He remarked that high-density UIs confuse and overwhelm most people, while technical people have developed the skill of sifting through lots of on-screen information and controls.
And as I mentioned, the flat style hides discoverability, so I think it offsets the usability gains from making the UI appear less cluttered.
So sure, maybe extra real estate means we can allow UI elements to breathe a bit, but keep the 3D look on elements that can be interacted with. Buttons should still be buttons. Text should be text. Interactable buttons should not be merely an icon or text.
Ah, this is the phrase I see most often when one UX person or team wants to justify throwing out the previous UX person or team's design in order to replace it with their own.
On top of that, it is of course very condescending to the users. Especially those who have invested significant amounts of their own time in leaning how to effectively use the existing UI.
Anyway, I'm sticking to K-9 5.600 with the original UX because the new one is very wrong for my use case: 3 separate accounts that must stay separate and a quick way to move between them. Given the comments on Google Play [1] and the old discussion on K-9 forums I know that I'm not alone.
I backed up the APK and sideload it on any new device I get, or after a full reset.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fsck.k9&hl...
Now he suddenly had to contend with two remotes, and in order to use the set-top box he would have had to build a mental model of how the on-screen EPG worked, develop some sense of current "location" within the menu, and get to grips with selecting an option - all stuff the rest of us take for granted without a second thought. But because of his failing eyesight, his failing sense of touch in his fingers, and an inability (and yes, a non-trivial amount of unwillingness!) to learn new interface concepts, it was basically the end of his unassisted access to TV.
And the funny thing is that this process never ends. Every couple of months the UI must be redesigned. They can never settle on one idea.
IntelliJ's new UI is modern, but it's not good.
did he give any references?
Doesn't' mean they're right, of course.
Except the Japanese?
I think it's a "grass is greener" case. I appreciate the trend of adding extra padding around the English internet a lot. If they're designed like their Chinese counterparts they'll be barely readable for me.
So the whole UI is being optimised for non-technical new users. Which does make sense commercially - you don't want your product reviews all about how the UI is too complex. But it would be nice to be able to flip a switch and tell the thing "I know what I'm doing now, can I have my pixels back please?"
Not buying it. Most people can deal just fine with spreadsheets, which are the epitome of high density UI.
What people don't deal with well are badly designed UIs which present illogical controls and information.
And yes, high whitespace UIs results in people seeing less confusing shit on the page, but only because it's now spread across 3 pages, not 1.
I bet you're thinking about people who have used spreadsheets before. You might even be thinking of people who use spreadsheets weekly or daily. Try putting them in front of a new user, and you will be shocked.
As someone who has performed many usability tests, I can only think of one person who said "I wish this was more dense and complicated", and that fellow sticks out because he is the exception who proves the rule that almost everyone wants it to be simple and above all clear. Most of the time, people just want to know what they should be doing next, and everything else is a potential source of confusion.
I’m kind of upset with myself that i find this statement so profound. I mean it’s such an obvious framing (sadly only in retrospect in my case).
Probably time to re-evaluate that prior.
If you're dealing with a hundred people in an office, then the vast majority can probably deal with a high-density UI. Because they are there for work and the UI - and more importantly the concepts underneath that UI and the mental model it requires - will be related to the stuff they already know.
But if you're dealing with an audience of millions who are trying to pass the time, or using apps or parts of the system that they rarely interact with, or have no real interest in the device, then a high-density UI will be extremely intimidating. They have no mental model of what is being represented on-screen - and if it's casual usage, they have no desire to spend the energy to learn that mental model. What they will want is the device to have two big buttons saying "do this" or "do that". Which is why the iPhone's grid of icons endures - "I want a bus ticket", "I want the camera", "I want to watch a video".
Personally I think the hardest part of UX design is ensuring the model presented on-screen matches the model that the user is expecting.
Which has two implications - firstly, it's entirely audience dependent and secondly, the further the UX model and the actual underlying model diverge, the more cracks will appear while people are using it - so you have to design from the bottom up for that given audience.
The audience of MS is corporations, yet they design for touch screens. Who uses a touchscreen 8 hours a day ?
If typing weren't such an important part of my job, I probably would too. There have been times when I've not been writing much code and then I rarely touched a computer. For calls, meetings, sketches, quick note taking, planning stuff out, audio editing, things like that I much prefer an iPad.
And, perhaps most importantly - if they don't learn, they can be removed. Big difference between UI for work, and UI for fun. You can design differently for a captive audience. This can be used for both good and evil (also see: Government websites).
Yet he doesn't seem concerned that the Flat Design part of Material UI is confusing to those same people.
You're building software for people to use 5 days a week for their job, make it as easy to use as possible assuming they've spent some time learning how to use it. Don't sacrifice that to optimize for the tiny fraction of time where they're beginners.
See also: basing your entire design on usability testing performed with people who are using it for the first time.
They are looking at people who aren't veteran users of the product because those are the ones who will buy it. If someone new to the product can't understand it quickly, they won't buy.
Does it suck yes but it's very logical.
I gave up on GUIs years ago and just do as much as I can via the terminal. The terminal is the ultimate power user experience.
The shared spreadsheet model is killing productivity.
Same for Windows not allowing to sort programs in taskbar the way they were opened. Tons of office workers have multiple documents opened and dont even know how to try to unfuck their taskabar (that is still bad in Windows 10/11).
I've always wondered why we diverged so much on UIs between eastern and western countries. Chinese characters pack information in a way that our alphabet doesn't, but that can't be the only reason, can it?
They had to do a user research with 600 people to realize that text input fields have to look like text input fields: https://medium.com/google-design/the-evolution-of-material-d...
In their latest iteration they don't even understand the concept of aligning things visually: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1643607965935476737.html
etc. etc.
Meanwhile every day I see people struggle to work with the more minimalist UI designs we see today. A lot of options are obfuscated and hidden away under the guise of keeping it clean, when instead the focus ought to be on laying out tools in a way that makes sense and remains in people's memory.
And of course every bit of software has different ideas about what minimalist and clean is, so you have to remember multiple ways how to do the same tasks.
I think part of the problem here is that "high-density UIs" gets used in multiple ways. Some designers, perhaps not those with ready access to users, take high-density UIs to refer to the markings on the screen. A button with borders next to a text field with borders is considered to be higher density than a button without borders next to a text field without borders, because the borders visually divide the field up. And if the border lines provide an affordance (e.g. a button pushed up), then that's complexity (because the lines have different colors, which is more complex than a design where lines all have the same color).
But such an interpretation goes against the research of the 80s and 90s. I have never been directed to evidence that "complexity" and "density" refer specifically to visual complexity and visual density as distinct from conceptual complexity and conceptual density or widget complexity and widget density - all the evidence I've ever come across (as in the old evidence, or the medium post by another descendant comment of my parent comment) suggests that visual complexity and density actually operate to clarify conceptual/widget complexity/density.
So I think the claims made by practitioners need to inspected and made more precise. What kind of complexity and density are they trying to resolve? And what evidence do they have that this specific kind of complexity and density is problematic, rather than clarifying?
After 7, I switched to Mac, and even after all these years, I still have fond memories of that OS. Every time I tried a new Windows version, they seemed to have gone downhill.
Windows 7 didn't use less resources than Vista, it was virtually the same, it's just that PCs have gotten miles faster in the timespan between Vista and 7 and people thought it was the OS that improved.
7 was not that much different from Vista, the problem was that When Vista launched, most people still had Windows 9/XP level hardware and that's what most PC retailers were still selling as well, while Vista demanded more as it was a complete overhaul from Windows XP/9.
7 didn't improve much performance wise, it's just that by that time people had already upgraded to much better hardware and they felt a performance improvement.
By most metrics, 7 was basically a Vista Service Pack, renamed to distance itself from the bad press Vista got, but it was more or less Vista under the hood.
For me that made a huge difference, with Vista I had to always stop the search service
But still... assuming a decent non-launchdate machine (1GB RAM, Geforce 6200), Windows 7 was more performant overall on the same hardware, and this was never 'fixed' on Vista's codebase over time. You can pretty much notice the small but important optimizations in the search service (faster, less lag), resizing explorer windows (less redraws), less scheduled services running, user account control alerts weren't as obtrusive. Sure, you wouldn't get extra fps on your favorite game, but those quality of life improvements really did show on daily usage.
What The Actual Fuck Is Happening. /rant
Edit: and also, since they've shoved OneDrive/Teams/O365/SharePoint/Etc down our throats you'd think there'd be a clear and obvious interface for sharing a file within this new, enlightened context menu... except that's mysteriously an icon and not a labelled option like the rest of the options instead. Great for discovery!
You don't, there's a paste option in the very first row when there's something in the clipboard that can be pasted.
Haha. This is in the spirit of "you haven't created any files on this computer so all file operations are disabled for you".
Like... why is it a mix of icons and dropdowns?? Why do the icons switch between being on the top and bottom?? Why is it low contrast??
To be closer to the mouse, because those are by far the most used tasks.
They started using icons for those tasks used the most so they're closer to the mouse so it's faster to click on. The by far most common tasks in the right click menu are now a single row that's always right next to the mouse when you right click. Instead of being like the fourth or sixth or depending on what else has mucked with your context menu the twelfth item.
Other than the Share icon they're practically all the same as the ones that have been commonly used in Windows for nearly 30 years.
I can't imagine that would be the case. It's the first option. Literally, the very first option when you've got something to be pasted. Item #1. The closest thing to the mouse cursor immediately after right clicking. If you bothered to look, you would have seen it.
** Also, it's NOT necessarily the first option - it moves between the top and bottom depending on where you click. **
It's also not something that used to appear and disappear based on the state of the clipboard, so further investigation may not have shown it (unexpectedly).
Clearly you like contextually responsive icons that behave like floating div's in a webpage, and you have been paying attention to the shape/format of the paste symbol to visually identify it all these years. That experience is not universal.
I've discussed this with several people, and you're the first to point out the icon that I missed - everyone I've talked to missed it as well.
Yes I've noticed it a few times over the 28 years since Windows 95 was released. It's not like it's some symbol that they only started using a few weeks ago.
> Also, it's NOT necessarily the first option
It's the first in that it's the one closest to the mouse.
I bet everyone you talked to was primed to not like it from the get go, with people telling them that basic functionality isn't there even though it is, so they reflexively went to the show more options aka switch back to the old without actually looking for it. When you've been told it's missing basic functionality and you don't immediately get it, aren't you more likely to assume it isn't there instead of actually looking?
You're being purposely obtuse - the point wasn't that it's a mystery, but that many people have deeply ingrained visual habits focusing on text, and you don't get to just assume everyone reacts to visual interfaces the same way you do. Not to mention that the previously discoverable and self explanatory text which has always just been light grey when not applicable now disappears depending on context in addition to being in a new place and purely represented by a (new, stylized, low contrast) icon.
Like, its OK that you like it, but you're being really presumptuous about how trivial and obvious it should be, especially since everyone in this thread probably has a different DPI monitor and interface scale.
TL;DR, don't fucking tell me I didn't look - maybe I'm some kind of moron, but I looked. With my eyes. For text.
I did not see it, and I think it's bad interface design. And I have now run out of shits to give about this conversation.
Right here buddy. You did one quick scan only for the word Paste, assumed it didn't do it because you didn't immediately see see the word, so you instead worked on trying to force the old menu. You said it yourself. You didn't bother actually looking at the new menu outside of seeing if the word "Paste" was there. You didn't think "huh this looks a little different, maybe I should see what those new icons are about...". Nah. Just ignore those, they're new so therefore they're bad and should be ignored.
You didn't actually look. Instead of bothering half a second to give the new thing a chance you actively moved to try and force bring back the old thing.
And I'm being obtuse? You're claiming you have to constantly hover over scissors to understand cut and a trash can to understand delete. You're the one proudly proclaiming of features not existing when they do exist.
But sharepoint team is trying
It feels to me that the more advanced graphics and display technologies become, the less GUIs make use of them.
32-bit colors with panels rendering billions of beautiful colors? Naw, black and white only.
Monitors capable of displaying over 33 million square area pixels? Naw, no pixels to spare for borders or shading.
Panels refreshing at 360Hz and faster powered by GPUs costing a few grand and CPUs with two dozen cores? Naw, response times are so last century.
Enough RAM to fit the entirety of Unicode including emoticons for love hotels and smiling poo? Naw, obscure hieroglyphs baby.
There's a part of me wondering if those command line warriors with their luscious neckbeards were right about GUIs being the inferior interface.
There’s nothing quite like trying to hit the narrow grab handle of a borderless window with a white title bar on top of a window full of white content. There’s no way Microsoft’s designers are actually using the stuff they’re making IMO.
https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2022/05/take-part-in-the-new...
That UI is absolutely horrid. Everything is hidden. It is complete and utter unusable garbage that has no business being in an application being used by professionals.
> Meanwhile, the UI trends in the industry have evolved,
No, they've devolved. That's what this entire thread is about.
> and many of our new users tell us that the UI appears heavyweight
Your "new users" are likely your lowest common denominator user. They're beginners at coding and haven't learned all the things that they're going to want a single click away.
> and dated.
Dated? Dated is good.
> Our goals were to reduce visual complexity
A goal that sounds noble, but really isn't.
> provide easy access to essential features
By hiding them behind unintuitive buttons that don't even have any text? Just a meaningless icon?
> It's the first time I've seen a step in the right direction for a long time.
110% disagree. They dumbed down the UI considerably.
> There is so much more room.
Even in 1080p, I think JetBrains IDEs have just enough room. In 1440p, it's great. I upgraded to 4K recently and I have more room than I know what to do with.
Are you using a 14" laptop monitor or something?
Complexity can be reduced to zero by shipping a blank page.
I don’t understand what’s being gained in some cases. For example, their UIs used to have sideways buttons with icons and labels in the gutters on the left and right. Now it’s icons only and a bunch of blank space. I don’t get any extra usable space and now I have to memorize a new set of icons and remember what they do.
What’s behind the hamburger menu in the left gutter and why can’t it be made directly accessible as icons in all that free space?
All of it reminds me of the versions of Chrome where the “show all downloads” action on the downloads page was by itself under a hamburger menu while the row in the UI was basically blank.
Admittedly when I'm at home on my bigger screens I don't value space as much as I do on my small work screens.
I like to think that every single one of those was a pet project of some PM at Microsoft, and they have them on their stupid resume.
The Browser Software Era designs are idiomatic. They're based on (CD-ROM era) multimedia and adventure games, not desktop apps.
The earliest, most influential web designers had been doing multimedia. The earliest creation tools were tailored for them.
That aesthetic has been carried forward, for better or worse.
(Actually, the more the merrier!)
Browsers, OTOH, used to dsplay content to be copied and pasted everywhere. Nowadays there are silos everywhere, and interoperatibiity sucks.
Personally, I think the Windows OS itself is one of the most problematic offenders. How can you expect better from third party developers, when MS uses at least 3 different UI paradigms for system settings? And F1 doesn't bring up help - it brings up a web browser!
And this is why I DO feel differently about Word, which does take up way too much space with a ribbon full of tools that really aren't of interest. In word, I'm usually writing something, and then spending a small percentage of the time changing formatting. Quite different from Excel, where it's more often than not working with large datasets pulled either from a csv online or directly from a SQL server and the various tools and functions are central to the task at hand.
I guess the point is, it really depends on use case as for whether the ribbon makes sense, and it should be left to the user to decide to use the old menu based system or the new ribbon based system based on how much time is spent composing vs. manipulating the existing data. Right tool for the job.
This sounds pretty great to me. If the applications are well designed, they can do their own thing. I don't see why we need to conform to a centralized idiom. It's great that you can immediately tell which app you're in just from a glance. And also it's more interesting when applications have their own character.
I would say idioms should maybe play a role at a company level, i.e. it makes sense that Google products will share design principles. But I wouldn't impose the same principles to all applications just so it will be slightly more familiar to some people.
Exactly for the same reason why humanity has come up with an idea of standards. Same set of reasons I would even say.
> But I wouldn't impose the same principles to all applications just so it will be slightly more familiar to some people.
This is because design choices are more important to you than users' comfort and productivity. Some argue that it should be the other way around, though.
and the same reasons are there why humanity has come up with the idea of breaking or ignoring bad standards
You can't resolve these type of issues in the abstract, some olden design paradigms are better than what we have now, but then there were plenty of awful decisions "standardized" as well
> I don't see why we need to conform to a centralized idiom.
> But I wouldn't impose the same principles to all applications just so it will be slightly more familiar to some people.
> You should not "innovate" just for the sake of innovation
But you can innovate to fix "bad UI practices standardized by ignorant people of the past"
They are almost never well designed. Devs, particularly those who get excited about “clever” UX don’t care about usability.
> I don't see why we need to conform to a centralized idiom.
Because I don’t want to learn dozens of keyboard shortcuts to do the same thing just because a random dev thought it was clever to have their own thing. Because I don’t want to spend hours navigating “clever” menu layouts and figure out whether the settings I am after are behind a hamburger, in a sub-sub-submenu, in a contextual menu, or hidden behind arcane commands (hello, Chrome). I don’t want some stupid software forcing down on me metaphors from another stupid OS, either.
I do want text fields to support the same operations everywhere; I want menus to be used the same way as well, and these are the most egregious.
OS provided widgets offer baseline functionality the users expect to find. Re-implementing your own widgets is fucking stupid: you are spending a lot of time to re-invent the wheel, and in the end it does not even work.
It’s just like cryptography. Don’t roll your own. Your users will thank you.
Personally I blame the shift to mobile as much as the shift to web for this - that's what drove the much-hated Windows 8 interface (leveraging the desktop computer monopoly to try and give the Windows Phone offerings a familiarity advantage), all coinciding with Gnome jumping the shark and Ubuntu shifting to something new. Ironic that during the end of the 'naughties' Apple were the pioners of touchscreen UI on commodity devices, but seemed to be the only player who understood that the desktop was a completely separate space, and should remain so.
This is word/office 97 though, peak office, which came before all of that.
Menus removing "unused" items must be one of the worst UI decisions of all time. Imagine how many user stories, thousands of tests and interviews resulted in that abomination.
Sometimes you just can't beat common sense. Problem is to know when you can and when you can not.
I believe that's Word 2002 in the article.
At the time, people complained about the menus popping out button-like borders on hover[1], which indeed no other menus did at the time, and about the un-buttony buttons on toolbars[2], which indeed directly contravened the Windows 95 HIG (unlike those in Word 95).
Not all moments of peak Office happened at the same time. Word 95 was the last to be mostly HIG-compliant. The macro functionality only matured with Word 97—but once you were trying to do moderately fancy things like use Microsoft Equation more than a couple of times, it crashed multiple times per hour (and of course ME’s typesetting was absolutely awful). That gradually improved until it became stable somewhere about 2003 (the weird blue UI) or 2007 (the OOXML/Ribbon release)—at the cost at no longer being usable in the rest of the system using OLE (IIRC).
What makes me genuinely conflicted is the contemporary rant against the Win95-style file dialogs[3]. I’m very used to them, to the point of finding it difficult to imagine anything else (I’ve encountered the vestiges of the old two-listboxes dialogs from Win95 on, but that’s all they were, vestiges). And yet I can agree with most of the criticisms! I just can’t see how to resolve them.
(Office never left those dialogs intact, though, not in any version, although they tried damn hard to make their custom versions look like business as usual.)
[1] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/visual.html#VISUAL36
But why optimise for an 800x800 resolution (which would essentially give you lots of empty real estate if you have a higher resolution)? I really don't get this post?
We have let the visual designers run mad and it is killing software.
From my side I'm going to continue excluding UX folk from all future development unless it's an explicitly new-user facing app on a mobile device.
This needs further clarification. What kind of software would that be? I read your previous sentence as "I can do the work UX folk do", but you don't seem to be implying that UX is not important, right?
When you’re looking for a “UX expert” and they are showing you their portfolio, ask them to show how their apps look on a phone in landscape orientation or over a slow dial-up connection, or how their designs work with a screen reader, or for a colorblind user. If they say “oh, that’s a problem for the Accessibility team,” RUN away from that candidate!
Also, what was the methodology used to decide the particular UX solution to the problem?
A UI designer is tasked with making a UI beautiful, a concept that is highly subjective. A UX designer is tasked with making the UI functional, which is far less subjective.
Guess which person the management takes more input from?
Because, unless today, the additional space will not be filled with useless hamburger menus but it will be used by the main working area.
Then there is the baffling (and still present) fuckery of the user directories in Explorer. There are all kinds of shadow copies of your user directories that are "forbidden." WHY? WTF is all of that shit?
I think they also removed (or, again, buried) the ability to organize your programs into groups in the Start menu. WTF are they thinking? I want to put all of my graphic-editor apps together. I want to put all of my audio apps together. Then I want another group for my office/productivity apps. But NO! MS thinks I want everything in a giant, disorganized pile. Or I want them organized by VENDOR name. What the ever-loving shit would I want that for?
There are little regressions everywhere. Another one is in Explorer. Originally, Explorer would show + signs next to directories that were not empty. I think it was Windows 7 where they stopped showing those... unless you happened to roll the cursor into the left pane of Explorer; then they would suddenly appear. WHY? Are we supposed to sweep the cursor across every pixel on the screen, looking for hidden goodies? Absolutely retarded.
And eventually MS abandoned the universally-understood + sign in favor of a stupid TRIANGLE to disclose additional contents. The + sign is fucking UNIVERSALLY UNDERSTOOD to mean "additional." WTF is a triangle supposed to mean?
I'm so glad the world has largely moved on from Windows, because it is a disgrace. I'm just bummed because I want to use MS Flight Simulator, but it would require me to buy and set up an expensive Windows system. NO WAY. Looks like X-Plane for me.
That was possible since the very first Windows version.
You could also set up system-wide color schemes in Unix GUIs. Only the vaunted Mac forced a hard-coded inverse color scheme on people for what, 30 years?
I mentioned this at WWDC in a user-experience forum in the mid-2000s, asking why we couldn't have user-defined color schemes on the Mac. You should have heard the whining and moaning from the Mac programmers, who no doubt considered themselves "elite" compared to Windows programmers. It was pretty pathetic. All Apple had to do was create a proper system of color registers during the transition to OS X. But nope. They hard-coded color names into the UI. Amateur hour.
I'm not shocked that the transition to even another hard-coded color scheme has suffered from problems; particularly on iOS, in Apple's own controls. But the fact that every app developer still has to manually cater to a klugey color-scheming system in the UI is embarrassing.
I miss the "put all windows of this app in a grid" command.
The start menu was useful and you could get an overview of apps and add your own folder hierarchy to it.
You could choose your self what Windows updates to install.
There is like no change but 64 bit support I like since Windows XP.
I absolutely hate it. All the app windows just blend into one, it's just so hard to see them.
Also, even basic Explorer windows often lose their borders when logging in via RDP, leading to white on white mayhem, but I've always assumed that's a bug.
It would blend into Teams, where only a hideous "high contrast" mode would render borders. The list keeps going on and on.
I've used a registry "hack" (manually added a setting) to set the colour of inactive windows, this does improve things a bit when it works. I prefer eg a dark grey as inactive, and eg orange for active window.
I'm blocked from upgrading my work PC to Windows 11 unfortunately.
I put the remainder of the elements on top of their new counterparts.
If you look harder, the icons are larger. Single icons got replaced by more explanatory content. The "expands" symbol is larger. And there are more actions crammed into the toolbar.
Also, yes, there's a lot of whitespace. But let's not forget the reason MS redesigned the office toolbars. It wasn't because it looked bad, it was because after people configured them to be functional it tended to take most of the screen.
This was true only for people who didn't know how to use a computer. And the fault was on MS side. By default, after installation, every MS Office program had the screen filled with toolbars.
And, surprise, surprise, today is the same. The damn Ribbon uses almost 1/3 of the vertical space. And you cannot have individual toolbars anymore. It is all or nothing. And this is for the native programm. The "web" version is a total disaster in GUI design.
Which wasn't a problem in ye olde times with 4:3 screens dominating the landscape, but nowadays is with 16:9 screens.
With computer mouse you can use much smaller and denser controls of course.
Maybe I'm just dreaming.
To sell Microsoft Surface, among other things.
Windows Phones are gone, but people still use Office on touch devices: MS Surface tablet, and other manufacture's Windows tablets or hybrid laptop/tablet devices, or just touch-screen laptops¹ which are a thing, and increasingly the web versions of office that might be used on anything modern including iPads.
> I don't understand why they removed the lines between buttons.
The usual reason for things like this is that it makes things look cleaner, or more modern⁴, which it does. Though IMO it has a detrimental effect on discoverability (it that a button, a link, or just some text?!) and navigation, even for the modern touch-first idea it is sometimes aiming at (where are the edges of what I can touch?).
My biggest irritation with modern UIs is focus indication on the desktop. It has been a problem for many years but only gets worse as time goes on: it can be difficult to see at a glance, especially over multiple screens, which window currently has input focus because many app families use different window decorations and even within one app the active/not distinction can come down to the difference between one shade of off-white/black and another shade of off-white/black (MS Office and Firefox are both guilty of this).
--
[1] I know people really like touching their screen where possible instead of using a mouse or trackpad, I sometimes find it preferable myself² though not for Office & similar tasks.
[2] and for the most part I'm an old-fashioned keyboard-or-die person, regularly bemoaning bad design decisions³ (or simple laziness of not implementing standard shortcuts) that force me to leave the keyboard to mouse/trackpad/touch
[3] which can't be good for accessibility reasons, as well as not-irritating-the-like-of-me reasons
[4] though given how quickly fashion changes, I'm of the opinion that “to look modern” should never be a design consideration in a product intended to last into next year!
That's smart! : )
And if using a touchscreen for that is a pain, then at least optimize for a mouse instead of something noone will actually use.
I wanted to see how LibreOffice would compare on my netbook, and frankly it's better than the new Word, but still "worse" than the old version: https://i.imgur.com/cWGYh3M.png
That said, at least LibreOffice lets you have your custom themes and actually offers a variety of different interface layouts, which I think is a nice touch: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Videos/User_interface
> Windows 7 with the Classic theme (which really was just a slight evolution over Win2K) was peak UI/UX, and you'll never change my mind. It's been downhill ever since, getting worse and worse with each generation.
To be honest, I'm inclined to agree with this. That's also why I rather enjoyed the Redmond theme even in *nix distros. There's just something so very usable about the old Windows look and more modern attempts, such as SerenityOS https://serenityos.org/ and even ReactOS https://reactos.org/
Everything about that theme was perfection. If you disable all kinds of animations, then it becomes even better.
They look very nice but have very little substance.
And to think that one of the most versatile and used interfaces is a spreadsheet, which has very dense information.
Talking about old vs new, you would never convince me that the abomination that is the ribbon is better than the previous interface (menus/icons).
UI design is not just some designer deciding that something looks good and just doing it that way. UI/UX design is not some "beautiful interaction layer" that you put on top of the actual "real part" of the application. A lot of software developers (me included originally) seem to think that way, I don't know why, maybe it's a bias in education. UI design is an integral part of the software development process, and I would argue more important than the programming itself. In fact, it should be the primary source of decisions that we make in our choices behind the software development process, not the other way around.
UI/UX design is the art and science of looking at your product the way a user would look at it, making it as accessible and intuitive as possible. It is the art and science of making the product that your user wants and needs, instead of whatever you think they need. The decisions made in UI design (like "adding more whitespace") are not made arbitrarily. They are not made because someone thinks it looks pretty. They are the result of years of user research and A/B testing, just like our programming paradigms are the result of years of research. It would be arrogant to dismiss all this effort by millions of people based on personal opinion.
That being said, the Office ribbon is a complete clusterfuck, and kind of the worst example you can find of modern UI design.
That also being said, I do think the original post is making a false comparison. Of course UI's will be designed to fit the technology of their age. If you only have limited screen space you want to conserve it as much as possible, hence why the toolbar approach was chosen for Word 97, as even screens of 1024x768 resolution were rare back then. The ribbon UI was designed for an age where larger screens were common and it could be afforded to take up more pixels. In fact if you were to put a 40px toolbar on a modern 4K screen it would be tiny, hard to see and hard to click on. Putting the modern ribbon UI on an old 800x600 screen that it was not at all designed for is pushing an agenda.
Maybe sometimes it is, but not in the article.
The article in fact has multiple problems.
1. The titlebar of the _host virtual machine_ is included in the offensive version. This is probably not a coincidence but to exaggerate the issue.
2. The ribbon bar that combines the title bar and menu bar of old in fact consumes _less_ precious vertical space.
3. The icon spacing is roughly the same in both screenshots.
4. The major "offender" in white space is the different layout being used but that has nothing to do with UI design but everything to do with giving plenty of space for header and footer editing, and showing "real life" page margins -- the print layout! The Word 9x screenshot doesn't use/have that display mode. It's not WYSIWYG. That display mode can usually be disabled, at least in the latest Word versions.
Case closed. It's a rubbish article especially because this CAN be a problem in modern UI's and there are plenty of better examples.
I held on to Windows 7 until the EOL date and I was forced to upgrade by my company for this reason. Minimal padding, clear borders and drag targets, high contrast coloring, no animations; it was far better usability-wise.
We have higher resolutions and bigger screens. I understand some people don't like the idea of adding more buttons to the UI because it can make it look cluttered and confusing, but rather than just adding padding around everything, why not make the icons higher resolution and maybe slightly bigger to take up the increased available screen real estate?
I'm sick of people associating "modern" with "good" and "dated" with "bad". Modern flat UIs are terrible for discovery, as it makes it impossible to tell what elements are interactable. And IMO, they're just plain ugly, but that's a matter of personal opinion.
Windows 7 with the Classic theme (which really was just a slight evolution over Win2K) was peak UI/UX, and you'll never change my mind. It's been downhill ever since, getting worse and worse with each generation.