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Comment by vedantroy | Hacker News Reader

Most of the time, I don't see an issue with non-native looking UIs. Oftentimes, non-native UIs look better.

VSCode and Atom both look great and they're non-native. I also think Slack looks pretty good too. Except for MacOS, native UI widgets generally seem to be pretty ugly.

Even Microsoft is embracing non-native UI for its own Microsoft Office platform.

Web-apps/material design, look sexy.

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> Most of the time, I don't see an issue with non-native looking UIs. Oftentimes, non-native UIs look better.

I think there's a threshold for this.

Throw 1 or 2 non-native designs (and UX) at me, I'm fine. I'll appreciate the aesthetics. Make every app have its own UX/design and I'm going to get lost very easily.

And there's a hidden context switch cost there that can accumulate.

Microsoft has never had a consistent look and feel across its suite of applications. Windows Live Mail, Zune media player, Windows media player, the Office suite, etc all looked different and they all looked different than other Microsoft applications.

Microsoft has never had a consistent look and feel across consumer applications. The business applications are highly consistent.

Interesting point, but that wasn't my experience. The office suite was consistent, but SharePoint differed markedly (at least in ~2010 when I last used it). IIS was different yet. I'm trying to think of other business-oriented MS products that I used (it's been a while)...

Microsoft Teams, Skype, VS Code, Internet Explorer, System Center. Not sure you could argue these are non-business applications, and none of them seem very consistent to me.

Amusingly, Skype looked much more native before MS bought it out and redesigned everything.

Microsoft doesn’t even have a consistent look and feel within its operating system. Windows 8 forward has been an inconsistent mess of a half implemented tablet interface.

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