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Comment by petilon | Hacker News Reader

It is unfortunate that the design of these controls give you no clues whatsoever as to how to interact with them -- or whether you can interact with them at all. Compare this to NeXTSTEP from the late 1980s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_...

Flat is broken [1], Flat 2.0 is much better [2].

[1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-ui-less-attention-caus...

[2] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design/

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In most apps nearly everything is interactive

It's probably better to specify what isn't interactive rather than specifying what is

Isn't there a trade-off though between always knowing what a button does on the first guess and having to misclick once or twice but then having a clean UI forever? I prefer the latter.

The notion that removing all shades and shadows is "cleaner" is a fad. This fad will end, and the sooner it ends the better it is for all of us.

Windows 1.0 doesn't have shades and shadows. It is "cleaner" in that sense than NeXTSTEP. But few will argue that it is more beautiful.

Here's Windows 1.0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_1.0#/media/File:Window...

Having never used it, I didn't realize Windows 1.0 had "responsive" menu bars!

I don't think anyone claimed that lack of shades and shadows automatically makes something beautiful. NeXTSTEP was simply designed by people who had more experience and taste in design. Also, that windows screenshot was when they were using sort of a hybrid "character mode" to display a graphical interface, which is quite a limitation.

I like some shading and 3d-ness, but it can be taken too far.

I really don't understand why that adjective is so commonly used to presumably denote something positive. To me, "cleaner" evokes images of emptiness, like a house you've just built and haven't started to actually use. The cleanest room has nothing in it. I think that's precisely the opposite of what you want.

Have you ever shopped for closets? Every major closet retailer has pictures of their product holding a ridiculously small number of apparel.[1][2] I, and especially my wife, have more than 4 shirts. I would like to see how a closet design looks when full. Sure the nearly empty closet looks cleaner, but it does not represent my use case, or that of anyone I know.

The same could be said for architectural renderings showing a handful of visitors at a place designed to be crowded.

[1] https://www.ikea.com/us/en/images/products/pax-corner-wardro...

[2] https://www.closetsbydesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/C...

> Have you ever shopped for closets? Every major closet retailer has pictures of their product holding a ridiculously small number of apparel.[1][2] I, and especially my wife, have more than 4 shirts. I would like to see how a closet design looks when full. Sure the nearly empty closet looks cleaner, but it does not represent my use case, or that of anyone I know.

Ok. That explains it. So the new UI's (or UX's) are like closets waiting to be used. You just have to add a pipe (you need to figure out where because real programmers don't ...) and a closet seat lid and it's ready for use.

> The notion that removing all shades and shadows is "cleaner" is a fad. This fad will end, and the sooner it ends the better it is for all of us.

It will not end so soon. They just rediscovered windows 1.0 and there is a lobg way till 95.

> Windows 10 doesn't have shades and shadows. It is "cleaner" in that sense than NeXTSTEP. But few will argue that it is more beautiful.

I fixed it for you.

Similar for Athena X11 widgets, no shades and shadows. Where Motif had them everywhere.

What does a "clean UI" mean, and why would that be worth having a confusing UI that leads people to mislick?

Why would there be a fundamental tradeoff between whatever "clean" means, and being confusing? Surely it's possible to build a UI that isn't confusing, but also has whatever positives a "clean UI" has?

It means less visual business, making it easy to pick your way through it. I find all those borders and shades in the NEXT interface distracting and I bet overall it slows people down when interacting with it. Besides, ideally, most elements should be intereactive in some way anyway. Hovering over them should provide enough indication of what type of interaction is available.

It's not distracting - it's actively helpful. It helps you understand how the parts of the user interface are separated, and so guides in how to interact.

I yearn for the menus of Windows 98 whenever I'm forced to use a new/updated ios app, and don't understand where to swipe to get it do to what I want.

Back then, software even came with manuals, and often a useful "help" menu right in the application. Now, when you google "how to x in app y", you end up on some spammy help-page that spends 5 paragraphs (with ads) to tell you to "pinch and then swipe" or whatever.

You "bet" it slows people down? This is a testable hypothesis. Empirical experiments along these have found the opposite, that the flat UIs they tested slowed people down by 22% compared with the same UI with stronger clickability signifiers: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-ui-less-attention-caus...

Do you have any contrary empirical evidence?

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