessary stuff, or open videos directly in mpv.
I use reader mode to make many sites easier to navigate.
Mastodon and Lemmy have a much better design than Twitter or new Reddit.
On the one windows machine I still have, I use the classic shell, to replace the start menu with something more usable.
I use Libreoffice, and many other Software with sane functional UI.
I don’t want to use old software, because the older software gets, the more hostile the environment becomes for it.
A lot of UI decisions on the Internet seem driven by the need to create empty spaces to put advertising into, and with adblocker it looks just bad.
This just means that functionality and interoperability criteria are more important than usability. They are - you can’t just exchange docs with a person using a modern office suite, while you are using WordPerfect 8 for Linux.
This is the opposite of confirming your argument about UI\UX, because this means that UI\UX are order of magnitude less important in making the decision.
And it’s obvious, I swear, some people haven’t been taught that arguments are not intended to support their group or hierarchy, you can’t do that with cheating in arguments anyway. They are intended to find out truth, make both participants richer than before.
That’s simply because they “theme their system” to look as they wish and they don’t have to stop with Win98 or Win2K.
But in a “one size to fit all” situation those are still obviously superior.
Ergonomics is not a matter of opinions, there’s plenty of research since the fscking world war two. Different controls should have different colors, shapes and textures. It’s a scientifically proven statement. Proven with human error stats and time to do a task stats.
Padding controls and indicators with space can be a good thing, but no modern designer is doing it right as far as I’m concerned. Because it’s not about making panels half the screen, it’s about different groups of controls being clearly separated by that space and padded for focus, and space being used proportionally to importance.
They’ve all heard something of it, but haven’t learned the actual thing.
Older UIs were usually (often, but not always) made with respect to ergonomics.
Our ideas of all three things seem to be diametrically opposite. For me older UIs seem ordered, compact and correctly accented. In general, it’s not always true - say, I like the appearance of old KDE (2-3), but not sure if I’d use it daily, for example (neither I would modern KDE).
For some, with only a small screen, wasted space means extra navigation to find hidden commands. A usability fail just so the app looks pretty. Also a symptom of “one UI fits all” just to save businesses money.
In my experience working with Designers for web and app design, they always had trouble with dynamic stuff at all levels, from program flow and elements which dynamically collapsed or expanded to using animation to illustrate things or call attention to something.
Don’t get me wrong, as a programmer I was like a toddler next to them when it came to even just awareness of the concerns related to merelly visual organisation, not counting all sorts of other concerns in a visual design some of which I’m sure I’m even not aware exist. It’s just that when it came to dynamic elements their expertise was comparativelly non-existent and they have little or no tendency to use such capabilities, even in things such as apps where they’re reasonably easy to do.
Almost like Microsoft did a tremendous amount of user research aimed at improving the accessibility of the most commonly used features. I don’t use their products much, but the design has definitely improved over the years and extra padding is a big part of it.
The design has absolutely not “definitely” improved.
I hoped it was clear that I was making a purely subjective statement there. So that’s just like… my opinion man.
I disagree.