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Comment by slownews45 | Hacker News Reader

Talking to modern UI / Designer folks for these things - so much mushy weird aspirational language and constructs.

What happened to this will be easier to see, to remember, takes fewer clicks, is quicker.

I mean, you spend a billion bucks on a new design and get things like this (from MS Fluent):

Fluent experiences listen and adapt... They unite people and ideas, whether they’re on opposite sides of the globe or standing right next to each other... Fluent speaks in light and shadow, in spatial dimensions...

I just want to get work done. Save me from my spatial dimensions (and whitespace overload).

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The trick is, these newer UWP apps, they all take fewer clicks, because they barely have any features!

Startup time is stable though: windows calculator has the same startup time as excel. Don't get me started on microsoft photos...

Modern UI quickly breaks down when you need to have complex software - software that needs a menubar, for example.

Exactly, this is my complaint. The calculator app is SLOWER with this modern UI, and I gain little in terms of efficiency.

You're just looking at the marketing speak from the new design language.

When thinking about design systems, there are few different levels and you speak about different ones depending on who you are talking to. For me it breaks down something like this, going from high-level to low-level:

Design Philosophy - Marketing (what you posted)

Design Principles - Designers / UX (accessible, minimal, emotion)

Design Language - Designers / UX (red is used to denote danger)

Design Library - Designers / UX / Engineers (ButtonPrimary color = blue, ButtonDanger color = red)

Design Implementation - Engineers (<ButtonDanger>Cancel</ButtonDanger>)

I'm no designer but I've seen amazing ones work. Could it be that this is just marketing talk unrelated to actual design philosophy underneath because it is not targeting people related to that?

But the modern interfaces are relative junk from my view with some exceptions.

Just basic things like putting focus on an input field of a pop-up dialog. I get that isn't sexy but it IS efficient. They should focus more on the later and less on the sexy gradient / look stuff.

This may seem crazy but that was one of the major accomplishments of the google.com search page. Before that when you navigated to a search engine, you still had to click the search box. The cursor was not located in the box for you.

> Fluent experiences listen and adapt... They unite people and ideas, whether they’re on opposite sides of the globe or standing right next to each other... Fluent speaks in light and shadow, in spatial dimensions...

BARF. I can hear the thrumming of Enya's "Storms in Africa" behind this text...

Hey, that's a great song though.

Considered on its own, it's quite lovely. I was going for the overuse of it to punch up meaningless faux-inspirational ad/prezo copy with generic positive vibes.

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