This isn't addressing the main issue I have with modern UI
Back in the era of Windows 98, buttons were beveled; one corner was light as if the sun was pointing at it, and the opposite corner was dark, and it made it look like the button was sticking out of the screen. When you clicked on it, the bevels got mirrored as if it was now sticking into the screen.
This showed "I am a button, and you pushed me". But most importantly, it became the universal language for "I am clickable", and you didn't need to hover over it, or click on it, to know that it was clickable.
The same bevel was then used for everything. The scroll bar, the resizable borders, and so on and so forth. If you could click it, it looked clickable
This got dropped progressively in favor of cooler looking UIs, but what we lost in the process is that now, the UI expects the user to have integrated some baseline of "software logic" (I'm trying to think of a software equivalent of "video game logic")
Now to know that something on your screen is clickable, you rely on hovering.
So the result now is that it got even harder to onboard who are new to technology. Most often old people.
They don't even have a legacy "windows 98" theme on Windows 10 & 11 anymore
Even worse is the web, most of the web stopped making links react to hovering, links are not necessarily colored blue or underlined anymore, nothing is unified
How would the web feel if you were the kind of person who didn't instinctively know that clicking on your avatar is supposed to bring you to your user's profile?
The web isn't built for you anymore, the expectations for the user are higher
Yes. I think your issue is a symptom of a broader problem: the takeover of UI by graphic designers, causing the virtual extinction of usability experts.
UIs today, first and foremost, are built for branding and marketing reasons. Usability and information accessibility have fallen way down in priority. I think this is the main reason why we see so much “responsive design” which is really just shoehorning mobile UIs into the desktop browser. To product managers it’s far more important to maintain consistent look and feel / branding across mobile and desktop than it is to achieve optimal usability for each platform.
Maybe the extinction is the population of users that's entirely unused to graphical user interfaces. You don't need to take that group into consideration anymore, so, goodbye to usability experts.
But the obvious result is that now, computer illiterate people are completely fucked
I had a father (he was 56 in 2022 so not even that old) who refused to learn how to use technology. But in 2022, he couldn't find an apartment without help, he couldn't find a job without help, he couldn't do his paperwork without help, even finding a restaurant's phone number to make a reservation would take him ages because who the fuck bothers filing for the yellow pages anymore? Are they even still a thing?
At some point surely he would've caved and pushed through to get a smartphone and a laptop. But at that point, how hard would it be to learn it all on your own?
One of my biggest issues is that "flat design" by definition also dictates "borderless". Meaning, a dialog or other window adjoins or overlaps another, you sometimes need to stare for a few seconds to tell where one window begins and another ends. Seems to be worse on Windows and Chrome, but I see it on Linux sometimes too and try to file a bug when it happens.
Adding at least a 1-pixel border and drop shadows to all windows can go a long way to fixing this, but I don't believe that the latter helps "dark mode" users much.
(Of course, a lot of developers these days only use and develop apps and websites in full-screen mode on a tiny 13" laptop screen, so they never see a lot of the issues that "flat" causes.)
A lot of oldest GUIs were flat by hw limitations (often 1bpp displays) and they absolutely didn't dictate borderless. Sometimes there wasn't an "always on" border, but a border would show up when your mouse was over a clickable element, sometimes there was a border. Activation of UI element was often done by swapping foreground and background colour, something that was immediately visible.
I think despite the fact that "UX" entered the picture a long time ago now, most people who are "UI/UX Designers" still focus heavily on how things look and have a much lower understanding of how things work and feel to use
I also suspect that universities are still mostly teaching design as if it is something printed in a magazine and not rendered in a browser
Designers I have worked with have shown a lack of understanding of the basic HTML input components, failing to understand what the difference is between a radio button and a checkbox for instance.
But there's a lot more than that. They build designs without considering scrollbars, or without considering paginating large datasets. They don't plan for asynchronous operations that may not return immediately. Yes these are more technical concerns but they do impact the design! Designers should be asking questions about how long an operation they are building mockups for might take and planning accordingly
But it's even worse than that. They want everything to neatly fit on a single screen, but they don't really understand display sizes and aspect ratios. This means they don't build (or really understand) responsive layouts. Very common to hear "this spacing looks off on my screen", as if it were designed for a consistent page size (print media)
I don't know. Maybe I've just had pretty bad luck with designers. I'll admit most of the ones I've had trouble with are fairly fresh out of university, so it could just be a lack of real world experience. But some of the stuff just really gives me the impression they weren't taught to design for web or digital displays at all
> I think despite the fact that "UX" entered the picture a long time ago now, most people who are "UI/UX Designers" still focus heavily on how things look and have a much lower understanding of how things work and feel to use
Yeah, use of the term "UX" has been a red flag for me for a long time now.
It seems we are suffering as a "profession" from serious cognitive dissonance as we preach the importance of accessibility and function over form, but design for aesthetics and follow trends in style.
If I had to estimate I would say about 70% of the apps on my phone don't have button outlines or menus, have no contrast, abuse jargon and worst of all don't respect my decisions. Except ofcourse, in the basket and the checkout pages. But boy do they look pretty.
The philosopher Rick Roderick does a talk about existential
priorities, about how the necessary conditions for appreciating
literature are having food in your stomach - that kind of Maslow's
stuff. In it there's this absolutely devastating, knock-down line
where he says of modernity;
"People aren't afraid of dying any more. We're afraid of being seen
wearing the wrong trainers"
That was like 1997, and it sound truer today than ever. In a culture
so steeped in vanity, with entire economies built on vanity, it's no
wonder that form triumphs over function. To even talk about function
is to invite ridicule. This is an age where people need a _thin_
laptop, no matter that it costs 10x the price, breaks if you stare at
it too hard, and catches fire when you charge it.
I try to remember how the general demise of OK/ cancel buttons came about. There was a time when almost all of the more complex tools in an application would use modal dialog boxes without an ability to preview the result before the user clicked OK. This was rightfully deemed inadequate and eventually tbe "modeless" side panel was invented, and its lesser sibling, the "apply" button. This gave users more tools that allowed instant previews. And these were mostly good changes.
But somehow the idea of modeless UI spread into all parts of UIs, including settings dialogs, where it sometimes doesn't feel appropriate at all. Why did that happen? Why is there no consistent pattern anymore for discarding unwanted changes in a dialog?
> I try to remember how the general demise of OK/ cancel buttons came about
I think there was a time when dialogs had all three: Apply, Ok, Cancel. I formed the habit of clicking Apply and then Ok back then.
Either way, I think Ok went away when smartphones were introduced, because they traded checkboxes with those horizontal slider buttons. Then someone had the idea what works on a smartphone should work everywhere and now we have that everywhere.
The Apply button was pointless. OK is supposed to apply. Apply simply made the changes, but it did not dismiss the dialog. Apply seemed confusing to most users and there should have only been two buttons. If you click OK, there was no reason to keep the dialog visible since you should be able to click the same thing (easily) to get back to it.
If the Apply button was necessary because you could not easily get back to the dialog, then it was a problem with the interface before the dialog opened. That is, it should be easy to open dialogs, close them, and open them again.
That change is explained in the human interface guidelines of the era. There was some debate in the GNOME world when this was first implemented and the rationale was explained in threads like this one:
This should be retitled as "I'm getting annoyed with the Microsoft/Windows UI."
Two of the three complaints are about Windows specifically (resizing windows and lack of application titlebar info). The 3rd appears to be an issue the author has with the theme they have applied in VSCode, which doesn't seem to match the theme shown on the VSCode homepage, which clearly shows which tab is active.
There's no look at macro trends nor software outside of the MS ecosystem.
> theme shown on the VSCode homepage, which clearly shows which tab is active
When I glance at the VSCode home page, the only thing which clued me in on which tab is active is the fact that there are two gray ones but only one black one. If there were only two tabs open, I'd have expected the gray one to be the active one. Sure, the argument is probably that the active tab color should match the background, which is black, but I still think it is a terrible UI.
And I really agree with the sibling comment about "wait, those are tabs?" Can't tell you how many times I've had that thought cross my mind. Not just for tabs, either, but for many types of UI elements. It really is a shitshow these days.
The author is not wrong, but swimming in the shallows.
It's a very old problem that goes back more decades than are accounted for here. To their credit, at least when the joint venture between IBM and Microsoft happened around OS/2, CUA still set a broad standard that was widely met and meant that many of these problems were rare, or at least the keyboard was guaranteed to work consistently. Apple does not deserve the free pass it gets here.
Why? Because design choices are not governed by designers. Rather, they are governed by cost and time-to-market, much like car interiors, and chosen from a shared parts bin.
Depending on the ISV this means that the GUI or widget toolkit may be Microsoft.net, Java, Qt, or 30 years of other toolkits recombined poorly ad nauseam.
Frequently, this means the evil of two lessers since there are no clear winners. Users will continue to suffer as a result.
I try to solve this with Sway on Linux, but the further into left field I go, the screaming just gets louder, not quieter.
> It’s actually Microsoft Edge. How would I know this by looking at the application? There isn’t any way to do it, as far as I can tell. You have to go somewhere else to know what app you are looking at. Grrr.
I have absolutely no idea why the author thinks it's important to see which browser you're looking at, at all time. It's a waste of screen space.
> We need to bring back the Ok and Cancel buttons.
As long as we never use the words "Ok" and "Cancel"
"Save Settings" and "Keep Current Settings" for his example please
No the point in article is "OK" and "Cancel" were fairly standardized buttons for ANY general action the user might initiate -- that requires a confirmation.
In certain situations where the action itself is "Cancel my Order" or "Cancel Job" etc ... then the button labelled "Cancel" can cause confusion through a double negative.
In other routine instances ... Cancel was a fairly standard and universally understood option to back out of an action -- across scenarios and across applications. Similarly OK to confirm the intended action.
I lament the death of always-visible, easily-grabbed scrollbars. Every scrollbar is transparent, disappearing, tiny, and exceedingly difficult to grab. Why? I guess UI designers decided that scrollbars are ugly. Same with obvious buttons; at some point, half of buttons were made into obscure symbols, and even when words are still used, any kind of bordering that points them out as buttons is gone. Just freestanding symbols and words. It's infuriating.
Low-contrast colors EVERYWHERE also angers me. Low contrast is great for being easy on the eyes, but certain interactive elements need contrast to indicate their function. My best example is that Linux desktop themes across the entire DE space focus on low contrast at the expense of almost everything else, and it's hard to figure out stuff as simple as which window is on top and active, or which elements in a window are clickable.
> Every scrollbar is transparent, disappearing, tiny, and exceedingly difficult to grab. Why? I guess UI designers decided that scrollbars are ugly.
It’s kind of obvious, isn’t it? Every mouse now has a scroll wheel (or corresponding mechanism) and on touch displays, scrolling needs no scrollbar either.
Of course, it’s still terrible to remove the only indication that a box has more information available that can fit, and is therefore scrollable. Not to mention the useful property of seeing both your current approximate position and the total size at a glance.
Grabbing and manipulating the scroll bar can be significantly faster in large windows than scrolling incessantly. I know Logitech mice allow you to scroll freely, but a user shouldn’t have to purchase specific hardware to rectify for a failure in software
in many situations we need to scroll both vertically and horizontally -- for example a Excel spreadsheet / google sheets, or maps
even on touch screens -- depending on the UI -- if the entire display area is "hot" the scrollbars might be the only way to pan around without editing / triggering other actions
I have to scroll with the mouse wheel just to make the scroll bar appear, and then be quick enough to get the pointer over it so I can drag it before it disappears again. It is super irritating.
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Back in the era of Windows 98, buttons were beveled; one corner was light as if the sun was pointing at it, and the opposite corner was dark, and it made it look like the button was sticking out of the screen. When you clicked on it, the bevels got mirrored as if it was now sticking into the screen.
This showed "I am a button, and you pushed me". But most importantly, it became the universal language for "I am clickable", and you didn't need to hover over it, or click on it, to know that it was clickable.
The same bevel was then used for everything. The scroll bar, the resizable borders, and so on and so forth. If you could click it, it looked clickable
This got dropped progressively in favor of cooler looking UIs, but what we lost in the process is that now, the UI expects the user to have integrated some baseline of "software logic" (I'm trying to think of a software equivalent of "video game logic")
Now to know that something on your screen is clickable, you rely on hovering.
So the result now is that it got even harder to onboard who are new to technology. Most often old people.
They don't even have a legacy "windows 98" theme on Windows 10 & 11 anymore
Even worse is the web, most of the web stopped making links react to hovering, links are not necessarily colored blue or underlined anymore, nothing is unified
How would the web feel if you were the kind of person who didn't instinctively know that clicking on your avatar is supposed to bring you to your user's profile?
The web isn't built for you anymore, the expectations for the user are higher
UIs today, first and foremost, are built for branding and marketing reasons. Usability and information accessibility have fallen way down in priority. I think this is the main reason why we see so much “responsive design” which is really just shoehorning mobile UIs into the desktop browser. To product managers it’s far more important to maintain consistent look and feel / branding across mobile and desktop than it is to achieve optimal usability for each platform.
But the obvious result is that now, computer illiterate people are completely fucked
I had a father (he was 56 in 2022 so not even that old) who refused to learn how to use technology. But in 2022, he couldn't find an apartment without help, he couldn't find a job without help, he couldn't do his paperwork without help, even finding a restaurant's phone number to make a reservation would take him ages because who the fuck bothers filing for the yellow pages anymore? Are they even still a thing?
At some point surely he would've caved and pushed through to get a smartphone and a laptop. But at that point, how hard would it be to learn it all on your own?
Adding at least a 1-pixel border and drop shadows to all windows can go a long way to fixing this, but I don't believe that the latter helps "dark mode" users much.
(Of course, a lot of developers these days only use and develop apps and websites in full-screen mode on a tiny 13" laptop screen, so they never see a lot of the issues that "flat" causes.)
Deleted Comment
I also suspect that universities are still mostly teaching design as if it is something printed in a magazine and not rendered in a browser
Designers I have worked with have shown a lack of understanding of the basic HTML input components, failing to understand what the difference is between a radio button and a checkbox for instance.
But there's a lot more than that. They build designs without considering scrollbars, or without considering paginating large datasets. They don't plan for asynchronous operations that may not return immediately. Yes these are more technical concerns but they do impact the design! Designers should be asking questions about how long an operation they are building mockups for might take and planning accordingly
But it's even worse than that. They want everything to neatly fit on a single screen, but they don't really understand display sizes and aspect ratios. This means they don't build (or really understand) responsive layouts. Very common to hear "this spacing looks off on my screen", as if it were designed for a consistent page size (print media)
I don't know. Maybe I've just had pretty bad luck with designers. I'll admit most of the ones I've had trouble with are fairly fresh out of university, so it could just be a lack of real world experience. But some of the stuff just really gives me the impression they weren't taught to design for web or digital displays at all
Yeah, use of the term "UX" has been a red flag for me for a long time now.
If I had to estimate I would say about 70% of the apps on my phone don't have button outlines or menus, have no contrast, abuse jargon and worst of all don't respect my decisions. Except ofcourse, in the basket and the checkout pages. But boy do they look pretty.
"People aren't afraid of dying any more. We're afraid of being seen wearing the wrong trainers"
That was like 1997, and it sound truer today than ever. In a culture so steeped in vanity, with entire economies built on vanity, it's no wonder that form triumphs over function. To even talk about function is to invite ridicule. This is an age where people need a _thin_ laptop, no matter that it costs 10x the price, breaks if you stare at it too hard, and catches fire when you charge it.
But somehow the idea of modeless UI spread into all parts of UIs, including settings dialogs, where it sometimes doesn't feel appropriate at all. Why did that happen? Why is there no consistent pattern anymore for discarding unwanted changes in a dialog?
I think there was a time when dialogs had all three: Apply, Ok, Cancel. I formed the habit of clicking Apply and then Ok back then.
Either way, I think Ok went away when smartphones were introduced, because they traded checkboxes with those horizontal slider buttons. Then someone had the idea what works on a smartphone should work everywhere and now we have that everywhere.
If the Apply button was necessary because you could not easily get back to the dialog, then it was a problem with the interface before the dialog opened. That is, it should be easy to open dialogs, close them, and open them again.
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/hig/2002-January/msg00079.ht...
Two of the three complaints are about Windows specifically (resizing windows and lack of application titlebar info). The 3rd appears to be an issue the author has with the theme they have applied in VSCode, which doesn't seem to match the theme shown on the VSCode homepage, which clearly shows which tab is active.
There's no look at macro trends nor software outside of the MS ecosystem.
When I glance at the VSCode home page, the only thing which clued me in on which tab is active is the fact that there are two gray ones but only one black one. If there were only two tabs open, I'd have expected the gray one to be the active one. Sure, the argument is probably that the active tab color should match the background, which is black, but I still think it is a terrible UI.
And I really agree with the sibling comment about "wait, those are tabs?" Can't tell you how many times I've had that thought cross my mind. Not just for tabs, either, but for many types of UI elements. It really is a shitshow these days.
It's a very old problem that goes back more decades than are accounted for here. To their credit, at least when the joint venture between IBM and Microsoft happened around OS/2, CUA still set a broad standard that was widely met and meant that many of these problems were rare, or at least the keyboard was guaranteed to work consistently. Apple does not deserve the free pass it gets here.
Why? Because design choices are not governed by designers. Rather, they are governed by cost and time-to-market, much like car interiors, and chosen from a shared parts bin.
Depending on the ISV this means that the GUI or widget toolkit may be Microsoft.net, Java, Qt, or 30 years of other toolkits recombined poorly ad nauseam.
Frequently, this means the evil of two lessers since there are no clear winners. Users will continue to suffer as a result.
I try to solve this with Sway on Linux, but the further into left field I go, the screaming just gets louder, not quieter.
I have absolutely no idea why the author thinks it's important to see which browser you're looking at, at all time. It's a waste of screen space.
> We need to bring back the Ok and Cancel buttons.
As long as we never use the words "Ok" and "Cancel"
"Save Settings" and "Keep Current Settings" for his example please
In certain situations where the action itself is "Cancel my Order" or "Cancel Job" etc ... then the button labelled "Cancel" can cause confusion through a double negative.
In other routine instances ... Cancel was a fairly standard and universally understood option to back out of an action -- across scenarios and across applications. Similarly OK to confirm the intended action.
Low-contrast colors EVERYWHERE also angers me. Low contrast is great for being easy on the eyes, but certain interactive elements need contrast to indicate their function. My best example is that Linux desktop themes across the entire DE space focus on low contrast at the expense of almost everything else, and it's hard to figure out stuff as simple as which window is on top and active, or which elements in a window are clickable.
It’s kind of obvious, isn’t it? Every mouse now has a scroll wheel (or corresponding mechanism) and on touch displays, scrolling needs no scrollbar either.
Of course, it’s still terrible to remove the only indication that a box has more information available that can fit, and is therefore scrollable. Not to mention the useful property of seeing both your current approximate position and the total size at a glance.
The god damn scroll wheel does not work in half of the cases in Windows. When you have work to do is very annoying.
even on touch screens -- depending on the UI -- if the entire display area is "hot" the scrollbars might be the only way to pan around without editing / triggering other actions