Material Design Guidelines for Dark Mode

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/38619/why-are-p...

Particularly the following comment:

"In some scientific fields/cultures, a stylish website could be viewed as unnecessary or even pompous. In this view, the textual content of a website is the only thing that matters, and if you "need" to make your website stylish perhaps it lacks real substance. This is the same line of thought that supports simplicity in presentation with minimal graphics. I have encountered this especially in math and theoretical CS."

It's more basic than that - the premise of UI deals first core usability, the layout of information of components in a manner that communicates information and allows for basic interactivity, and then to make it all coherent across the app.

That alone can get pretty hard, there's all sorts of decisions that need to be made. Consider that it's as much about what you don't see as those elements you do.

Then you can get into the more granular aspects such as those covered in this article that I identified as 'picky' (for example, the specific contrast ratios among various elements - this is far beyond what 99% of UI designers have the luxury of addressing) and then of course broadening the scope of accessibility, corner functions, cross platform consistency.

Even the basics of UI can be pretty hard, let alone the aesthetic elements, and very specific things.

And of course, all of it 'cross cuts' with the aesthetic aspects, which is why the disciplines of UI and classical design are so tightly interwoven.

Design and UX is very poorly understood, and it's difficult to professionalize or measure given the abstract nature of the subject. As Engineers, we love to measure things, and much of great design defies the kinds of classical measurements we are used to. As the OP indicated, it's also a field wherein it's hard to be self aware i.e. to 'know what you don't know', and so 'everyone has an opinion'.

A great UI is almost like a great API - it's hard to measure and articulate, but generally we know it when we use it.

And no HN people are nice, it's just a matter of understanding the subtilities we might all disagree on.

Ps : a bas php.

It's not about skills, it's about goals.

There are roughly two main conflicting goals when building a product. One, make a product that delivers value to users. Two, make money off that product. In a perfect world, these two would be maximized simultaneously - leading to fair exchange of value between the customer and the provider. In the real world, people sacrifice the first in order to get more of the second.

UI/UX design as it is today is almost entirely about sacrificing utility to boost sales. All the trends parent commenters are complaining about exist to convince users to spend money by means other than delivering a useful product to them - be it by differentiation from others, by looking like popular players, by reducing functionality to make it look simpler when purchasing decision is made. Addiction-inducing design trends like timelines and notifications and loot boxes are a part of this too.

This is not failure of intelligence of individuals, this is a moral failure of the industry. And being on receiving end, as a software user, it's fucking annoying. So is being upstream from it, as a software developer doing their best to deliver value to user, only to see it shat upon because the organization adopts user-hostile design trends.

Another view on this is that a new set of designers suddenly deciding that the old set of designers were bad at their job and just doing it over can end up pretty terrible for users. Some stuff doesn't need to be disrupted, dammit!

My comment was ranty, but I did not say that.

But fundamentally, it is not about who is inferior. It's about who's subjecting whom to constant change, and who is not listening to whom.

The problem is that it isn't "the designers" versus the developers anyway. We're all a little of both. The problem is that the sum total of all the little changes, both cosmetic and fundamental causes a drift over time. You don't see it until the timescale is long enough. Eventually you drift so far that nothing is familiar. (case in point: last time I used Windows was Win2k. Windows 10 is nothing like it. I have no clue how to do anything, and it is hard as fuck to learn, because there isn't much in the way of all that ugly "text" to help me out. There's no manual, no printed documentation. You gotta google everything, or use the built in searches. )

I find all this really frustrating. I'm worse than a novice. I used to be good at this. Now I'm a dinosaur. I literally cannot use the tools that I was good at 10-20 years ago. While change is constant in modern life, software, and particularly The Web, have accelerated change to a point where we are, as I say in my OP, robbing ourselves of skillsets when using software as a tool.

I mean, talk to someone who used Excel for 15 years, like friends of mine in marketing positions. Every revision. Changes. New functionality, but scrambling the old. And then one day their corporate overloads mandate a switch to Google docs, which not only has way less functionality, but is also all different. It's constantly changing too. The damn thing scrambles itself every 6 months. Eventually, the unconscious brain unlearns what it knew. And, worse it learns that how it is now is not how it will be. The brain won't bother learning anymore. So we stop actually becoming experts. Because what's the point if it's gonna get scrambled in < 2 years anyway?

> You're literally just making stuff up. Apple, probably the most infamous capricious design company, hasn't changed their File manager, settings menu, dock, or toolbar in 19 years.

Mac is relatively stable in the core things (thank god for that!) but Windows definitely not, Linux definitely not, and the web is a total other animal. Mac also drifts a lot. Look at iTunes. But the one MacOS example in a sea of drifting, changing, usually breaking and getting worse, crapass apps isn't really worth much.

When a developer adds a feature to an application, he/she generally reaches for the boring stock widgets in the UI library. It's a full time job just wiring together these components! You end up with an app that looks more or less like every other app. Good for usability, maybe bad for aesthetics.

When a designer adds a feature to an application, their mind is freed from the constraints of the toolbox. Their job is to imagine a better way! Their only constraint is Photoshop. You get... new ideas.

This is of course a cartoonish illustration of these roles, which overlap considerably. But I think there's a kernel of truth to it.

The parent didn't make that point.

It's exactly the same with marketers. Or managers. Or anyone who isn't a developer for that matter.

And why they're not aware of them? Google does an excellent job of hiding features sought by users (and then sunsetting them when they're not used; I wonder why they're not used). The design there does not serve the users' needs.

Try comparing Windows 98 to Windows 10.

Or some random website from 1999 to that same site now.

This rarely ever happens if you are a developer interacting with similar people (e.g. as a freelancer). They think you are some kind of magician. Similar when you are a good audio engineer or something, they will just let you do your thing.

The funny thing is: this perception is completely independent of the quality of your work. They will always have something to say – sometimes even stuff that makes sense, but very often just for the sake of it, with no real reason. Everybody thinks they have a good taste and a great eye and what kind of graphics are needed, while in fact often they have none of the above.

[1] https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/castletype/standard/medium/ according to Whatthefont

Regardless of specific hardware implementations, it can be agreed upon that patterns which can cause some non-negligible amount devices to be less energy efficient are anti-patterns.