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A comment on Redesigning GitHub Repository Page. Parent comment

Re:Redesigning GitHub Repository Page by MereInterest on Thursday February 28, 2019 @07:32PM (#19276895)
Agreed. I was on-board with most of the changes, but that one removed all visual distinction between elements. It became a load of black text on top of a white background with no separation between semantically different elements.

On a related note, Gmail's latest redesign for Android made the exact same blunder when viewed in the compact density. Just sender/subject/sender/subject with very little indication of each one being a separate email. They spent an extra line break, rather than adding a nice horizontal divider, which would have used less space and given more visual separation.

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Re:Redesigning GitHub Repository Page by RussianCow on Thursday February 28, 2019 @07:51PM (#19277006)
Lack of visual distinction is a general problem with the current design trends. Even Apple suffers from it at times—in Xcode, it's impossible to tell whether certain elements are interactive (buttons vs passive status indicators) without clicking on them.

The thing that drives me up the wall is when text inputs are not made obvious. Google in particular is notorious for not giving any indication that something is a text box, as opposed to just static text. I can't count the number of times I have tried to focus and type into something that I thought was a text field, only to discover that nothing was happening.

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