> Me: "I don't like smartphone UIs. Everything is flat, nothing indicates where you can touch or not. I have to randomly try everything on the screen."
Response by non-tech person: "Well, yeah, of course you have to try everything? How else would this work?"
I think this goes deeper than many tech people realize.
From what I understood from talking with "nontechnical"(*) friends, relatives, etc, for a good potion of them, computers had always been "unpredictable magic". They got by through memorizing some very strict and rigid interaction sequences - "click this icon, then click that menu, then click that button, etc" and prayed nothing unexpected would happen. They were too scared and/or uninterested in computers to even try and find any rules or consistency in it.
I feel as if those nontechnical people "won" now. Now all UIs feel as inconsistent and unpredictable even for "techies" as any computer interaction felt to those people back then.
(* repeated from another thread: "nontechnical" in the "not fluent with PC use" sense, which is actually quite arrogant - they can have very high technical skill in other areas obviously)
thewebguyd 15 minutes ago [-]
> They were too scared and/or uninterested in computers to even try and find any rules or consistency in it.
Yes, and this is still true today. I work for a company with a large very non-technical user base. People absolutely will not explore, click on things outside of what they have memorized, or even try basic troubleshooting steps out of fear of breaking things.
It's actually really frustrating when trying to train to certain software or concepts because you have to lay everything out very explicitly, step by step. You cannot leave anything to the imagination or just assume that because the UI is "intuitive" that they will figure it out, because they won't even try.
I've encountered some form of that attitude and behavior at nearly every job I've had.
marcosdumay 20 minutes ago [-]
My parents never had any problem understanding where they can click on Windows 3.11. They never could understand how to interact with DOS GUIs.
Nowadays they have decades of experience with computers. They still can't predict what part of a web-site they can interact with, but they have memorized all the actions they can make on the phone apps they use.
exitb 15 minutes ago [-]
Let’s look at the very website we on. Would you prefer for every clickable element here to be a button? Or even underlined as a link? Do you ever get confused navigating this website?
Telaneo 13 minutes ago [-]
> Would you prefer for every clickable element here to be a button? Or even underlined as a link?
Yes.
> Do you ever get confused navigating this website?
No, because I've been browsing the web for a while and know that every website does things their own way.
exitb 5 minutes ago [-]
Given it’s a website mostly for experienced computer people who, like you, don’t really need those visual cues, don’t you think adding them would be superfluous?
Telaneo 3 minutes ago [-]
No.
EGreg 27 minutes ago [-]
It started with iOS 7 and Jony Ive
Steve Jobs was right. Then when he died (after removing Scott Forstall), Jony Ive got to do his hardware minimalism in software too. And everything Steve Jobs favored was suddenly derided as “skeumorphism”. It’s like what USSR did with Stalin under Khrustchev. I still remember when Chrome app just had a big white area where you’re supposed to enter the url and you had no idea unless you randomly happened to click there. And if the website background was white, too? Oh too bad LMAO. Minimalistic! Chrome had no… chrome.
al_borland 38 minutes ago [-]
> Since that button down there is called "Start", it implies that you can probably do something with it, maybe start programs? Click and you'll see the Start Menu:
Over time it seems like a lot of designs stop feeling the need to lead the user in this way. There is an assumption that by now everyone knows what the menu in the bottom left corner does, and we are no longer in the phase of trying to teach the population to use a computer for the first time.
I feel like this is the wrong approach. Every day there are new young people using a computer for the first time. Wouldn’t it be nice if all these conventions that evolved over the past 50 years could be intuitively discovered, instead of needing explanations from someone who already understands them?
Of course, as the world becomes more digital, many skeuomorphic designs become more abstract to those same young users. The floppy disk, the traditional telephone, even the file folder.
makeitdouble 14 minutes ago [-]
I was a wee little kid when I first touch windows 95, and only ever used dos before.
The "Start" button made no sense. The computer was already started, and clicking randomly popped up menus and opened documents in their right programs, so it felt like the natural way to progress. The owner of the computer had to point me to the start menu.
Even now I still think it was a cursed UI. It was the place primarily to close and shutdown the computer (again, when you see that button the computer and OS will always be already started), get to the control panel or run commands. None of it felt like "start", and the current windows logo only design makes a lot more sense.
To your point, small kids get proficient very fast with smartphones and iPads. I'd call their interface a lot more "intuitive"
mkprc 11 minutes ago [-]
I also think about this, and worry about this. My go-to example is that the file-system in Windows used to clearly be a tree, and the file explorer was how you traversed this tree. With "Libraries" and other shenanigans with the location of the Desktop folder, it's not much of a tree anymore, and I wonder if this is related to kids-these-days not understanding the basics of file systems anymore.
I think smartphones obscuring the filesystem away, and desktop search making the skill less of a requirement really hurt the filesystem understanding for younger generations.
I remember Steve Jobs saying the last area of complexity they needed to be solved was the filesystem, which is why they made the iPhone the way they did, with apps owning the files, so users didn’t have to deal with it. We’ve seen the Files app introduced and those walls get broken down, so it was clearly the wrong approach, especially when various apps can all perform actions on the same type of files.
Jobs also said death would take care of the problem of people not knowing how to type. I often think he should have taken the similar approach to the filesystem. Required learning for the modern era, not something to hide away so skills never develop.
ranger_danger 24 minutes ago [-]
> There is an assumption that by now everyone knows what the menu in the bottom left corner does, and we are no longer in the phase of trying to teach the population to use a computer for the first time
Strong disagree, because:
> Every day there are new young people using a computer for the first time
I can assure you these people have no idea what the start button is or does... it doesn't help that it no longer even says "Start" for the last ~20 years.
al_borland 9 minutes ago [-]
We do agree. I said the first thing you quoted was the wrong approach, because of the second thing you quoted. Having it say “start”, like it used to, would help solve that.
the_other 36 minutes ago [-]
I agree that we had much better patterns back then. The software industry in general worked towards sharing visual paradigms, making use of system designs of their host playforms, facilitated discovery etc etc. All that was good and the recent trends moving us away from that consistency and discoverability are a detrement being steamrolled over by agents…
But I don’t agree that it “looked nice”. I hated Windows 95 and 2000’s “style”. They looked like engineers had made them. They looked stiff and unfriendly, eith too much border and outline. Real life has no outlines. I was in my late teens when 2000 came out. My friends and I jumped on it and felt it was the Os we had been waiting for.
But even then I thought it looked like shit.
The affordances were great. I agree that details like button depress and consistent scrollbars are valuable.
But I genuinely prefer things a bit rounder, a bit flatter, less grey, or late Aqua-style flat-with-shiny-affordances.
I agree that backgrounds should be flat (or very subtly textured so they recede but arn’t “boring; again, late-00s Mac OS nailed this for me).
What I’d really like to see is something new that takes the consistency of NT/2000 and Mac OSX prior to Lion, mixed with the novel affordances of BeOS/Haiku (docking windows, small title handles), and puts it through Apple’s “zing” (but not too far - transparency is highly overrated).
clark_dent 20 minutes ago [-]
Computer UIs needed borders and outlines because there are no brain-intuitive visual cues: no depth parallax, no shading, nothing shifts as you move your head, and until relatively recently they had poor contrast and brightness variability compared to the real world.
It was also a compromise for interface device limitations. We didn't have 4000 DPI mice with scroll wheels and 26 configurable buttons; you were lucky to have a 1024x768 resolution; and 16 bit color was for people shelling out $$$. Obvious borders and some padding between elements were a necessity to click what you intended to click.
sprash 4 minutes ago [-]
> But I don’t agree that it “looked nice”.
That is a feature. The content should "look nice" not the GUI. The GUI delivering the content needs to be easily distinguishable from the content. Harsh borders and outlines serve that purpose perfectly.
chriswarbo 7 minutes ago [-]
> In Windows 95, those toolbar icons were still actual buttons. In Windows 2000, they are recognizable as a button when activated, but in their default state they're not and you have to hover over them:
This is something I've struggled with as toolkits change and old widget themes stop working. There are still some decent themes out there (e.g. Skulpture for Qt has been my default for many years), and with a little patching they can be dragged into working on the latest toolkit versions. Yet I can't seem to avoid this "you have to hover over to see that it's actually a button" behaviour. Very annoying!
nycticorax 12 minutes ago [-]
Andreas Kling has said that one of his inspirations for SerenityOS was the Windows 2000 UI (https://corecursive.com/serenity-os-with-andreas-kling/). I found his general goal for SerenityOS ("Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user accessibility of late-2000s *nix.") to be strangely validating ('Wait... So it's not just me?!'). And so of course I decided to try out the KDE desktop, which I had always kinda dismissed as being a bit too much of a niche within a niche. And it's great. It really is wonderful to use an OS that is designed from the ground up for serious technical users. And the ubiquity of web apps nowadays makes Linux a far more practical choice than it was back in the day.
bluedino 49 minutes ago [-]
Was this peak Windows UI?
I would say so, but the Active Dekstop stuff wasn't the right move.
Fisher-price came next, with Windows XP. At least you could easily switch back to classic.
And then Windows 8, we won't even talk about that.
kreddor 14 minutes ago [-]
I really liked the luna silver and olive green themes. They were not too bad to look at.
rib3ye 24 minutes ago [-]
Maybe more importantly, Win2k was the first windows version actually WORKED in a predictable way after years of unstable post-Win3.1 (Win95 and onward) production releases.
Telaneo 40 minutes ago [-]
> I would say so, but the Active Dekstop stuff wasn't the right move.
Even so, you could completely ignore it if you wanted to!
cake-rusk 43 minutes ago [-]
Windows Vista / 7 was peak UI for me.
petilon 48 minutes ago [-]
The title bar of windows in Windows XP was Fisher-Price. But I thought the rest was OK.
Dwedit 41 minutes ago [-]
I think Windows XP looks very nice if you install the Royale theme. It's a shiny and glassy version of the default XP style.
madaxe_again 33 minutes ago [-]
Almost. The NT5 RCs, which became windows 2000, were better IMO - not massive differences but it hadn’t been slobbered upon by marketing yet.
marginalia_nu 50 minutes ago [-]
Design language, like any language is metaphorical.
The thing that makes these skeumorphic designs work so well is that it kinda forces a consistent metaphor, and consistency above all else is huge for UX.
The fact that it's based on things we've seen in real life is also helps, as it means we can reason about the UI with the same faculties we've spent our entire life training.
xg15 20 minutes ago [-]
You still need some design experience and "taste" though.
I've seen some B2B apps built in Java which used the Windows look-and-feel and looked absolutely awful: Actions wildly scattered through buttons, menus and context menus, panels and tabs nested several layers deep until the UI started to look like a canyon formation - and no icons or color at all, because I suppose those would have been "unprofessional" - so everything was in dull gray.
(I think it's worth realizing how colorful the stock Windows dialogs and applications actually are through the use of icons, even despite all widgets being gray.)
I still believe the Windows 2000-era UI toolkit is one of the best, because at least it gives you straightforward pathways to build a good-looking and usable UI - but you still have to want to do it.
petilon 42 minutes ago [-]
Why are designers not understanding this these days?
I think one reason is that flat UI is super easy. Skeuomorphic is extremely hard to get right, and if you don't get it right it looks super tacky. Most people who have the word "designer" in their job title don't have the artistic skills needed to pull it off. This is why most designers are opposed to skeuomorphic.
> flat UI is super easy. Skeuomorphic is extremely hard to get right
What I don't understand is why those are treated as the only two choices?
Just adding some shadows, dividers, 3D buttons and real scroll bars again would go a long way to making things more usable without going full on into skeuomorphism to represent elements of the physical world.
A good example of the wrong direction was macOS in the switch to Tahoe. Buttons in modal dialog boxes became flat instead of 3D. They no longer look like buttons, they just look like a web-UI card with a gray background. There is no visual indicator at all that it is a clickable button.
Why? Legitimately, I want to hear from the designer(s) that made that decision and what their reasoning was.
al_borland 24 minutes ago [-]
Flat UI is also really difficult, as it can easily look cheap, boring, and unfinished.
Even Apple’s initial move to a flat UI in iOS 7 suffered from this. It took a long time to get refined to the point of not feeling like a major step backward. I still preferred the look of iOS 6 to anything that came afterwards. The skeuomorphic designs were warm, inviting, and fun. They served as a nice juxtaposition to the rather austere hardware.
vslira 36 minutes ago [-]
What’s the meaning of skeuomorphic design for a generation that has never worked with the original physical artifacts they’re based on, though?
Telaneo 28 minutes ago [-]
Consistency. Even if you've never held a telephone receiver, if it means 'call' in one place, it's very likely to mean the same thing in another.
We could be using random hieroglyphs to the same ends, but people seem to always make their own (barring a few exceptions, like the hamburger menu). It's probably a better idea to use something with some grounding in reality rather than make your own from nothing, since doing that is hard, even for actual designers.
al_borland 15 minutes ago [-]
It also takes a long time for those purely digital ideas to filter out into the mainstream and get a shared name. For many years I would hear people same, “click the thing in the upper left corner”, “click those 3 lines up there”, or something similar. The term hamburger menu is starting to filter out there to the point where I feel comfortable using it. Even the term, hamburger menu, is a skeuomorphic name for a digital control. No one knows what to call those 3 lines, but everyone knows what a hamburger is. I’ve even seen some sites use a literal hamburger icon.
It also took a long time to standardize on the hamburger menu. Many also tried to use an ellipsis for a long time. Some still do. Sometimes those dots are vertical… is that a thin hamburger or a vertical ellipsis? I heard one person trying to make the term “tots” happen for this style of menu… tatter tots to go with the hamburger.
Contrast that to a “gear” menu for settings. They see a cog or a gear and everyone knows what that is without training, even if they aren’t a mechanic.
petilon 23 minutes ago [-]
It doesn't really matter if they haven't used the original physical artifacts. If it looks physical you can figure out how to use it based on your knowledge of other physical objects you have used in your life.
Of course if you display for example, a spin dial like old telephones that has a particularly quirky way to use, them this doesn't apply.
marcosdumay 16 minutes ago [-]
Following the standard is easy, deviating from it is hard.
Every designer nowadays insists on deviating.
bromuro 44 minutes ago [-]
Like the floppy disk for “save”? Or the old school phone receiver for “call”?
lonelyasacloud 7 minutes ago [-]
For icons and some aspects of functionality why not as a starting place?
Where it falls down is when designers force too many of the paradigms of the RL original onto a platform that doesn't suit it [0].
No different than "windows" or "desktops" or "files." When was the last time you actually saw a file folder? Or a document separated by sheets with "tabs."
95% of computer users have never seen an ethernet cable, but they're still the symbol for networking.
99% of car drivers have never seen brake calipers, but they're part of the icon when my car's parking brake is on.
ranger_danger 22 minutes ago [-]
> When was the last time you actually saw a file folder? Or a document separated by sheets with "tabs."
Every day because normal functioning adults still need to keep paper records of things.
delta_p_delta_x 39 minutes ago [-]
The loss of the theme menu and 'Windows classic' from Windows 8 onwards is dearly missed. But Windows classic hasn't gone away. If you run a 32-bit executable on Windows 10 or 11 under Windows XP compatibility mode, and set 'reduced colour mode', Windows Classic comes back. I have also noticed that when Adobe Acrobat crashes (heh) it momentarily flashes Windows classic on the title bars.
It's all still there. Bring it back, Microsoft. And put HiDPI and all your other modern technologies like D3D12 and borderless full-screen on it. I want to write old-school Win32 applications that fly.
mysterydip 55 minutes ago [-]
For me: everything! I clicked so well with it, everything made sense and was responsive.
Zak 30 minutes ago [-]
I agree with the author's wish for visual cues when something is clickable, scrollable, etc.... This, on the other hand:
> Imitating real objects is good, too -- I don't have a single one of Android's "sliders" anywhere in my house, for example, so why don't you make this a checkbox, because writing down a check mark on paper is something that I actually do:
feels like an idea from a time when many people were encountering UIs on screens for the very first time as adults. I think the slider would be recognized as a toggle in its usual context of a settings screen by most people who have seen a settings screen before, but not that specific design for a toggle.
delta_p_delta_x 19 minutes ago [-]
There is a specific UI guideline for something that can be enabled or not: it's called a tick box. The on-off switch thing is a distinctly iOS invention [1]. The funny thing is that OS X (now macOS) mostly held off using those 'switches' too, until fairly recently.
I liked every version of Windows that I’ve used, back to 3.1 all the way up to 11. Nowadays I mostly use 10/11 at home and at work. A new Windows upgrade was always a magical treat for me, the old slow HDD speeds building up anticipation during the installation phase, making me excited to finally use it. Growing up with computers unfortunately demystifies many things, but such is the price of poignance.
alberth 46 minutes ago [-]
It was clear, clean and understandable.
Buttons looked like buttons.
Windows (which have frames), looked like windows.
And there was no distracting design elements.
usrnm 37 minutes ago [-]
I remember those times and there were a lot if windows that did not look like windows and buttons that did not look like buttons. Not in the apps provided by the OS itself, but in third-party software. It was the time of wild experiments, especially in software created by enthusiasts. We just tend to forget this stuff
Telaneo 24 minutes ago [-]
It's not like the world was perfect before; it's just that it's gotten even worse. The lack of consistency has spread, to the point there barely is any.
minkeymaniac 33 minutes ago [-]
And crazy themes I had the matrix one with the "dodge this" sound instead of a ping... good times
mig39 39 minutes ago [-]
The article praises the UI, but isn't Windows 2000 using the Windows 95/98 UI with a different kernel?
The different kernel for 95/98 was NT 4... Windows 2000 was unified, same UI for Consumer and Server
flanked-evergl 38 minutes ago [-]
> I liked the UIs of the entire era from 3.0 to 2000, really. I'm mostly using Windows 2000 as an example here because it runs so well in QEMU/KVM and that allows me to easily take screenshots.
When Windows XP came out, computer magazines wrote articles on how to switch the more modern, colorful UI back to the old, grey, drab, boring UI of Windows 95/98/2000.
I was young at the time and this seemed absurd to me. Why would you willingly use a UI that looks like wearing an old grey tie for a dusty office job in a depressing concrete building?
Rendered at 16:28:03 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Response by non-tech person: "Well, yeah, of course you have to try everything? How else would this work?"
I think this goes deeper than many tech people realize.
From what I understood from talking with "nontechnical"(*) friends, relatives, etc, for a good potion of them, computers had always been "unpredictable magic". They got by through memorizing some very strict and rigid interaction sequences - "click this icon, then click that menu, then click that button, etc" and prayed nothing unexpected would happen. They were too scared and/or uninterested in computers to even try and find any rules or consistency in it.
I feel as if those nontechnical people "won" now. Now all UIs feel as inconsistent and unpredictable even for "techies" as any computer interaction felt to those people back then.
(* repeated from another thread: "nontechnical" in the "not fluent with PC use" sense, which is actually quite arrogant - they can have very high technical skill in other areas obviously)
Yes, and this is still true today. I work for a company with a large very non-technical user base. People absolutely will not explore, click on things outside of what they have memorized, or even try basic troubleshooting steps out of fear of breaking things.
It's actually really frustrating when trying to train to certain software or concepts because you have to lay everything out very explicitly, step by step. You cannot leave anything to the imagination or just assume that because the UI is "intuitive" that they will figure it out, because they won't even try.
I've encountered some form of that attitude and behavior at nearly every job I've had.
Nowadays they have decades of experience with computers. They still can't predict what part of a web-site they can interact with, but they have memorized all the actions they can make on the phone apps they use.
Yes.
> Do you ever get confused navigating this website?
No, because I've been browsing the web for a while and know that every website does things their own way.
Steve Jobs was right. Then when he died (after removing Scott Forstall), Jony Ive got to do his hardware minimalism in software too. And everything Steve Jobs favored was suddenly derided as “skeumorphism”. It’s like what USSR did with Stalin under Khrustchev. I still remember when Chrome app just had a big white area where you’re supposed to enter the url and you had no idea unless you randomly happened to click there. And if the website background was white, too? Oh too bad LMAO. Minimalistic! Chrome had no… chrome.
Over time it seems like a lot of designs stop feeling the need to lead the user in this way. There is an assumption that by now everyone knows what the menu in the bottom left corner does, and we are no longer in the phase of trying to teach the population to use a computer for the first time.
I feel like this is the wrong approach. Every day there are new young people using a computer for the first time. Wouldn’t it be nice if all these conventions that evolved over the past 50 years could be intuitively discovered, instead of needing explanations from someone who already understands them?
Of course, as the world becomes more digital, many skeuomorphic designs become more abstract to those same young users. The floppy disk, the traditional telephone, even the file folder.
The "Start" button made no sense. The computer was already started, and clicking randomly popped up menus and opened documents in their right programs, so it felt like the natural way to progress. The owner of the computer had to point me to the start menu.
Even now I still think it was a cursed UI. It was the place primarily to close and shutdown the computer (again, when you see that button the computer and OS will always be already started), get to the control panel or run commands. None of it felt like "start", and the current windows logo only design makes a lot more sense.
To your point, small kids get proficient very fast with smartphones and iPads. I'd call their interface a lot more "intuitive"
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...
I remember Steve Jobs saying the last area of complexity they needed to be solved was the filesystem, which is why they made the iPhone the way they did, with apps owning the files, so users didn’t have to deal with it. We’ve seen the Files app introduced and those walls get broken down, so it was clearly the wrong approach, especially when various apps can all perform actions on the same type of files.
Jobs also said death would take care of the problem of people not knowing how to type. I often think he should have taken the similar approach to the filesystem. Required learning for the modern era, not something to hide away so skills never develop.
Strong disagree, because:
> Every day there are new young people using a computer for the first time
I can assure you these people have no idea what the start button is or does... it doesn't help that it no longer even says "Start" for the last ~20 years.
But I don’t agree that it “looked nice”. I hated Windows 95 and 2000’s “style”. They looked like engineers had made them. They looked stiff and unfriendly, eith too much border and outline. Real life has no outlines. I was in my late teens when 2000 came out. My friends and I jumped on it and felt it was the Os we had been waiting for.
But even then I thought it looked like shit.
The affordances were great. I agree that details like button depress and consistent scrollbars are valuable.
But I genuinely prefer things a bit rounder, a bit flatter, less grey, or late Aqua-style flat-with-shiny-affordances.
I agree that backgrounds should be flat (or very subtly textured so they recede but arn’t “boring; again, late-00s Mac OS nailed this for me).
What I’d really like to see is something new that takes the consistency of NT/2000 and Mac OSX prior to Lion, mixed with the novel affordances of BeOS/Haiku (docking windows, small title handles), and puts it through Apple’s “zing” (but not too far - transparency is highly overrated).
It was also a compromise for interface device limitations. We didn't have 4000 DPI mice with scroll wheels and 26 configurable buttons; you were lucky to have a 1024x768 resolution; and 16 bit color was for people shelling out $$$. Obvious borders and some padding between elements were a necessity to click what you intended to click.
That is a feature. The content should "look nice" not the GUI. The GUI delivering the content needs to be easily distinguishable from the content. Harsh borders and outlines serve that purpose perfectly.
This is something I've struggled with as toolkits change and old widget themes stop working. There are still some decent themes out there (e.g. Skulpture for Qt has been my default for many years), and with a little patching they can be dragged into working on the latest toolkit versions. Yet I can't seem to avoid this "you have to hover over to see that it's actually a button" behaviour. Very annoying!
I would say so, but the Active Dekstop stuff wasn't the right move.
Fisher-price came next, with Windows XP. At least you could easily switch back to classic.
And then Windows 8, we won't even talk about that.
Even so, you could completely ignore it if you wanted to!
The thing that makes these skeumorphic designs work so well is that it kinda forces a consistent metaphor, and consistency above all else is huge for UX.
The fact that it's based on things we've seen in real life is also helps, as it means we can reason about the UI with the same faculties we've spent our entire life training.
I've seen some B2B apps built in Java which used the Windows look-and-feel and looked absolutely awful: Actions wildly scattered through buttons, menus and context menus, panels and tabs nested several layers deep until the UI started to look like a canyon formation - and no icons or color at all, because I suppose those would have been "unprofessional" - so everything was in dull gray.
(I think it's worth realizing how colorful the stock Windows dialogs and applications actually are through the use of icons, even despite all widgets being gray.)
I still believe the Windows 2000-era UI toolkit is one of the best, because at least it gives you straightforward pathways to build a good-looking and usable UI - but you still have to want to do it.
I think one reason is that flat UI is super easy. Skeuomorphic is extremely hard to get right, and if you don't get it right it looks super tacky. Most people who have the word "designer" in their job title don't have the artistic skills needed to pull it off. This is why most designers are opposed to skeuomorphic.
Somewhere in between is the right approach. The NeXTSTEP UI from the late 1980s is what we need to return to. It still looks beautiful today: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/openstep42
What I don't understand is why those are treated as the only two choices?
Just adding some shadows, dividers, 3D buttons and real scroll bars again would go a long way to making things more usable without going full on into skeuomorphism to represent elements of the physical world.
A good example of the wrong direction was macOS in the switch to Tahoe. Buttons in modal dialog boxes became flat instead of 3D. They no longer look like buttons, they just look like a web-UI card with a gray background. There is no visual indicator at all that it is a clickable button.
Why? Legitimately, I want to hear from the designer(s) that made that decision and what their reasoning was.
Even Apple’s initial move to a flat UI in iOS 7 suffered from this. It took a long time to get refined to the point of not feeling like a major step backward. I still preferred the look of iOS 6 to anything that came afterwards. The skeuomorphic designs were warm, inviting, and fun. They served as a nice juxtaposition to the rather austere hardware.
We could be using random hieroglyphs to the same ends, but people seem to always make their own (barring a few exceptions, like the hamburger menu). It's probably a better idea to use something with some grounding in reality rather than make your own from nothing, since doing that is hard, even for actual designers.
It also took a long time to standardize on the hamburger menu. Many also tried to use an ellipsis for a long time. Some still do. Sometimes those dots are vertical… is that a thin hamburger or a vertical ellipsis? I heard one person trying to make the term “tots” happen for this style of menu… tatter tots to go with the hamburger.
Contrast that to a “gear” menu for settings. They see a cog or a gear and everyone knows what that is without training, even if they aren’t a mechanic.
Of course if you display for example, a spin dial like old telephones that has a particularly quirky way to use, them this doesn't apply.
Every designer nowadays insists on deviating.
Where it falls down is when designers force too many of the paradigms of the RL original onto a platform that doesn't suit it [0].
[0] See for example the Mac OS X Address Book app https://www.betalogue.com/2012/01/15/abook6-dumb/.
No different than "windows" or "desktops" or "files." When was the last time you actually saw a file folder? Or a document separated by sheets with "tabs."
95% of computer users have never seen an ethernet cable, but they're still the symbol for networking.
99% of car drivers have never seen brake calipers, but they're part of the icon when my car's parking brake is on.
Every day because normal functioning adults still need to keep paper records of things.
It's all still there. Bring it back, Microsoft. And put HiDPI and all your other modern technologies like D3D12 and borderless full-screen on it. I want to write old-school Win32 applications that fly.
> Imitating real objects is good, too -- I don't have a single one of Android's "sliders" anywhere in my house, for example, so why don't you make this a checkbox, because writing down a check mark on paper is something that I actually do:
feels like an idea from a time when many people were encountering UIs on screens for the very first time as adults. I think the slider would be recognized as a toggle in its usual context of a settings screen by most people who have seen a settings screen before, but not that specific design for a toggle.
[1]: https://freeimage.host/i/CxYBW6G
Buttons looked like buttons.
Windows (which have frames), looked like windows.
And there was no distracting design elements.
I was young at the time and this seemed absurd to me. Why would you willingly use a UI that looks like wearing an old grey tie for a dusty office job in a depressing concrete building?