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Comment by copx | Hacker News Reader

I have always hated this fashion with passion too. For me it makes UIs less aesthetically pleasing and harder to use.

One of the reasons why I still use Windows 7 is that I like its 3D transparent glass-like look and utterly hate the flat design of later versions which I would call soulless and ugly. And the UI elements are harder to distinguish for me.

That being said, many people do like it, and I am not aware of any studies about how many people like it / don't like / don't care in general.

Fortunately for us flat UI haters, that horrible design trend will go away the same way it came - as a fashion. Fashion by definition does not last. Sooner or later flat design will inevitability be considered old and unhip too.

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Absolutely. I still stick with Windows 7 as well. I just can't stand the flatness, and the obnoxious amounts of space-wasting whitespace.

The whitespace is there because people design first for mobile, then port to desktop browsers as an afterthought. That's not going to change any time soon.

The introduction of copious amounts of whitespace is a very common design tool that is not limited to just websites. Have a look at an average art gallery or museum and you will know what I mean. And there's a reason why using whitespace is a good thing, as outlined in this article[1] for example.

[1] https://boagworld.com/design/why-whitespace-matters/

It's still bad.

I remember a admin at a company giving me a before and after on some tool- where the fat-finger-friendly UI reduced the presented information and thus the usefulness off the tool to basically zero.

Sure it will.

People used to design for desktop first, then port to mobile as an afterthought. Originally, there was only desktop, and mobile was a completely different and separate thing. Then mobile got more capable, and by necessity (since everything was designed for desktop) mobile tried to be a small desktop.

Mobile was limited, and trying to be a small desktop didn't work out that well. So people switched gears and said "Well, let's treat everything as mobile first, and let desktop adapt because it's more powerful." So we began the mobile-first trend.

But in the meantime mobile has gotten much more powerful and less limited; today many mobile devices have higher resolution and more powerful cpus than the old desktops had. The screens have also gotten a lot larger than they were when mobile-first started.

So, I think we'll either wind up with a "tablet-first" trend, designing for the middle-ground and making both the smaller mobile and larger desktop adapt, or we'll go back to recognizing that mobile, tablet, and desktop needs are different and we'll design accordingly for each, but now with a better understanding and better toolset for minimizing the redundancy that can occur with split designs.

I prefer Windows Classic even more, probably because it's what I'm used to and the UI elements are easily recognisable but not too fancy.

Indeed. And why right now i am using IceWM on Linux, and consider Win2k the last sane Windows.

Windows 2000 was the holy grail of Windowses. Stable, could play games, classic UI. XP was just a paint job that had more weird defaults to change back to classic.

Well there I was, thinking that maybe rejecting the free upgrade might have been a bit petty after all. I'm not a big hater of flat UI but phew, Windows 10 is ugly. Flat UI should have high contrast but with a feeling of lightness. For some reason Windows 10 went for a super dark palette: black, magenta, navy, blood orange etc. Sorry, not for my workstation.

On the other side of the spectrum, plenty focus too much on being neat and consistent that they become greyish, bland and sacrifice usability. Good ones use colours, shadows and placements wisely so that navigation does feel lighter and the experience is more content-focused.

Excellent ones do all that but without burdening the audience with that nasty aftertaste of pretentiousness.

Learn the rules, then break the ones you can't agree with. It's the designer's privilege to be able to do this more often than developers can ;)

that's the tough thing about design, it's subjective. I personally really like the win10 design much more than 7. 7 Seems to dated to me.

I'd really love it if MS embraced shell skins. There are so many great ones, but I hesitate to jump through all the hoops to make them work.

Churn makes things seem dated. After you see too many screenshots of it, the MS Office ribbon seems like today's thing and a plain old menubar seems dated. Could someone show me something that makes the ribbon seem dated? Nagel paintings seem dated now, but seemed hip back in the day, nestled between the ads for theaters showing Breakfast Club.

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