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Comment by RodgerTheGreat | Hacker News Reader

A generation was raised on usable designs which clearly communicated interactability with a consistent visual language. It is only natural that they would come to think of computers as inherently ordered, understandable devices. Machines had always been this way.

It was obvious to this new generation that the affordances of youth were purely redundant. Clutter. Overhead. Junk! Widget by widget, pixel by pixel, bevels were smoothed. Tasteful gradients and transparency replaced harsh outlines. Explanatory text was tucked away. Manuals became brochures, then a lonely slip of paper with a URL. Maybe a QR code.

Now my screen is the very picture of elegance and sophistication. There are no extraneous details. Indeed, there are no details. I caress my phone's surface gently, hoping to see a sliver of its rapturous visage peel back, hinting that I have found the first step in the puzzle box of its interaction model.

Alas, no dice. Maybe I can hunt down a how-to video... to show me how to hunt down a video...

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Compounding this frustration (on iOS at least) is stuff like "force touch" and hidden toolbars. Depending on how hard you press a button you might get a totally different UI interaction.

Are others good at knowing exactly how many newtons of force it takes to follow a hyperlink instead of triggering this horrid mini-preview window? Maybe that's why Jonny Ive made millions of dollars while I work like a stiff for a living.

Want to open a new tab in mobile Safari while on a webpage? Oh I must tap the invisible button bar at the bottom. So obvious.

I just wish Apple et al. didn't force these choices on us, that we could disable silliness like force touch and hidden toolbars. But alas one cannot.

Force touch is the best evidence we have that designers have lost their power at Apple.

The best thing Steve Jobs did was hire serious designers and defend their ideas against the rest of the organization. That’s clearly not happening anymore.

My guess is that “Designer at Apple” became such a desirable title that the design roles have been taken over by wannabees.

Force Touch is on its way out. Has been for about two generations of iPhone. There's now Haptic Touch which is nothing but a long-press with better feedback.

All this means is that instead of people accidentally discovering the obscure behaviour as they do now (and then working out how to carefully tap out of it), they'll just never find it. That's certainly less annoying to me, who has never used any of these weird popup menus, but doesn't seem a massive improvement overall.

> they'll just never find it

Why not? People always complained about accidentally activating Force Touch when trying to long press. Long press has a precedent in iOS; 3D/Force Touch never did.

I have no idea what I should be long pressing (there are no affordances that I know of other than randomly trying it) and I’ve only ever accidentally activated force touch. Perhaps I am unique.

It has the same problem: invisible, undiscoverable UI driven by seemingly random gestures. Who cares if you long press or press harder? You still can't tell it's an option unless you try it on everything.

It's meant to be reserved for advanced features that you only want to offer to users that know how to find them.

See: right click.

I don't think right click is in the same category. For one thing, the right mouse button is prominent and next to the left one. For another, there was a pretty well established language that right clicking either did nothing (was harmless) or brought up a contextual menu of advanced actions you could then read.

And Apple UI designers (IMO rightfully) were against exactly these hidden context menus. You can see in the older versions of Pages/Keynote/Numbers how UI was meant to work: Instead of right-click menus there was the Info button (promimently found in the shortcut list), which opened a non-modal context menu that could be placed anywhere on screen in a persistent way. This then allowed manipulating all the detail object settings with minimal mouse travel and clicks.

I'd say the one thing that MS Office always did really well in comparison is the format paster. Cmd-alt-c/v just isn't as intuitive and discoverable.

Not always. After working for years at Apple I was told (in response to a bug report I filed about missing menu items) that Mac menus might totally change their contents if you PRESSED A MODIFIER KEY. WTF!

So every Mac menu conceivably had (has?) 7 sets of contents, 6 of which are essentially secret. Idiotic.

totally agreed there - these modifiers should go away.

edit: with my post I in no way wanted to indicate that Apple's UI is the pinnacle of design - just that they IMO made the right choice at first by avoiding context menus, or at least keep them optional.

Well, there is this "move to trash" menu item that turns into "really delete" on many file managers. I find it not bad.

If you really need it, you will discover it. Otherwise, you can still go to the trash and really delete the file from there. It's safer than having the really delete item by default, and it's there if you need it.

> I'd say the one thing that MS Office always did really well in comparison is the format paster. Cmd-alt-c/v just isn't as intuitive and discoverable

Office products have the worst copy/paste of any software I use. Somehow their rich-format copying never does what I want it to do, despite fussing with setting default paste options and learning the advanced keystrokes.

> Somehow their rich-format copying never does what I want it to do, despite fussing with setting default paste options and learning the advanced keystrokes.

I was like you, until I learned what each of the pasting modes are meant to do, and in particular that it works different if you copy/paste within the same document or from an external source.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2012/02/1...

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/control-the-formatt...

Now I still consider it shitty, but at least I'm moderately in control.

I just wish that the default was to copy/paste the text and not text, style info, multimedia and who knows what else.

You can change the default.

agreed on copy/paste, though I think that's a problem in general in Microsoft-land due to a lack of standardization across their products. what I meant was specifically the format paste feature (the yellow paintbrush icon in Office apps).

I forget when right-click was introduced (9? 10?) but there was only one mouse button at the time.

So exactly like right clicking on items to see if a contextual menu pops up in Windows 95?

It's easy to discover when there are only two buttons on your mouse. If it had one and pressing strongly did something else, you'd be right.

Originally of course there was only one mouse button, and you would ctrl-click for the context menu

Two button mice were for sure the standard on non-Macintosh PCs well before Windows was in popular usage.

And 3 wasn't rare, I think.

Originally, yes, there was one¹. But three were used quite soon after.²

¹ https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/input-output/14/3...

² https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY

It's just as easy to press harder "force touch" as it is to right click.

Sorry, but the Windows 95 user interface had the exact same discoverability issue.

Opening a Context menu was never a destructive action though, so you could click that other button on your mouse all day without risk. You have to be taught that a context menu exists once, but it's safe & consistent from then on

Force touching an item to see if there is a contextual menu isn't a destructive action.

That doesn't change the fact that neither interface gives you a way to know in advance which items have associated contextual menus.

But if you "hard-press" a button that doesn't support hard-pressing, won't it just detect a normal press? Depending on what the button is, that might be destructive or at the very least time-consuming.

Newbie Windows 95 users would quite frequently hide the entire start bar because they accidentally moved the mouse while trying to click on an item, and the system interpreted that as a drag intended to resize the start bar to a zero height.

At that point they could no longer use their computer at all until they got external help.

You still see a small bar even with "zero" height.

Which was of absolutely zero use to them now as it remains today; they don't understand what happened.

There is a different cursor when you hover it. At some point you can't help people anymore.

I agree, and like the right click, force touch options were always accelerators for more confidant users (rather than being the only way to complete some task).

Personally I loved force touch and a few months on iOS 13 I’m still struggling with transition to long press gesture instead.

The problem with long press as an accelerator is that it’s triggered by a deliberate pause. It might just be a few hundred milliseconds but the perceived time is very frustrating.

Um, ease of use has little to do with discoverability. Two buttons are there in front of you.

Yes. That was one of the worst parts of Windows 95’s interface because it wasn’t discoverable.

A context menu is fine when it provides shortcuts to functionality also discoverable elsewhere. Windows 95’s context menus were full of functionality only available through them.

I guess you love the extra menu items you only get with Shift+Right button.

Some things are, by design, not meant to be easily discoverable.

Sounds a lot like double click on Windows 95 to me.

Worth noting they also disabled the feature on older hardware in iOS13 for feature parity. So even if your device can detect pressure it no longer bothers.

Not true. Force touch works perfectly in iOS 13 on my XS. As does long pressing. It is true though that they had disabled force touch altogether in the iOS 13 beta.

Doesn't work the same as it used to on my iPhone 7. You don't get the feedback as you force press an icon on the home screen anymore, you can tell its just the same simulated algorithm as on the new phones.

You can set the amount of force required for 3D Touch in settings. It’s a feature I liked, it behaved like a right click in many instances. Also its double action made text selection easy.

I'm pretty sure invisible UI started very much while Jobs was in power. Hiding the scrollbar, for example.

I think it's quite a myth that Jobs knew good design. Jobs had a fetish for minimalism. For simple, single use, UIs that's often a good choice. I think that's what made iPods and the first generations of iPhones so well designed. But as smartphones have transitioned into being primary use devices with greater abilities, hidden UIs and extreme minimalism because a worse choice.

Well, they didn't hide the scrollbar on desktop until Lion, at which point Steve was in quite poor health.

On mobile, and particularly on screens the size of the original iPhone, hiding the scrollbar is a necessary tradeoff for screen real-estate. It also doesn't necessarily hurt usability if you know the exact screen size you're designing for, and can ensure elements are never fully cut off on your initial view.

It hurts usability in several ways. For example, you can’t click on an iOS scrollbar to jump to a specific part of the document. Nor can you use it as an instant reference to determine how long the document is.

> For example, you can’t click on an iOS scrollbar to jump to a specific part of the document.

How would you propose doing that on a 3.5" screen without a mouse or stylus?

> Nor can you use it as an instant reference to determine how long the document is.

You scroll the screen a tiny bit and the scrollbar pops up. Again, keep the size of the screen in mind—making the scrollbar persistent would be a poor use of space.

iOS isn’t just used on 3.5” screens, though - my 8” iPad mini screen could certainly accommodate a scrollbar. I also frequently interact with controls smaller than a scrollbar - apple's 'finger resolving' algorithm seems more than capable of this.

I know it’s still there - that’s why I said “instant”. It’s a very minor concern, I’ll grant you.

I recently discovered that on iOS, you can press on the scrollbar to get direct control of the scroll knob. That allows you to quickly jump to any part of the document without having to thumb scroll through it page by page.

Yes, the original Mac had invisible UI: the double click. It's an undiscoverable operation that people had to be taught, and invented so that Jobs could squeeze two operations onto one button because one button looked cleaner.

Were two button mice even around when the original Mac was introduced? It might not have been due to aesthetics.

In 1983 the best number of buttons was not clearly established. PCs (the few that had mice) were tending to two according to the reference, while workstations were tending to three.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_button#Number_of_buttons

I think some early mice had one button. Other early mice had two or three buttons (that would be chorded for different operations)

Apple has killed off 3D Touch first with the XR and now the entire iPhone 11 line

They've still kept the functionality AFAIK - you could just long-touch for force touch menu. Instead of pressing hard, you're now pressing longer to invoke the 3D touch menu.

I know why Apple got rid of force touch - BOM cost. Not that I condone the concept of Force Touch, but some wizbang designer pitched to the management that hey "We could solve this using just the UI with long press, and save $$$ in LCD costs to put a force sensitive layer". That's exactly how this happened.

Edit: Just checked on iPhone 11 Pro - yup, just long touch an icon to popup a contextual menu which used to require pressing with force.

The main reason they got rid of it because it was a gimmick that never really panned out and having two different ways of invoking a context menu based on force was a UX disaster for the novice user.

I'm glad Apple was able to swallow their pride and drop their "breakthrough innovative pressure sensitive screen" - reducing BOM costs was the icing on the cake, although it seems like they have just replaced that space with more battery so I wouldn't be surprised if the BOM difference was negligible in the end.

I’m not sure if I buy that - Apple makes millions of iPhones every year, shaving off a part from the BOM has huge impact. I worked in manufacturing for 10 years where we made 6 million things per week. It was a big deal.

Can confirm. I use to work in hardware before and the pressure was to reduce BOM costs whenever possible and compensate via firmware. BOM cost is also why Apple's top €1000 device is stuck with an 18W "fast charger" while the competition is eons ahead. If they can save money and line their margins and people will still buy it why not do it?

Maybe charging faster is bad for the batteries?

> was a UX disaster for the novice user.

I suspect it was also a disaster for older people. The delicate touch just seems to go away at some point. My mom for example can't do a half-press-to-focus on a camera. She just doesn't feel the extra step. I've seen older people doing force-touch gesture by accident and get confused why it happens.

Except, long press has been a gesture since the earliest days of iOS. They’re simply reverting back.

I think you’re correct that cost was a factor, but more likely that the marginally utility of force touch over long-press wasn’t worth the trade-off. (Both gestures have to be learned, but force touch is faster once learned. But probably not enough people used it to justify the extra layer of technology.)

Force touch at least seems to be on its way out. I hope.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/05/29/3d-touch-2019-i...

It is out in hardware, but not entirely in the UI. The UI for force-touch is replaced by long press on the icon or widget.

The UI is totally new in iOS 13, it’s descriptive and more explicit about what’s happening, looks a lot like a right click menu. Try holding down on an app icon in the home screen to see.

This made me think, how long did it take for cars to acquire basically their modern standard interface, and have personal computers been around that long?

Apparently, the Austin 7 popularized what are now standard controls for cars in 1922 (although it wasn't the very first example), and the IC auto was patented in 1886, which means it was about 36 years before people mostly settled on one interface.

By comparison, microcomputers have been around longer, but if you consider the GUI personal computer as a separate class, the Apple Lisa came out in 1983, which was...36 years ago! But it doesn't seem like we are converging to one standard.

I feel like we have converged!

Without exception, laptops are two panels connected by a hinge, with the top containing a screen and the bottom a keyboard and trackpad. The “desktop” metaphor is universal — draggable, tilable windows adorn a hierarchical filesystem.

Basically all modern phones are rectangles dedicated entirely to their screens, with which you interact using your fingers. Turn them on and you get a grid of app icons, each of which takes up the full screen when launched.

Sure, there’s a lot more variation on top of these foundations — but then, computers are way more complex than cars.

Me and the wife have a car each. The reverse gear is in a different position in each. On mine the headlights are controlled with a rotary switch at lower right of the steering wheel, in hers you twist part of the left stalk. If you accidentally press the centre of my headlight control you raise or lower the lights - hilarious. Some cars have the handbrake on a stick behind the steering wheel, some have it as a lever in the central console. Some have a small paddle.

Then there is the which side of the road do you drive thing ...

Oy, going from BMW to Fiat was fun.

BMW has R in the top left, while Fiat has it where BMW put 6th.

Those are minor. As late as the 60s motorcycles had non-standard controls. Standard:

Right hand - throttle and front brake

Left hand - clutch

Right foot - rear brake

Left foot - gear shifter

You have to use the clutch and gear shifter together, and you have to have at least one foot down when you stop. This layout makes a lot of sense.

Back in the day you had things like suicide shifters: you shift gears with your left hand and the clutch is at the left foot meaning that you have to take your hand off the handlebars to shift gears (hence “suicide shifter”), and as you come to a stop you have no foot to put down since you should be using bother the clutch and the rear brake. And that’s just one of many examples of weird layouts. Basically imagine driving a manual car where the gears are shifter with your left foot, the brake is hand operated and the clutch is a part of the steering wheel.

It's funny you mention cars, because there's definitely a new trend towards touch screens, and it happened fairly recently.

There's also the increasing number of weird controls for automatic transmissions.

However, I think the last major difference in the basic controls of a car was automatic vs. traditional manual, and that seems to be resolving.

I can imagine things that nobody seems to be doing - like what if you have a CVT, but manual control of the gear ratio through a lever with no detents?

> Want to open a new tab in mobile Safari while on a webpage? Oh I must tap the invisible button bar at the bottom. So obvious.

... I didn’t know there’s a button bar there until just now, and I tend to think that I know what I’m doing. I’ve always scrolled all the way back to the top of the page to get to that bar. I genuinely wonder what else I’ve missed now.

Just scrolling up a small amount should bring the bar back. No need to scroll to the top.

> Now my screen is the very picture of elegance and sophistication.

Is it? Windows 10 looks like installing a custom skin on Windows XP went wrong and now you're stuck with "Windows Classic (Flat)" set up for weird colors.

Thank you. I feel like the world is taking crazy pills. Windows 7 was gorgeous. Windows 8 was a mess but at least the were trying to do something bold with consistency with their Windows Phone Look and Feel.

Then Windows 10 shipped and I thought I got some pre alpha developer build accidentally, and it just... Never updated.

I've heard iOS be criticized for being overly flat these days but I just got an iPad and found the clickable areas at least visually pleasant, if a bit hidden. Windows 10 is undiscoverable AND ugly.

Take a look at this iOS critique https://uxcritique.tumblr.com/

To me Windows XP’s look & feel was among the best. Except for the fat Window title bar.

XP was playschool. Eww. Windows 2k was great however.

Maybe I just don't remember enough about Windows 8, but how is Windows 10 that much worse, in your opinion? I feel like it's the exact same as 8 sans the Metro Start section and a few minor (in my opinion) UI tweaks.

Windows 3's design was a first shot.

Windows 95 was extremely polished and well done.

Windows XP was a response to PCs becoming mainstream and figuring what the everyman wanted was more flair and fashion.

Windows 7 was a response to desktop Linux (Compiz et al.) capturing people's imaginations.

Windows 8 was a response to iOS while trying to avoid Apple's skeuomorphism patents (fortunately).

Windows 10 was realizing that none of that really mattered, they already have all the users anyway, so they just need long-term UI stability now.

I hope Compiz et al didn't inspire anyone, the low point of linux UIs (and that is saying plenty!).

Thankfully Microsoft showed restraint. Windows Vista got a GPU accelerated 3D workspace but the only real showcase for it was the very gimmicky and useless win+tab feature.

For me the savior of Linux is the niche tiling window managers.

Personally I'd go back to the Windows 95 era and use that as a starting point for a new, consistent, predictable, ergonomic, universal, and aesthetic GUI framework. I don't think any of what we have today is the ideal.

Oh goodness, now I can't unsee it.

Idk, my mom found windows 95 etc very hard to use but has no trouble with her iPhone, iPad or even a Mac (let alone the TV or can-speak-to appliance). Maybe part of is it is that a lot of problems that required UI solutions before just work magically now. Like file sharing, networking or dealing with different document formats. You don't need nearly as many controls for the most part so the UI can be simpler.

You think she learned nothing in the years between?

I am embarrassed to say I hadn't considered this actually; and it's a good point. But considering it, no, I don't. She simply doesn't have the mind for it, as far as I can tell.

That is actually a good point. Simple stuff might have become simpler.

That said I am firmly in the "we lost something between 95 and here" camp for now.

And to while it does explain why pads are different it doesn't explain why we needed to mess up the desktop in the process.

And the market for simple stuff that is simple to do is a lot larger than the desktop market.

That's probably what we learned from the iPhone.

Simple UI is better when you have consumer grade "simple" but problems starts when complex pro app start to do "simple" and you get "simplistic stupid"

We have gained many, many features between 95 and today. Your phone does many things (mapping, notifications, cameras, various permissions/access, etc) that your computer did not in 1995.

The degree of complexity that can be adequately conveyed graphically on a single screen though is fairly constant.

Windows 95 came out 25 years ago and many jumped directly from DOS or typewriters to it

She has +25 years of experience in using computing devices now, and computers are hundreds of times more powerful, of course things are easier for her

I don’t think that argument holds very strongly.

My grandma worked on typewriters, and then word processors in the 70s/80s. She had no problem doing her job.

She’d been using a Windows laptop since the mid/late 2000’s, and it’s always been a huge struggle for her. She’d frequently enable/disable features without noticing, etc.

Her tablet has been, as they say, like a glass of iced water in hell. She is far from a power user, but there is not a single thing she did on her laptop that she cannot do on her tablet.

> Her tablet has been, as they say, like a glass of iced water in hell

TBF tablets do a fraction of what regular computers do.

I find it hard to believe that she finds hard to do the things she does on her tablet on her the laptop.

Like, for example, working with excel file (spreadheets in general) on a tablet is excruciatingly hard, while I've seen literal computer illiterates fly on their keyboards

A device for consumption can have a simplified UI compared with a device for production.

It was a crossroad of limited computing affordance and abstraction necessity.

I grew up in CGI land, basically high end CGI programs were what the latest web app is. Reactive redrawing of free form geometries. I wanted this to be mainstream so bad. I got old and it became slightly true. Not keeping aside the drift of website content and pop overs.. something hit me. My brain doesn't want real time and free floating. I want abstraction, solid, and patient. It even contradicts my love for lisp repls (another form of low latency feedback). I look at 90s desktop GUIs with a bit more love and appreciation. They were limited just enough, the limitation forced abstraction and organization. And most of the time it was just right (you could remove spooky side effects, and add a bit of genericity it wouldn't hurt).

UI framework designers these days really undervalue “not spooky”.

I myself can't tell if this feeling is just me getting older. I liked the shiny dynamic stuff when I was younger. Gradually I found myself ignoring more of it and developing more specific rules for what I wanted out of the UX. When a recent thread on "calm computing" mentioned Fraidycat I took to it immediately. It's nearly the antithesis of the news feed - there's no repetitive rhythm to it, although there is a bit of clicking around. There was a time when I actually wanted news feeds, I would cycle through a few sites and F5 constantly.

I know a few twenty-somethings who are still falling for shiny stuff. I don't think that's going away, but I do think the overall culture will come to realize that it's junk food computing.

I do think it's both side of the getting old coin. In one way we're getting cranky. But we're also getting wiser. We don't want more data, we want better signal (quantity/quality).

A consequence of optimising interfaces to look good in screenshots and promo photos, rather than actually being useful?

That's the only explanation I can find for the whitespace ridden desktop and phone interfaces that plague us today.

I've noticed this happening as well, but I guess every system is built on the affordances and cultural knowledge of the time it was built.

The original Macintosh (and Windows before 95) were built for people who were more or less familiar with computers already BUT who didn't know so much about the mouse, etc. (And even if the Mac might have been "easier to use" people wouldn't just jump into an expensive machine without knowing what they would be getting). Hence they would "handhold" more. Even the 1st iPhone was more user friendly (design wise) than the newer ones.

Now kids know how to swipe "intuitively" and design will seem less obvious (for people unaccustomed with it) with time.

The stereotypical "old people with tech" shtick is that they don't know how to do things we contemporaries seem trivial.

Considering the trend maybe that isn't too unexpected, and I'm also worried that when I get old I'll feel left out and abandoned by this growing tend towards oversimplification

> It is only natural that they would come to think of computers as inherently ordered, understandable devices.

until you get a blue screen of death...

Don't get me wrong, I completely agree that modern UI is complete garbage.

Come on, UI design and the OS crashing down are two separate orthogonal issues. Yes, they culminate at the end as “User experience”, but the OP is clearly talking about UI elements and how their functional design is eroding away. What’s that to do with BSOD!!??

The blue screen of death was fairly predictable at some point.

To be fair, the Bsod does try to make crashes ordered and understandable. It's a terrifying blue screen that communicates fairly clearly that 'something done gone and fucked up' on your computer. The ui served its purpose so well it literally became a meme.

It sounds so obvious once said aloud!

(Sarcasm: someone can make a thousand word blog post about it and it can be voted to the top.)

I hate Material Design with a passion.

The box! You opened it, we came.

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