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I don't like it either, but they are in the fashion industry.

Why did the label on my Fig Newtons get redesigned? It's not because it lacked in usability. It's because the company knows that customers respond to visual updates. If something looks the same year after year, lots of people will see it as old and tired. A redesign makes it feel modern and fresh. At least to enough people that it matters.

I had the same experience on a recent trip to The UPS Store. The color scheme was all different from the previous time I shipped a package. I commented to the clerk that they'd redecorated. He said they do it pretty often.

Software has a visual aspect to it, and the same forces are in effect. Part of a UI designer's job is to be on that treadmill. That's probably not what the job should be, but the people who pay their salary want it to be.

The amount of times I absolutely cringe from super lux UI which clearly a lot of time and energy went into prettifying at the absolute expense of usability and affordances. I love Apple TV but flip to any screen with multiple buttons and not being able to tell which button is selected. Or the Russian Roulette of Youtube trying to select any of the overlayed buttons on the actual video frame. I would 1000% trade shiny for more usablility in 99% of apps.

There is both ux and and graphic design and they both have their place. Saddly far too often one wins out over another instead of finding balance.

I concur, though I fear that as a discipline we haven't done ourselves any favours here in how we pass knowledge between generations.

In decades past, books and journals served as the primary mechanism for capturing and transferring CS and Software Engineering knowledge. Older knowledge was curated and remained easily accessible.

When I studied CS and engineering in the early 2000s, I learned a lot about the history and evolution of the field simply by browsing old books on the shelves of the university library. Thousands of them. I read back to the 60s and 70s, and I felt it really helped me have a broader perspective and evolution of the field.

That same university library has now transitioned to mostly online materials. The physical collection has been drastically pruned based on what is currently relevant and in demand.

The online collections don't have the same historical depth. And websites and online repositories come and go - think of the vast troves of knowledge that once existed on Usenet that have been lost to obscurity.

I also think the joy of browsing through topics you didn't know existed as given way to search-driven retrieval.

In our efforts to use computers to document what we know about computers, we have lost all that was good about not using computers for information management.

It’s when people confuse User Experience Design, which is a systemic and architectural discipline, with UI Art, which is an aesthetic discipline. If you have someone who is professionally the latter doing the former job, you get things people think look good but don’t work well.

This isn’t even to knock either: UI artists are essential to making a UI understandable and enjoyable. But people think the skill sets are the same, and they aren’t.

Disclaimer: am a UX Designer.

I had some hilarious experiences by telling people that they did well, now make the same thing again but make it better. I was quite surprised they put up with it many itterations and even more surprised that each round (with few exceptons) was actually better.

> Alan Kay (of Smalltalk fame)

Alan Kay (of Alan Kay fame)

> No more clean, compact directory trees

Even plain old tables with sortable rearrangeable columns, a staple of all of the traditional desktop UI frameworks, are increasingly falling by the wayside in favor of mobile-style single-column lists with cells consisting of stacks of labels.

This is exhausting with web stuff. Every designer wants flat everything, not even so much as underlining links, let alone enough design to actually make it obvious what's a clickable button.

How about on windows, no visible borders just overlapping off-white

Rightfully so. Your entire premise is that design should be made with accessibility in mind whereas in reality, accessibility tools should be built to handle those concerns and design should be free to do what it needs to do full stop. If that's being accessible that's fine, but trying to enforce accessibility standards is like saying that Levis needs to make pants for people without legs.

Or if you have any sort of non-correctable visual impairment. I'm sighted but recently I had actually been thinking of learning better how to use a screen reader because I genuinely struggle to visually parse a lot of modern UI design. The big move toward flat designs, but with everyone choosing their own idiosyncratic special snowflake way of doing it, leaves very little visual redundancy for people to use as a fallback. Sad to hear that it might not be the solution either.

Also, holy hell, this obsession with huge swathes of negative space is a disaster for anyone who needs to zoom the page for readability. I'm here to see content, not an homage to the backrooms.

> We can also lay some blame at Agile's feet. I've seen UX and UI designers genuinely struggle to fit their work into the sprint treadmill. 2 weeks' notice is not enough time to do any sort of serious usability design study.

Windows 95 significantly overhauled the desktop GUI metaphor, in a way that is still the skeletal structure of desktops today.

Its U/I design since Windows 3.11 came about because of agile, not in spite of it. https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...

> We recognized that we needed much more opportunity to create a design, try it out with users (perhaps comparing it to other designs), make changes, and gather more user feedback. Our desire to abandon the waterfall model and opt for iterative design fortunately followed similar efforts in other areas of the company, so we had concrete examples of its benefits and feasibility.

You're right that you can't go start to finish on a design in a single 2-week sprint. But that's why you have a repeating series of sprints, you're not supposed to go from start to finish in a single sprint.

The Windows 95 team always had a shippable OS to demo internally to devs, QA, beta testers and users invited by the UX designers for usability testing. Just because you demo something to the product owner does not require that you then release the result immediately to end users. Decouple development from deployment and from release and you'll find agile methods can work just fine.

When the end of a sprint is a hard cutoff point for tasks, agile is done wrong. Just carry unfinished work over - it won't go away, anyway.

I think the trick here is to not co-mingle the development of UI toolkits and the software built with them. Agile works fine if the UI framework itself is its own project with its own lifecycle, suitably long sprints, etc.

This goes against the pattern that's most often observed in the past decade of every product hand-rolling its UI from scratch, though.

Fixed, thanks!

> But that was in a different millennium.

Exactly. There may have been a reason for the single menu bar back in 1984 when the Mac had a 9-inch screen. But it doesn't work very well on my 43-inch screen where the menu bar may be a few feet away from a small window in the lower right hand corner.

IIRC Bill Atkinson said that it is at the top because it was easier to code. at any rate, it’s true that screen edges and corners are easy to click because their hit region becomes infinite in one or two directions

Decades before Liquid Glass. They had begun throwing it all away by the time they got rid of scrollbars (and the rest of the industry followed like gormless lemmings).

I think you're trying to find meaning when there's no meaning what so ever.

Large phones were a bad idea because you cant use it with one finger, until iPhone Pro Maxes came out.

Installing apps from the internet is scary because viruses, yet Macs let you do that no questions asked.

Ads are bad and dangerous, until it shows up on Apple Maps.

Apple is just a simple company, existing to make as much money as possible. They make beautiful devices though - but no reason to put them on a pedestal.

Criticisms of the format, "the same people", are virtually always irrational/tribalistic, and based on the "invented enemy" internet trope that happens when interpreting groups of people as being one person. I'd like to leave such common tropes outside of HN.

You know, it’s really not what happened. All these people, Gruber, Siracusa, and the usual suspects, were unanimous in their displeasure.

You don’t have to make it up, it was only one year ago. All their blog posts are still visible.

> And on every misstep and their correction, the same people will be defending them.

That doesn't match my experience. Personally I've found Apple fans (not just Gruber and Nielsen but regular Apple users) to be the most vocally critical of their design missteps.

4 still shipped with buttons my mum could recognise.

Apple's design never recovered from the flattening of iOS 7.

*3GS

I once thought it was a nice refresh every 5+ years. Now it feels excessive changing every single year.

Apple's own design guidelines originally said not to do the thing they did (and which they are now once again saying not to do).

Couldn't Apple have just, like, talked to the people who originally wrote the guidelines? Why do they need to re-invent the wheel? Will Apple forget again in another 15 years and need to re-run the experiment, taking us all along as test subjects?

Microsoft has (and had) some amazing designers. They came up with Metro, which was the forerunner of the flat design that everyone loves/hates now.

When you say carefully considered, you're going with the the Aristotelian process that led him to argue that feathers fall slower than rock.

It would have been a very easy thing to test the people outside there bubble.

Your “today” does a lot of work. Many frustrated people are comparing 2020s Apple with 2010 Apple, thus the complaints.

Alan Dye really did a number on that company and set back UI design by one or two decades, favoring graphic design over human interface design.

My inbox folders/labels used to be just text, and I'd have to read them to find the one I wanted to look at. I started adding emoji to the label names and suddenly I could scan the list far quicker to get to what I was looking for.

Granted, I had done this rather than the vendor deciding what icon fit - so I guess my brain had created neural pathways linking the image and the word.

Personally I think there's probably enough screen real estate to have both an icon and text in a menu entry, but menu search is generally more useful for anything not already an icon on the application's toolbar.

Yeah with KDE it's all or nothing, either every menu item has an icon or you can turn off all of them.

This goes against the original argument which is that icons should only be used for universal idioms that can be recognized by the icon _only_. Otherwise it's just noise

It doesn't matter that it's JS, they have their own, performant interpreter for it and it's a limited subset of JS. And that's just one layer, the rest is actual compiled code, increasingly Rust.

I was skeptical, too, but it allows for some serious visual tweaking beyond what KDE allows without rewriting code.