JetBrains – Addressing the New UI Comments | Hacker News Reader

JetBrains – Addressing the New UI Comments

blog.jetbrains.com

Here's a blog post where they have a screenshot of the new UI [1]. The biggest thing that always annoys me with UI redesigns is when something with a good label gets replaced with a flat icon and whitespace.

For example, what was wrong with the vertical labels on the left (Project, etc.)? How is an icon and extra whitespace better for my productivity? I want to see what the ellipses on the left are hiding. If it's a menu with a couple items that could have simply been put in the newly created vertical whitespace, I'd like to know what the reasoning is for that. It's not like I'm using their apps on my phone, right?

Sometimes I feel like all I've got is a hamburger menu and 2 feet of (horizontal) whitespace. What an awful trend. I also prefer colored icons. Distinct colors help me remember and I can find things more quickly.

1. https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2022/05/take-part-in-the-new...

I really prefer the new look. I don't need or want labels in my field of view all day for buttons that I learned the purposes of years ago. If there's a new icon I don't understand, I can simply hover over it for a second.

I tend to rely on keyboard shortcuts and fall back to Search Everywhere (double shift), so the first thing I do on a new install is hide the menu bar.

I find the extra bit of whitespace helps with less travel and accuracy when switching to mouse.

The new UI has been a net positive in my personal experience.

Wow, that looks terrible! Thanks for sharing the preview. I really dislike vertical UI elements, and these are much worse than they were before- almost entirely EMPTY. These new vertical ribbons are at least twice as large as the old ones, eating up valuable screen real estate and managing to be less usable and discoverable in the process. I really hope they U-turn on that!

Thanks. Was not aware of the preview. Going by the single screenshot, I could have sworn it’s vscode! Not sure how I feel about it (after all it’s just a tool but sheesh some visual differentiation would be nice).

> Before announcing the preview program, we ran an extensive dogfooding program inside JetBrains as well as usability tests with external users. Overall, we got a very positive reception, and the initial feedback from the private preview program matches that.

Well, apparently their dogfooding and usability tests with external users were not that excessive if they already feel the need to address the users comments, now do they?

There was probably massive selection bias going on. That is, the people who volunteer for internal dogfooding programs or external usability tests tend to be the type of people who like the design changes that have been happening across the industry (eg. more whitespace, greyscale icons, adding round corners). Meanwhile, the people who liked their UI as it is and don't want the changes are probably not going to volunteer for beta programs that they know are going to contain changes they don't ilke.

No amount of dogfooding and usability testing will ever be good enough to keep everyone from commenting on something. At some point you need to ship, and it isn’t like a 100% solution will exist in the first place.

That's the thing, you don't need to ship. There's always the possibility you've built the wrong thing.

They changed the UI to get younger people.

Yeah, do they realize people in college like me don't use jet brains because it's not free. I'm only using vscode bc its FREE.I actually don't care for the default ui.

It actually is free, but that doesn’t seem to be widely known. When I have a new Mac to set up I just do `brew install --cask intellij-idea-ce` along with my other dev tools. If you want to find a download link make sure to add “community edition” to find the free version.

It’s free for the time you are in college, if they give you an email address. jetbrains.com/community/education/#students

It looks fine. Some people just complain about change because they hate change.

I for one welcome it and far prefer modern software design to old paradigms.

Doesn’t look too bad to me, but my opinion may be biased since nearly the entirety of my use of IntelliJ has been through Android Studio. There I use very few of the on-screen buttons, and even many of the ones I do use are keybound, which makes most of the buttons unnecessary visual noise.

I don’t really like the VS Code style vertical bar on the left but the rest seems fine.

Glad I picked up Neovim last year (can afford to make light edits and don’t need a full-blown IDE). No one will be changing my interface anytime soon :)

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