This applies to 95% of all modern software. Optimise UI for looking (subjectively) pretty in screenshots.
I used to teach Human-Computer Interaction, and it was exciting to me when many companies started hiring UX designers. But ultimately it was disappointing because especially in consumer products it seems like product managers prioritized hiring folks with strong aesthetics even at the expense of fundamentals like usability and research.
I wasn't familiar, but this site fits the comment better, so I assume that's what was meant.
We were on top of the world, now the world is built on top of us.
(Personally I like designing expressive/extensible products, so that constrains me to working on tools for professionals.)
At least in my experience, making products for non-professional power users presents a few challenges. First off, you can't charge much for a product that isn't a professional tool. At the same time, power users are (initially) a niche segment so in order to support a development team you probably need something that will appeal to a broad audience. But designing a product that works well for a broad audience and for power users is harder (=more expensive) than focusing on one or the other. It doesn't help that power users can be more demanding in terms of support and feature requests than average users.
My experience is that power-user features often get nixed not because any one stakeholder doesn't like them -- often internal folks are themselves power users and think it would be pretty cool -- but because it's often harder to make a good ROI argument for building and supporting power-user features compared to features for the average user.
It's a slightly different case, but I remember noticing that, when Google retired Google Reader, the perception of Google in media and on tech sites seemed to go bad nearly overnight.
Besides the argument that power users can become evangelists, the other argument I've used in feature prioritization meetings is that power users can provide significant utility to the whole user ecosystem by sharing the customizations and extensions they've developed with average users.
Having said that, these kinds of features rarely make the cut, and even when they do they're often not as obviously successful as I would have hoped. With respect to the benefit of power-user "evangelism" that's hard to measure. It's hard to measure whether $400k for a few power-user features or $400k in average-user features ends up resulting in more paying users.
Basic support for already existing web client functionality. For instance, I shouldn't have to sacrifice the ability to open a link in a new tab, or sacrifice the ability to link _period_ which is commonly the case (which interferes with bookmarking, etc). I shouldn't be logged out or yelled at by an app for hitting the back or refresh buttons on my web browser.
Most of these things are reinventing the wheel. Just for prettiness they'll break a basic browser functionality, then they try to re-implement in their framework and it just creates an abstraction layer on top of an abstraction layer, creating unnecessary bloat.
Many times this is even just so they can show you a blog post, which is just text and some images. I shouldn't need JavaScript to see that, especially if I don't know you or trust you. Even Google AdWords has had malware injected in its JavaScript, a blogger is not going to be worth my time to read if I have to trust his code isn't malicious just to see what he has to say about an obscure fruit.
- Information density. This is especially a problem with communication tools, which for some reason are all copying Slack and leaving very little screen space for the thing you actually want to see - the text that the other person is writing. Messages go off the screen very quickly and a lot of screen space is spent on decorations (user icons, names, speech bubbles, padding) leaving it with basically the density of comic chat. Graphic background images with semitransparent visual elements on top are another similar trend which uses a lot of padding to not obscure the background too much, and the transparency makes contrast and readability worse.
- Affordance discoverability. Many modern user interfaces have a lot of functionality hidden behind catchall elements like a user icon, a gear icon, or a hamburger menu. This may be a misguided attempt to make the user interface "cleaner" but it makes it very difficult to find what functionality is available unless you go exploring. This is especially bad for context-dependent functionality because there's no visual indication that the hidden contents of the catchall have changed.
- Delineated targets. A lot of modern designs have flatness as a design concept, meaning the click or tap targets are not clearly separated from the static parts of the interface. This makes it hard to know that they are targets (as it's common to have nonclickable decorative graphics too) and hard to tell where exactly they start/end so it causes extra cognitive load in order to hit them precisely.
- Non-gigantic targets. This is related to the low information density mentioned above. More and more designs target smartphone displays, which used to be very small and require big targets to ensure they could be mashed with normal human fingers. However, this gets reused on tablets, modern gigantic smartphones, and even desktop, where none of this makes sense.
- High-contrast targets with identifiable icons. Low-contrast or monochrome targets have become fashionable. Clickable items often have simplified, highly abstracted icons with thin-line monochrome content, frequently implemented as fonts, which is less distracting from the visuals of the design but is also hard to understand what it's supposed to represent. Another common one is having said elements in grey on grey, making them very difficult to read for people with less than perfect vision.
- Less modality. Many modern designs will have modal interface elements that prevent access to the rest of the user interface until interacted with and/or dismissed. The "blur the content and put a tiny dialog with a huge button in the middle" is a common tactic, and is often user-hostile nudging trying to get the user to do something they don't really want in order to get rid of the thing that is literally blocking their access to whatever they were actually doing.
This is basic human-computer interaction design stuff, but somehow it's all gotten lost.
Users still have to explore, even more so, in complex interfaces where a lot of options are presented. They don't know what each option does and there's so many of them.
And even the classic desktop apps have a lot of functionality hidden under the File/Edit/View/Insert/Tools menu bar. If they are not designed carefully, they are just hamburger menus with confusing labels. I'm looking at one right now. Why is "Find" under "Edit"? I don't want to edit anything, I just want to look for something. Is this action destructive? I took a risk and I pressed it, but luckily it is indeed just a search.
It's also a problem in physical interfaces like a computer keyboard. There's dozens of buttons and yet there are many hidden interactions between them. What does "Home" button do? Will it take me to my home screen? My home page? Let's press it. Oh, it just scrolls up.
Unless the options are severely limited or the users are trained, exploring can't be avoided - and it's not a bad thing.
> More and more designs target smartphone displays, which used to be very small and require big targets to ensure they could be mashed with normal human fingers. However, this gets reused on tablets, modern gigantic smartphones, and even desktop, where none of this makes sense.
It does make sense on the gigantic smartphones and tablets. The size of the viewport doesn't matter. The size and the precision of the pointer device does - and my finger didn't shrink.
> Clickable items often have simplified, highly abstracted icons with thin-line monochrome content, frequently implemented as fonts, which is less distracting from the visuals of the design but is also hard to understand what it's supposed to represent.
Here's a screenshot of LibreOffice Calc with a classic skeuomorphic icon set: https://i.imgur.com/TO7mHEg.png Let's ignore the poor contrast caused by the dark background for now. Can you tell me which icon is responsible for Search?
It should be the one between the printer and the scissors - it has a magnifying glass after all. Turns out, it's Toggle Print Review. Search is actually in the middle of the row between Redo and Spelling, labeled as Find and Replace. It looks more like a microphone to me.
> Less modality. Many modern designs will have modal interface elements that prevent access to the rest of the user interface until interacted with and/or dismissed.
There's a time and place for this, especially if it's something important. For example Exit Without Saving confirmation modal in BIOS, which is several decades old.
I agree with your other points. Chat apps are getting worse. Discord has even shrunk the text area where you type your message.
As for the size of clickable items, I consistently see interface elements that span the full width of the screen (except some padding) on modern giant-screen smartphones and tablets. It seems the screens grow and the UI elements grow with them, rather than remaining fingertip-sized. And of course none of this has any place on desktop, but it gets reused there anyway.
I guess it's easier to design once and ship everywhere. Although with tools like Tailwind there's no excuse to ignore different viewports these days.
There's also a related problem with text stretching the entire window, like on the Wikipedia.
Just give me a big button with a goddamn gear icon every time.
Lately I'm a big fan of omni-search bars that search not only across the files, but also options and menus. Like the one in Sublime Text on Jetbrains products.
> This is basic human-computer interaction design stuff, but somehow it's all gotten lost.
Indeed, probably because people who design the interfaces no longer care about carefully studying human-computer interaction, or apply the knowledge of decades of research in this area.
I just can’t comprehend why anyone thinks it’s a good idea to imply an area is a button and then not make it act like a button. It’s not even like they don’t have multiple ways to make whatever element they use to contain/apply the colour clickable, it’s just bad design!
I agree with most of what people have written, but I think the two biggest gaps are:
First, understanding the target users and their goals, tasks, skills, context of use, performance, etc. When interviewing designers I'm regularly surprised how many of them have been working in the field for years and have a beautiful portfolio and yet when I drill into their process they seem to have spent surprisingly little effort understanding of the human on one side of the interaction.
Second, usability tests with a representative sample of the target audience. (Along with an organization that has the humility to accept when a redesign is unsuccessful.) If you do nothing else, do this. Even the best design groups I've worked with produced nearly the same number of beautiful-but-bad designs as the worst ones. The difference was that the former had the humility to accept that the design missed the mark and continued to iterate whereas the latter was often willing to ship anyway due to misplaced confidence, strict deadlines, or a CEO with a Steve Jobs complex.
With respect to things like whitespace, information density, hit-target/button size, modals, adherence to platform standards, up-front complexity vs hidden actions, icons vs words, customizability, etc those can be good or bad depending on user and context. The real problem occurs when a designer attempts to substitute their own gut instinct to compensate for a lack of understanding of their target audience. The mantra often repeated at the design program where I worked was: "The user is not like me."
Having said that, the shift in favor of visual/aesthetic designers does seem to be somewhat recent. My impression is that companies scrambled to hire interface designers when good interfaces became a selling point for consumers, which led to a lot of graphic/print/visual/web designers switching over to UX, and some of those designers never got around to learning about the rest of UX. Whatever the reason, there simply seem to be more designers these days who operate as if the most important aspect of a design is how it looks.
Examples in different categories as I don't use Nextcloud:
Do Firefox designers for Android use Firefox on their phones as their only browser or they use Chrome and don't understand how their new UX added too many extra taps and/or complications?
On the other side, the designer of new K9 is the original developer and I'm pretty sure he uses K9 daily. I and many other people just happen to use the app in a very different way than him and many others. The new app optimizes one workflow and inadvertently destroys the other. At least I understand that even if I had to go back to the old version (no security bugs there at least.)
Also, the complains about how design and UIs are getting worse, remind me a lot of the "the youth of today" complaints that can be dated back to Plato. There was plenty of absolutely horrendous UIs around at every time. Also, just because it looks good, doesn't make it bad UI (plenty of people seem to judge like that).
That's another thing, material design interfaces are also ugly as sin x)
>This applies to 95% of all modern software. Optimise UI for looking (subjectively) pretty in screenshots.
Hard to blame them - most people make the decision to evaluate/not evaluate software based purely on how it looks.
I wrote an interactive GUI app in Lazarus that had almost instant (less than 20ms) responses to any user action (click, enter, typing, chart-rendering, etc). My manager complained that it looked dated and asked why a WebApp couldn't be done instead :-/