The Death of Personality (2017)
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The Cardhop icon (packed with “personality”) praised at the end of the blog post now looks like this: https://flexibits.com/img/new-fantastical/logo/product/cardh...
it's kind of blowing my mind.
In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.
-Hendry Wadsworth
More to the point, HN achieves simplity without going to an extreme where the user experience is negatively affected.
In my newspaper days we stuck to around 60 characters as an optimal line length for readability. I've seen up to 80, but even that seems to be pushing it. Once you stretch out the lines so much it's hard to track back and forth from the end of one line to the beginning of the next line.
I'm reading the parent, top-level comment on a Macbook Air with a 13 inch screen and the first line is a whopping 194 characters long. Reading anything of length on this screen is decidedly uncomfortable when browsing HN.
I agree that simplicity is a noble and useful goal, but when it comes at the expense of usability it's hard to swallow.
Such a cool-sounding job! Any fun stories to share from those days?
> Reading anything of length on this screen is decidedly uncomfortable when browsing HN.
Agreed. I always browse HN in a window that's half the width of my monitor.
There is something nice about the ultra-simplistic CSS that goes as wide as your window, though. Then, the user can just resize their window to find the sweet spot for themselves. The sites that force a fixed width for reading on everyone really miss the point, I think.
I have yet to experience anything even remotely close to the buzzing productivity of a newsroom minutes before the press deadline. Election nights were always fun because all the information was coming in later so we had to scramble. Obviously we knew about the time constraints beforehand so we could plan for it to the best of our ability, which of course usually fell to the curse of best laid plans.
I’m nostalgic for slower paced information flow and newspapers remain a near-perfect example.
But if I want to widen a fixed-with design, I can't.
So yeah, I'm with Wikipedia.
I just tried and Firefox' reader mode automatically limits the width, though unfortunately that's not made for interactive use. I guess it might be a good idea for a browser plugin (if it doesn't already exist), similar to the ones forcing dark color themes on websites using CSS.
...resize your browser window? The text is as wide as you want it to be.
On the other hand, I absolutely hate it when I want wider or narrower lines, and resizing the window either causes useless whitespace or a scrollbar to appear.
I have lots of tabs open, and every other site I use chooses a legible width.
You think I'm going to resize my browser window narrower every time I switch to HN, and resize it wider every time I switch to a different tab?
Sites are designed. Legibility is part of design. Appropriate characters per line is part of legibility. Full stop.
Not disagreeing with your premise BTW.
Or you could just put it in a separate window of the desired width; maybe then you'd even have enough space on your huge monitor to see several sites all at once!
As I wrote the post above, I had about a dozen different windows open, all of varying sizes. Monitors have gotten much bigger, yet the users seem to have gotten worse at making good use of that space.
(Nor do I have a huge monitor, I'm on a laptop...)
I think it's fair to add that links/menu items/buttons are generally too small and close to each other on touch devices.
All links and buttons are freakishly small.
I approve!
The premature optimization here, is not trying skeumorphism again, because of a feeling.
There were some real losses though. The tension between flat & unobtrusive vs flat and indistinct becomes a usability issue. Clear separation of elements & sufficient contrast can be lost.
In some ways, it should be more a question of what the user wants. Apps used to sometimes have multiple skins, winamp being an over the top notable one, but I believe IM programs like trillian did too. The old gtk2 themes on linux allowed users far more flexibility in picking what kind of an experiemce they wanted, what level of contrast they wanted, what the look & feel.would be like. The alow march towards everyone being beholden to crazy crafty designed UI's we were force fed is, imo, part of what drove the counter-push towards flat; users lost control, it was way too overloading an experience, and flat became the more neutral acceptable dictated/company-driven style.
This does have an upside. Sort of. People are more accepting of dark patterns, as when you have to mouse over the ad before the "x" to make it go away appears. In a different place each time, for the worst cases.
Im at the point that if something gets annoying I simply drop off. If ads for example become unavoidable Id stop consuming, %99 is utter waste of time anyway. End of rant
My brain basically chooses icons by color content, so when everything is a primary color picker, I err frequently.
If you're drawing shapes, why the fuck do you intentionally break them? Shape-breaking is the exact thing animal and military camouflage do to make animals and humans less recognizable in the environment. And Google applies it to something they want to be spottable.
@mcclure111 used a colorblind filter on them and they look better, as expected, because the shapes get broken less.
Google basically failed Design 101.
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Linguists already understood a long, long time ago that redundancy is not a bug, it's a feature; it's what allows you to decode a message even if you don't get it fully.
I feel like interface designers should’ve understood the same already. Sleep-deprived, with poor sight, not tech-savvy enough to get it right, using a non-native language because the native one is not supported, interacting with the program while taking care of a kid, there are a thousand (no, a million) ways that users can miss small tidbits of info conveyed by the design, so that redundancy is essential.
Yet they didn’t. On the opposite, the current design trends boil down to redundant → removable → should be removed. Also known as “minimalism”.
You end with icons that look the same, not quite sure if something is clickable or not, those ugly switches that assume (why is there always some assumer behind poor decisions?) that you're aware of the "right = on, left = off" (or that on/off makes sense in that context), so goes on.
And it’s kind of funny. If you actually point this out, plenty designers (or other laymen, like me, except that they agree with the design decisions being pointed out) will be quick to spit the same fallacy: “it’s new so it’s better, as an assumer I assume that you live in the past”… yeah, nah.
This may or may not be related to the fact that I still use MATE, instead of GNOME 3 or similar.
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[Non-copypasted] Someone mentioned HN’s interface. It's the exception that proves the rule because, when you actually analyse it, it has all tidbits of redundancy here and there; such as the "next", "upvote", "collapse" and "reply" buttons appearing for all comments. A minimalist designer would've removed them all, and made the content of the comments clickable.
Remember the much-derided Corinthian leather of the OS X address book, inspired by his personal Gulfstream? He loved that visual approach.
iOS 7 was sold as bringing the software more in line with the minimal hardware design philosophy. But it was really a response to industry trends.
I want it to be simple, to get out of my way and do what it is supposed to do. I feel like the world and particularly tech products are overwhelmingly noisy.
I yearn for everything to be more simple. Less notifications, less ads, lets annoyance. Don't take over or interrupt my life, enhance it with functionality then get out of the way. I don't want it to have a 'personality'
Then i try to protect the environment i created from the damage the original creators can do. Take a snapshot, kick the VMs Network driver if needs be. If something has annoying sound adds, i rather rip the sounddriver out of my phone then let it play loud - even in the background. Nobody is taking my attention hostage, i learned programming to turn my devices into servants of myself. Any coup by others will be meet with brutal punishment, and if it annoys me enough, that punishment will be available to others as a crack.
On my ideal workstation, your GUI designers starve and your bloat programmers hunger.
To think that today's style finally achieved some objective progress about engagement and exhaustion is just post hoc speculation.
Minimal design is itself getting exhausting, and there are a number of styles that are coming in to challenge it, including intentionally garish designs that nostalgically call back to the Myspace/Geocities aesthetic that many young designers are fascinated by.
Simpler UI, gratuitous complexity beneath.
An example I bumped into just this week: https://www.artbreeder.com/
P.S. "visual design doesn’t involve UX design" is not a common designer belief. "UI !== UX" (the reference I'm assuming they're making) means something else entirely.
read this article with this lovely music playing.
I prefer 'modern' except for the fact that there's a lack of borders and groupings, and designers try to get too smart.