214
Why is UI design backsliding?
(lemmy.zip)
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 literally any level of 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 people 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.
How are laptop screens useless? I'm using a laptop right now. Doesn't seem useless to me.
I have more than enough room.
Laptops wouldn't be the main form factor for doing PC work if they were useless.
Unless you've got scaling set super high for some reason, that's very doubtful.
Is that a Framework Laptop?
Damn I wish, I've been eyeing those up for ages.
It's some Huawei laptop I found refurbished for a price I couldn't turn down
No wait, let me go with your example ….
You believe a laptop window is useful because you can run a browser with 11 headlines visible
My first work “computer” was a vt100 terminal: black and white, 80 characters wide (on the newer models), by 24 rows. I could and did have a reader that could display as many as 20 headlines on a single screen, and I could scroll and drill down much faster. Sure the UI was shit, but it had the functionality to do the task.
Don’t get me wrong, I fully appreciate the usability and power of a modern graphical UI and would never go back. However the point is designers focus too much on eye candy and “doing it because they can” over actual functionality. Can you understand my frustration that a modern 1900x1200 screen with millions of colors is really no more functional than a 40 year old black and white character based terminal. I get that designers want to show off their UI, but I want the UI to get out of my way and let me do more stuff. I want there to be more focus on compactness and efficiency. I want at least some attention paid to using resources wisely
So you accept that you were mistaken, yeah? Clearly they're usable.
*12 headlines, on a window that doesn't even take up my whole screen, at 125% scaling, with a bookmark bar taking up space, and on a site rich with thumbnails.
And fine. I'll set it to standard 100% scaling, at a size where I can still comfortably work:
19 headlines, and some nice related thumbnails, a site header with plenty of links, 2 small file manager windows open, and a terminal window open.
None of this is even taking into consideration things in modern UX design like virtual desktops you can instantly switch between - something non-existent long ago.
Please do continue to tell me about how "unusable" laptops are.
Wow, you can fit one whole browser window on it .. with headlines.
Even back in the CRT days, I could have a couple windows, such as email, text, and IDE
Laptops are great for portability: I used to carry them to work from any loaation. It was great while it lasted. Now I carry it from docking station to docking station, and I’m back to the bad old days of dpneeding an office set up, so I can have usable monitors
I easily fit my browser on it (displaying a reasonably-sized page without content being cut off) with a file manager at the side, which is what I had open at the time.
I don't know what you wanted me to show you. 4 windows in a quadrant layout? That would be doable too, for most programs.
I was refuting your point that laptops are unusable because of modern UX - clearly they aren't.
I thought we were talking about laptops! Now you're talking about a monitor on a desk?
As I just showed you, you can have multiple windows open on a laptop. My laptop isn't even large, it's just a usual 14.something" laptop.
You should go into your display settings and turn your scaling down, because it seems to me you've got scaling set at 200% or something lol