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Comment by spaetzleesser | Hacker News Reader

When I look at this I think how these old UIs like MacOS, windows 95 or 2000 were designed for clarity and usability. And how things have gone downhill since then. I really miss easily distinguishable UI elements.

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I'm of two minds.

The Mac famously had User Interface Guidelines that tried to keep everything consistent. I loved it and, like you, miss it.

But then designers came along and we got drawers (and then we lost the drawers), editable toolbars, brushed metal (and then not), etc...

The point at which I called bullshit was when Safari combined the URL text field with the loading progress bar. I disagreed with the design and said so — it looked to me like the URL was being text-selected as the page loaded. (Ah well, it appears to be gone now anyway.)

But I digress. I had begun to consider that users are now more comfortable with inconsistent UI with the ubiquity of the Web. That has perhaps freed designers to try random stuff on a per-app basis and not adhere so religiously to User Interface Guidelines.

But, yeah, it made life easier for developers too.

Interestingly, that the progress bar/URL field combo was co-invented by Steve Jobs: See https://donmelton.com/2014/04/10/memories-of-steve/

> The Mac famously had User Interface Guidelines that tried to keep everything consistent. I loved it and, like you, miss it.

> But then designers came along

I mean, the Guidelines were written by designers. I don't have a problem with designers; I don't care for the Mac design, but at least it was consistent. But I don't think there's an OS with guidelines anymore; at least not any OS where 95%+ of what ships with the OS follows the guidelines (never mind what else the OS developer ships or 3rd party software). </rant>

before the OS vendors started ignoring their human interface guidelines, we had Kai's Power Tools, which some people loved--but I hated. I dont know if that was the beginning of custom UIs for every applications, or if it was just an outlier.

I'm happy for people to try things, but please at least draw outlines around / highlights on the actionable UI elements. We're at a point now so far into flat UI extremism that opening a new application is like a giant guessing game to find out which parts of the UI you can click on and what they do.

(Even the HN page I am staring at right now has styled all the links to an indistinguisable gray / black that looks totally inactive.)

I was just on a website - can't remember which - that said something along the lines of "to learn more, visit the documentation." I wasted a few minutes trying to find the documentation before realizing that the words "the documentation" were in fact a clickable link in the same color and font as the rest of the text, which you could only discover by hovering over those particular words.

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