It's not strange to like redesigns. But if they slow you or your machine down? Yes, it's strange!
Would you prefer a car that changed every year to a more "fresh" design, but each year make it harder to open the door and would let you go 5(km/m)/h slower? I definitely wouldn't and it's strange that you would, yes.
You mean like in the BMW i8 ? https://www.youtube.com/shorts/T-upswNkRqE
I only open the door twice - once to get in, once to get out - so a small nuisance like being harder to open wouldn't bother me as it's only a fraction of the time spent engaging with the car. However I have family members with terrible arthiritis who struggle opening car doors anyway, so it'd definitely be a factor for them.
I'm also not typically in a rush when I'm driving, so if the car is a little slower that doesn't bother me as much as whether I'm comfortable and enjoying the drive. Or even if the car was no more comfortable, but just looked better, I might actually feel some pride in it and that would give me a lift and result in an improvement to my mood. If my goal was to get from A-B as fast as possible though, then it absolutely would bother me.
But I guess we're the minority!
My experience is that regular users hate changes, period. Doesn't matter if it looks much prettier now. The button isn't where it was or changed color and they are now confused.
This is starting to change as more people had computers in a phase of their life where they were happy to experiment. But it will still be many years until the majority of the working population evaluates changes on design and performance criteria instead of just disliking them for being different than before.
Like Windows 11 for some reason centers the buttons on the screen. I'm not quite seeing what that improves since now things move around, and the start button is no longer in the very comfortably reachable corner by default.
A few days ago, a new search bar showed up in Windows 11 and I immediately closed it without trying it in any way. Months ago, I switched to DuckDuckGo because I couldn't disable Google's search result highlighting. I hate the new microwave in our house because it doesn't let me type in seconds and instead I have to push some "Automatic 1" for a fixed 60 second interval (there's probably a better way, but my wife threw away the manual).
Sometimes, better is worse. I am so close to switching to a basic Linux distro like Gentoo just to avoid these surprises.
<citation needed>. I don't think I ever saw anyone say more than "ok it looks kinda neat" and that isn't commentary on "liking" just "well, they changed it and it is not terrible yet".
Most of UI changes in long running software honestly looks like designers (or their managers most likely) trying to excuse their employment than anything acutally useful for the user
Why would you think so? It's not like any vendor goes and asks them about it, before making a UI overhaul.
In my experience - which I recognize is anecdotal - they absolutely hate those changes, even more than professional users, because it's even harder for them to find their bearing again. Non-tech-savvy people in particular don't have the experience and developed mental models to pin-point and describe the sources of their dissatisfaction, so they round it up into "tech sucks" or "my computer is slow, maybe it has viruses, I probably need a new one".
People have nostalgia for 98 and XP, but try to use any software from around that era and it’s the equivalent of riding a bicycle on a highway. Definitely not 5 km/hr slower every year
You and I must use disjoint sets of software then. For me, cloud software is universally slower than legacy software. Good chunk of it is because of the browser. The UI, by default, is jankier and slower for every interaction - to the point I can notice the delay on every click, which for desktop software even 15 years ago was true only when the machine was under large load - not literally all the time.
And that's without considering UI interactions that block on network requests.
And so, I find trivial webapps to be just jankier. For anything serious though, they're near-useless, as the performance drop prevents using the app or, in some cases, slows down the entire machine. 2D raster and vector editors, and 3D modelling software, is still done primarily as desktop apps for a reason.
I purchased a Tesla model 3 in 2019. Adjusting to controlling everything on a tablet in the center of the car was a huge change from every car I had driven previously, but I gradually got used to the UI and memorized the layout. In December 2021, Tesla launched a new UI that moved the buttons around and hid many single tap actions behind multiple taps. It was terrible. The last place I want a redesigned UI is in a car I currently own. They should have only launched the refresh on new models. It wasn’t the main reason I sold the car, but it certainly didn’t help. Big UI changes can be exhausting.
Yes, so.....win98/win2000 interface. I don't have any idea why you'd look at the attrocity that is win 11 and say it's "beautiful". It's not. It's mostly just empty coloured boxes that don't have any inherent meaning.
A lot of this is simply because the newer designs are based on large screens while Win98/2000 was hampered by the requirement to being readable at 800x600 and 256 colors. Using gradients, negative space and was a luxury not afforded in 2000 but it does help.
I have fond memories of using wxpx64 which was basically w2k3 desktop edition.
I honestly hate how it looks and I think it is fucking ugly.
Yet I still defaulted to switching back to it (back when that was simple, don't think it's an option in win 10 anymore) just because the new one was so anti-functional. It was that bad.
I wouldn't be surprised if many users did once they knew that it was even an option.
Peak of "traditional" while still looking decent was honestly XFCE for me. Since then I went full geek and set up i3 tiling manager with basically workspace/screen per app, as I realized near-everything I do is just "running 2 full screen apps on 2 screens" so I optimized for that.
I just find the look ugly. There is no objectivism in preference to how something looks.
Ugly would be, with no arguing, the first editions of Amiga OS. Look:
http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga1.html
http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga2.html
Windows 95, being designed for 256 colors, looks really fine. Ok, Mac's System 7 it's prettier, without any doubt, but as I said the Amiga OS 1/2.x versions are far worse.
Windows 95 it's boring in the sense of being tied to a corporation based style, with cubicles.
It's akin to that office that has no desk because it would ruin the aesthetics. The desk has to be there, your challenge is (should be) to design around the functional requirements.
That being said, designers work with customers and as a former freelance designer I can tell you that wrangling the customer is basically half the job. This is true even in a company setting.
Design is one of those fields where everybody thinks they know what works and everybody thinks they have taste (spoiler alert: they don't). I ultimately stopped working in the field because you literally had to manipulate customers into making okay choices instead of horrible ones and even then you had the occasional CEO just overriding weeks of work with some bullshit idea he had on the shitter.
Everybody blames designers, but designers rarely make the choices that lead to the results everybody sees. Designers just try to get paid.
The designer described how every time they had to show a draft for a stakeholder such as a client or manager, they polished their design and then added some obvious design flaw like making something clearly off-center that should have been centered or similar. Then when they show their initial design, the manager says "Looks good but make that thing centered properly".
If the design had been flawless, the manager would find something else to object to, which would invariably make the design worse. So showing off the imperfect design leads to the perfect outcome: the manager or customer gets to feel like they contributed to the design but the design stays the way the designer intended.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062759/trivia?item=tr1788197
More broadly, it's just political management of assemblies. Most governments do the same with controversial legislation: attach some wildly-outrageous clause to something slightly-less-outrageous, focus opposition on that, then strike it out. You then have the space to pass the bulk of it, which was your real objective all along, while claiming you "listened".
Having said that, at no point do I really believe the role isn't involved in decisions like hiding the randomize button in iphone music player.
I think what people are trying to do is combine the legibility of Windows 98 design with the juiciness of modern UIs, which as far as I know hasn't been done yet and is why this keeps getting brought up.
If your artstyle(s) doesn't fit usability patterns, change it or find someone else.
My computer is sort of like a toolshed. There's a workbench. There are some tools hanging up on the walls. There are some storage cabinets.
Whether I designed it or someone else, I'm here to work, and over time I get used to how things are arranged.
If tomorrow I come in and everything is different, it will be difficult for me to find my tools, and my efficiency will be reduced. If the tools are rearranged in a way that makes them permanently less efficient, I may get irate.
It's different if we're talking about the living room or even the bathroom. It's different if it's my casual clothes or the garden.
But my computer is none of those things, it is my workstation. And if anything gets in the way of that, I get rid of it and find a replacement.
Thinking a bit about this though, say Microsoft could argue that the toolshed isn't really yours. That you're merely renting/"licensing" it and they reserve the right to rearrange their tools at a whim, and they usually won't touch tools you own. I don't know how to counter-argue this though.
You can see it in the language used in UI design these days. It's all about user experience and their journey. Not much about what they want to actually do with help from software.
This is exactly the case, and why I don't use their toolshed anymore.
And while we are into ending a post with random opinion statements, yes, 2k was the pinnacle of Windows design.
All I can think about is the Windows 10 Calculator. Prior to Windows 10, you could type Windows Key + R, Calc, and immediately type my equation. Amazing for when you're in the middle of a meeting and just need to calculate something right away.
But now it's a stupid app that takes a few seconds to load regardless of how fast your computer is. Needless bloat which seemed to have only only made things look pretty.
Am I strange to tend to like app and OS redesigns if they make things look fresh, even when they might slow me down slightly, or even slow my machine down? I just wanted to be the contrarian voice here. Redesign all you want. It's ok to say "Let's choose just a little bit of form over function here". I usually like the new better than the old. No, Win2000 wasn't the pinnacle of Windows neither in function nor design. There I said it.