Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> “No designer is given promotion for sticking to conventional designs. It's their creative & clever designs that get them attention and career incentives.”

This is a massive change from my first software industry job in 1997.

I was essentially a “design intern who knows HTML” on a team that built a shrinkwrap Windows application for enterprises. The core of the design team was a graphic designer, a cognitive scientist, an industrial designer, and a product manager with industry experience in the customer domain.

The application was Windows native. User research was conducted on site with scientific rigor. Adhering to platform guidelines and conventions was a priority. I think I spent a few weeks redrawing hundreds of toolbar icons so they’d be in line with the Office 97 look (the kind of boring job you give to the junior). If the app stood out on the Windows desktop, that would have been considered problematic.

Today a similar design team would only have a graphic designer and a PM, and neither of them would care the slightest about platform guidelines or customer domain. The UI is primarily an extension of the corporate brand. Hiring a cognitive scientist? Forget about it…

Everything certainly wasn’t perfect in the Windows/Mac desktop golden era. But the rise of the web wiped out a lot of good industry practices too.

Remember times where you could change the theme and all of the apps followed suit ?

Even in Linux there were tools to sync gnome with QT look so you could have one theme applied to every app for nice and consistent look, all the way to how the common icons look.

Nowadays ? Every fucking app gotta have their own different styling. Will the setting icon be three dots, gear, or honey badger ? WHO FUCKING KNOWS. You'd be lucky if you even get a choice between light and dark theme

But hey, we can write same code to work on windows, mac and mobile ! It will work shit in all of them and be slow but we don't care!

> Will the setting icon be three dots?

Multiple hamburger menus with a scattering of cryptic icons stuck at arbitrary places on the screen. What does the swirly icon with up arrow do? No text label for you!

Oh and let's move the next button to the top left of the screen and not highlight it. Mmmm that's some good UI design.

Might be a coincidence, but that's a weirdly accurate description of MS Teams.

Not mentioning about the wording (at least in spanish) is awful too.

I remember that theory. I also remember the reality that if you changed your background colour to anything but white, some app, somewhere, was going to become an unreadable black text on black background mess.

> Nowadays ? Every fucking app gotta have their own different styling.

This has more to do with the current state of GUI frameworks than with developer mindset. Microsoft is between GUI frameworks and rumoured to have deprecated everything between win32 and WPF, and in the meantime they are pushing React Native. Apple doesn't seem to know what to do with desktop environments and is stuck between their legacy objective C frameworks which they seem to purposely hide any form of documentation and swift-based frameworks which are broken out of the box. Linux has a couple of options which are ugly as sin since ever. There's Qt, but their licensing scares away anyone with two brain cells to rub together.

So where are we left?

Well, with webview-based frameworks, which is the worst of both worlds but at least they don't look half bad.

Except that webview-based frameworks are a far lower-level abstraction than any native widget-based framework. Developers are forced to reinvent the wheel, and this means dropping any standard look-and-feel because that's already ugly to start with but takes even more work to get into a working state.

And all you want to do is to provide a GUI for users to click around.

And it got worse with client side decorations. Now even window interactions are app-specific and don't adhere to global settings.

> Even in Linux there were tools to sync gnome with QT look

There are still such tools, you don't have to use the past tense here.

Even better, every app is doing their own styling so they can all look like Discord

Is it just me or there are others who find discords handling of threads terrible?! I mean Slack is far from my favourite but at least they treat a thread like a thread where I can see the entire conversation in one place instead of visually parsing questions and replies while frantically scrolling up and down.

Discord and Teams both have terrible UX. Discord has the look and feel of a poorly designed game and Teams can't even get highlight and focus right.

Threads in Discord appear in the sidebar usually. Are you thinking of replies?

I was thinking more like seeing all the replies to a comment as a thread without the explicit "create thread" which mostly people don't. E.g. I right-click on a comment that has replies and I see the root comment along with the replies in the sidebar.

Oh man I totally forgot about that. Thank you for the reminder.

Total flashbacks to windows 95 and every so often changing the windows color, text font etc. for the entire system

Good times

A lot of native apps on iOS still at least follow the light/dark theme and global font sizes. But I’m not sure if that works by default with Flutter or React Native etc. or if they’d have to implement it explicitly.

> Every fucking app gotta have their own different styling

Have you considered that the average user never cared and never will?

Having ultra consistent styling across all apps ruins the ability to... you know... sell the software. It gives far too much power to some group of annoying elitist nerds in denial of their opinions preaching UI/UX pseudoscience.

> But hey, we can write same code to work on windows, mac and mobile ! It will work shit in all of them and be slow but we don't care!

Ain't nobody got time for reading even shittier documentation for badly written OS APIs.

From a person who started using computers from the early 2000s era:

THANK YOU!

None of the current SaaS apps I use can come close to the experience of using softwares from that era.

Take a simple list view of a typical Windows/Mac software?

1. Command clicking selected multiple objects

2. Shift clicking selected a range.

3. Right clicking brought up selection actions.

4. Double clicking opened an object.

This pattern was followed in almost list views and there was no re-learning and surprises.

Now can you say the same about the list views of modern web apps?

Can you apply the same list selection experience across Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive and Apple iCloud? Nope.

That's were we failed as an industry. We let a lot of designers run too wild with their ideas, to put it bluntly.

The problem isn't really with designers per se (tho they played a role). The problem is with the web as an application delivery platform - it was never designed for this.

Windows, or MacOS, both have design guidelines that was produced, and they expected native apps to follow. Most native apps do (the few that doesn't have either good reason, or were unique enough that their customers don't care - think photoshop).

With the advent of the web, such a guideline for software no longer mattered, because the controls and UI elements are all custom - since html is not an application GUI library!

So every man and their dog has a different UX and UI interaction built for their own app, because the web encourages it. The designers are also at fault for not standardizing on a set of common UI widgets, but i cannot blame them as this isn't the easiest path.

> design guidelines that was produced, and they expected native apps to follow.

It almost sounds old-fashioned in 2023 to talk about usability, affordance, and user-experience.

Part of being a native application was/is for the application to look and behave like the rest of the user interface. Standards are important because learning how to use a tool is important. Users are important.

Software has become a way to make users miserable. Oh, and while confusing them, throw some advertising at them too. ^_^

And everything had a keybind so if you worked in software every day you could be as fast as cli nerds.

Absolutely...closing a popup with 'esc'? Naah, wasn't requested so tha message stays up

And not even be slowed down by animations.

I read "even" as "ever" - still made complete sense.

Animations may seem fine and fun the first time you encounter one, but when you think you'll have to suffer through it every time an action is taken, it becomes a whole different story.

Also:

CTRL+A selects all

CTRL+Shift+End selects all from where you are to the end

CTRL+Shift+Home selects all from where you are to the top

One of the (many) problems of web UIs is they often ignore the keyboard completely.

Or as is increasingly the case: they actively hijack what should be system-wide keybindings - making it even worse.

>CTRL+Shift+End selects all from where you are to the end

>CTRL+Shift+Home selects all from where you are to the top

Those two don't need CTRL, just so you know.

>One of the (many) problems of web UIs is they often ignore the keyboard completely.

They are also starting to ignore the mouse.

> Those two don't need CTRL, just so you know

Well, yes they do, only it's different with and without CTRL. For example in a text editor (or a normal webpage without any fancy JS):

- Shift+End goes to the end of the line

- CTRL+Shift+End goes to the end of the document

and the same is true for Home (substitute "end" with "beginning").

I have seen people, even "technical" people, select a text with the mouse from the middle of a large Word document to the end, because they didn't know this.

They also had to do it often (several times a day) and it had become a significant part of their workload...

Emacs would like to have a word.

Emacs is a text ecosystem. And it's trivial to add these shortcuts. Evil[0] basically rewires everything to be Vim.

[0]: https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil

It is a desktop application that doesn't adhere to the user experience guidelines of the OS it runs on. I'm an emacs user and fan.

I can’t help but feel that Agile is at least partly to blame for this. Things like you are describing usually don’t come under the “minimum viable product” purview and thus get pushed out indefinitely until the product is at the “very mature” stage. At that point there’s the risk that the product will be re-written and the cycle reset again.

Nah. If anything a lot of these trends are directly anti-agile, e.g. avoiding labels and using icons so that it's easier to translate your app, even though the icons take longer initially and you're never actually going to translate your app.

I’m not really arguing that. I’m saying there is a trade-off between having the common OS feature set described above (Ctrl/Cmd-select, etc) and implementing/iterating a web/mobile product quickly. Often standard UI paradigms are never implemented or implemented inconsistently. AWS, widely known for their Agile practices, might be the epitome of this with their web console. Sometimes I can sort columns by clicking on them, sometimes I can’t. Some products allow shift or control click and some do not. Etc etc. I can only assume the product teams are doing their best within their constraints but as an end user it’s a piece of suck.

The problem with the controls is mostly because they don't want to pay for Qt (multiplatform toolkit), so instead every company (badly) implements their own controls in HTML to save money. I suspect ultimately they waste much more money than they save.

Qt isn't even in the radar of most companies currently building multi-platform applications in HTML. And it won't be soon, for two main reasons: developers able to use it are expensive, and most Qt applications in the wild still have the "uncanny valley" look and feel about them on every OS but Linux.

Not to mention that with SaaS being more profitable than selling unlimited-use licenses, a lot of apps also have HTTP backends and webapp versions, which can share a lot of HTML/CSS/JS code with a browser-based desktop version. Think of Slack/Discord/VSCode/etc. Sure: Qt, Flutter, etc also have web versions, but they just don't look/feel as good in the browser as an HTML app normally can.

If you want a "Premium" native look and feel, people gotta go directly to the source: native APIs. Qt won't do it without a lot of work. Lots of companies have separate Android and iOS teams. Or they go directly to HTML when there's not enough cash (or even things like Flutter, which look ok in mobile). High-quality macOS apps, like those made by Panic, Rogue Amoeba, etc, use Cocoa directly.

Standardized controls and shortcuts unfortunately end up being collateral damage in all of this.

All this sounds great from the perspective of retail shrink wrap software. Today, the major use cases for Qt on the desktop are in-house corporate software. And, no one cares about "uncanny valley". Only HN and online nerds care about that stuff. Average, non-technical, corporate users care about functions, not form. Hell, they are happy with a VBA app! Also, lots of in-car and in-seat (aeroplane) entertainment systems are built in Qt.

    If you want a "Premium" native look and feel

Who is doing this in 2023? No one outside my examples above.

There's a reason in-house corporate software started becoming web based 15-or-so years ago: web is cheaper, easier to hire for, faster to develop and deploy, doesn't require installation or updates, easier to troubleshoot, doesn't need special pipes for communicating with the server (yeah I remember the days of DCOM, CORBA, WCF and other weird protocols instead of HTTP).

It is things like Qt that only HN and online nerds care about.

Don't get me wrong: I really like well made native apps and I think they're great. But Qt apps are almost never as great as software made with native toolkits directly.

No, long term, web apps are more expensive because the front end needs to be completely re-written ever few years. A desktop app written in Qt can be kept running for a decade with very little work. (This assumes no Qt library upgrades, which for in-house apps, are most unnecessary.)

The primary advantage of web apps is "zero install", which is a major point of friction at large corps.

> ...needs to be completely re-written ever few years.

No it doesn't, the HTML spec hasn't changed, whereas QT has. The issue is how the webapps were built in the first place. You don't need Nextjs and all it's friends to post a form to a backend once an hour but somehow that is becoming the standard approach...

“because the front end needs to be completely re-written ever few years”

Citation needed. I’m currently working in a jQuery+Coffeescript app that still works like a charm.

Like the sibling post says, Qt itself had breaking changes that HTML/JS/CSS didn’t.

> Who is doing this in 2023? No one outside my examples above.

For macOS check apps made by Apple (Logic, Final Cut), Panic, Rogue Amoeba, or apps like Pixelmator, Affinity, Pixelmator, TablePlus, Tower, Dash... there's more.

There's even open source ones like IINA providing a premium look+feel.

> If you want a "Premium" native look and feel, people gotta go directly to the source: native APIs.

I've seen this regurgitated a hundred times, but I don't really know any more what that "native look and feel" is. On Windows, it might be the old Windows 95 controls, but those are quite limited. What system today is made of dropdowns, checkboxes and OK buttons?

Well, yeah. Windows is... special. Even Microsoft stopped using the normal controls. But the problem is that Qt looks like an uncanny valley version of those Windows 95-style apps.

But by Premium I'm talking more about macOS, iOS and Android.

For macOS check apps made by Apple, Panic, Rogue Amoeba, or apps like Pixelmator, Affinity, Pixelmator, TablePlus, FantastiCal, Tower, Dash. Or even "non flashy" apps like Pacifist.

Those all use Cocoa and have a bit more of a slick appearance, even though they're mostly using native controls, with very few special parts here and there.

According to Microsoft, native look and feel includes tiny tiny dialog boxes with even smaller panes inside that can't be resized, so yeah, not going to bother with that

Qt has uncanney valley... do you think people using HTML care to make things look native then?

No. Why would they? The reason HTML apps don’t suffer from the uncanny valley problem is because they don’t try to look native at all, it's just something totally different.

When they suck it's not because it looks "almost but not quite there".

But there are exceptions: when Cordova/Ionic tries to imitate the look of iOS/Android's native controls. Then we have an uncanny valley problem.

> None of the current SaaS apps I use can come close to the experience of using softwares from that era.

I'm afraid you're looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses. In general software back then sucked hard. User experience did not existed at all. Developers bundled stuff around, and users were expected to learn how to use software. Books were sold to guide desperate users through simple user flows. Forms forms forms forms everywhere, and they all sucked, no exception. Forget about localization or internationalization. Forget about accessibility. Developers tweaked fonts to be smaller to shove more controls into the same screen real estate, and you either picked up a magnifying glass to read what they said or you just risked it and clicked on it anyway.

Software back then sucked, and sucked hard. Atrocities like Gimp were sold as usability champions. That's how bad things were.

Those four actions worked for me on the Google Drive web interface

Great! Now try it in any other list view in any other app.

Maybe the list of docs in https://docs.google.com?

On my phone so it's hard to check, but Gmail's ctrl and shift clicks work really well and is intuitive to me. I'm shocked they wouldn't use the same mechanics everywhere.

Best example: Gmail is one of the only webapps I'll ctrl click a few items at the top of the list, ctrl click a few in the middle, and then shift click to the bottom and it works exactly how I'd expect - everything stays selected and the shift+click selects from your previous click to the next item. I think it gets wonky if you change directions but I can't imagine how I'd expect ctrl+click item 1, 2, 9, 10, then shift click on 4 would work.

For myself, I'd expect the items between 4 and 10 to be added to the selection: everything but 3 would be selected.

Having just checked, this is indeed what the file explorer on my desktop does, and I'm pretty sure windows file explorer does the same.

Today they might have a psychologist on the team to research which buttons may serve as dopamine triggers so you're a lot more likely to upgrade to Premium before thinking it over

Right. Making people click on things they didn’t mean to and buy things they didn’t want — those goals were not even a part of the 1990s UI paradigm.

1990s design was all about preventing people from accidentally doing actions they might not have wanted to. Even down to the “Are you sure you want to quit” dialogues that were all the rage.

It’s sad just where we are now compared to the design goals of old.

There's been a large influx of people chasing dollars and status, they could not care less about the product or who uses it. You can still find orgs that do care, but they're swiftly pushed out by the VC-funded "growth at any cost" model or are acquired into oblivion.

The indie scene is looking excellent however, a lot of programmers who have already made their money seem to be pushing excellent hobby projects out.

There is a fundamental difference between working on software products vs bespoke software development:

In the former you make money from selling the result, in the latter you make money from selling the hours spent creating the thing.

If the former is unusable it will lead to bad sales. In the latter it might even lead to additional hours sold in change requests.

The former is bought often after evaluation and comparison by the user of the software. The latter is sold to an executive that will never have to use the software as a project.

Microsoft basically used to do this too. We can see that they clearly don't anymore.

I have another theory: it's all about the screen size. When you had only 320x240—1014x768, you simply MUST have thought about UX (in the sense of "How can I fit all this info in this little space?"

Now you don't have to. So no one does.

This is true in a sense, but we now have a different restriction, called a mobile view.

That sounds expensive AF though. Was that really necessary?

I’m all for craftsmanship, but having four top guys fiddling with design.. it all depends on the domain I guess.

Considering most of us here are ready to murder a few designers for wasting so much of our time now?

Yes, absolutely necessary cost.

Uh ... plenty of companies have a UX team. They're mostly all graphic designers. "four guys fiddling with design" is nothing. Either you care about having a well-designed UI or you just want a pretty one with a high conversion rate, and who you hire reflects what you really value.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com