The Decline of the User Interface

This isn't addressing the main issue I have with modern UI

Back in the era of Windows 98, buttons were beveled; one corner was light as if the sun was pointing at it, and the opposite corner was dark, and it made it look like the button was sticking out of the screen. When you clicked on it, the bevels got mirrored as if it was now sticking into the screen.

This showed "I am a button, and you pushed me". But most importantly, it became the universal language for "I am clickable", and you didn't need to hover over it, or click on it, to know that it was clickable.

The same bevel was then used for everything. The scroll bar, the resizable borders, and so on and so forth. If you could click it, it looked clickable

This got dropped progressively in favor of cooler looking UIs, but what we lost in the process is that now, the UI expects the user to have integrated some baseline of "software logic" (I'm trying to think of a software equivalent of "video game logic")

Now to know that something on your screen is clickable, you rely on hovering.

So the result now is that it got even harder to onboard who are new to technology. Most often old people.

They don't even have a legacy "windows 98" theme on Windows 10 & 11 anymore

Even worse is the web, most of the web stopped making links react to hovering, links are not necessarily colored blue or underlined anymore, nothing is unified

How would the web feel if you were the kind of person who didn't instinctively know that clicking on your avatar is supposed to bring you to your user's profile?

The web isn't built for you anymore, the expectations for the user are higher

I think despite the fact that "UX" entered the picture a long time ago now, most people who are "UI/UX Designers" still focus heavily on how things look and have a much lower understanding of how things work and feel to use

I also suspect that universities are still mostly teaching design as if it is something printed in a magazine and not rendered in a browser

Designers I have worked with have shown a lack of understanding of the basic HTML input components, failing to understand what the difference is between a radio button and a checkbox for instance.

But there's a lot more than that. They build designs without considering scrollbars, or without considering paginating large datasets. They don't plan for asynchronous operations that may not return immediately. Yes these are more technical concerns but they do impact the design! Designers should be asking questions about how long an operation they are building mockups for might take and planning accordingly

But it's even worse than that. They want everything to neatly fit on a single screen, but they don't really understand display sizes and aspect ratios. This means they don't build (or really understand) responsive layouts. Very common to hear "this spacing looks off on my screen", as if it were designed for a consistent page size (print media)

I don't know. Maybe I've just had pretty bad luck with designers. I'll admit most of the ones I've had trouble with are fairly fresh out of university, so it could just be a lack of real world experience. But some of the stuff just really gives me the impression they weren't taught to design for web or digital displays at all

It seems we are suffering as a "profession" from serious cognitive dissonance as we preach the importance of accessibility and function over form, but design for aesthetics and follow trends in style.

If I had to estimate I would say about 70% of the apps on my phone don't have button outlines or menus, have no contrast, abuse jargon and worst of all don't respect my decisions. Except ofcourse, in the basket and the checkout pages. But boy do they look pretty.

I try to remember how the general demise of OK/ cancel buttons came about. There was a time when almost all of the more complex tools in an application would use modal dialog boxes without an ability to preview the result before the user clicked OK. This was rightfully deemed inadequate and eventually tbe "modeless" side panel was invented, and its lesser sibling, the "apply" button. This gave users more tools that allowed instant previews. And these were mostly good changes.

But somehow the idea of modeless UI spread into all parts of UIs, including settings dialogs, where it sometimes doesn't feel appropriate at all. Why did that happen? Why is there no consistent pattern anymore for discarding unwanted changes in a dialog?

This should be retitled as "I'm getting annoyed with the Microsoft/Windows UI."

Two of the three complaints are about Windows specifically (resizing windows and lack of application titlebar info). The 3rd appears to be an issue the author has with the theme they have applied in VSCode, which doesn't seem to match the theme shown on the VSCode homepage, which clearly shows which tab is active.

There's no look at macro trends nor software outside of the MS ecosystem.

The author is not wrong, but swimming in the shallows.

It's a very old problem that goes back more decades than are accounted for here. To their credit, at least when the joint venture between IBM and Microsoft happened around OS/2, CUA still set a broad standard that was widely met and meant that many of these problems were rare, or at least the keyboard was guaranteed to work consistently. Apple does not deserve the free pass it gets here.

Why? Because design choices are not governed by designers. Rather, they are governed by cost and time-to-market, much like car interiors, and chosen from a shared parts bin.

Depending on the ISV this means that the GUI or widget toolkit may be Microsoft.net, Java, Qt, or 30 years of other toolkits recombined poorly ad nauseam.

Frequently, this means the evil of two lessers since there are no clear winners. Users will continue to suffer as a result.

I try to solve this with Sway on Linux, but the further into left field I go, the screaming just gets louder, not quieter.

> It’s actually Microsoft Edge. How would I know this by looking at the application? There isn’t any way to do it, as far as I can tell. You have to go somewhere else to know what app you are looking at. Grrr.

I have absolutely no idea why the author thinks it's important to see which browser you're looking at, at all time. It's a waste of screen space.

> We need to bring back the Ok and Cancel buttons.

As long as we never use the words "Ok" and "Cancel"

"Save Settings" and "Keep Current Settings" for his example please

I lament the death of always-visible, easily-grabbed scrollbars. Every scrollbar is transparent, disappearing, tiny, and exceedingly difficult to grab. Why? I guess UI designers decided that scrollbars are ugly. Same with obvious buttons; at some point, half of buttons were made into obscure symbols, and even when words are still used, any kind of bordering that points them out as buttons is gone. Just freestanding symbols and words. It's infuriating.

Low-contrast colors EVERYWHERE also angers me. Low contrast is great for being easy on the eyes, but certain interactive elements need contrast to indicate their function. My best example is that Linux desktop themes across the entire DE space focus on low contrast at the expense of almost everything else, and it's hard to figure out stuff as simple as which window is on top and active, or which elements in a window are clickable.

Windows, icons, menus, and pointers ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_(computing) ) had its origins in the late 60s and was codified at PARC in the early 70s. It's ridiculous that we still use it despite the radical change in hardware capabilities and our understanding of coding. This article really missed an opportunity by complaining about trivia instead of the core problems.

iphones are not easy to use... hidden buttons and gestures everywhere

Add to the list --

--

Make this your default browser?

- Yes!!!

- No I am a masochist. Nag me every time I use this browser.

--

WE RESPECT YOUR PRIVACY AND CHOICE. <fine print> Turn on Alerts and Notifications and full permissions to scrape your contacts and data collection and personalization and Email spam and enable trial of AutoAIMagic(TM)?

- <default> Yes I agree I want to use this software. (or other irrelevant text that is worded like you are routinely agreeing to use the software as per terms)

- <hidden> Remind me (or secretly turn these on at next update anyway)

> For instance, which tab is active?

Honestly, I wouldn’t start with “which tab is active”, I’d start with “wait, those are tabs?”

This is a low-effort article that completely fails to understand why a couple of the nits even happened, which would have been actually interesting.

* On confirming changes with ok/cancel:

Online and collaborative apps have trained many users to expect that all changes are automatically saved. Where Google Docs used to have a "save" button that did nothing, we may have now entered a new era where some users don't know what the state of things is if you don't hit one of the ok/cancel buttons. That's interesting, and maybe there's a more clear way of doing things because of this expectation change.

Not to mention that the OK button has hopefully deservedly died because it wasn't clear. The affirm button should have a custom label that describes the action that will happen if you click it.

* On apps (more specifically browsers) not being identifiable: This is good mostly? Browsers are presumably responding to users who care more about having maximum screen real estate dedicated to the content they're reading that the browser which hosts the content. An app that realizes that I often don't really _want_ to interact with the app itself is good. The removal of excessive toolbars and separate URL and search boxes is a all great. I want a browser that's almost full-screen content but still usable for navigation and window management.

* On gray selection: A code/text highlight example, really? Yes, I personally don't want a bright blue background for my selected code. It would be too distracting. But you can change this with your theme! Choose a theme you like. If other users like it too it'll be popular.

Or is he complaining about the selected tab? That has bold text and a color highlight line above it. I have no idea why the selected gray is so similar to unselected in his screen shot when the Dark and Dark Modern themes in VS Code for me have more contrast. Again, bright colors would be distracting and you change change the theme.

The interesting question here would be how you balance obviousness of UI state with not being distracting, especially for editing apps.

These are tough design challenges and this article kind of flippantly dismisses the current state as "aesthetics" rather than considering that there are competing usability concerns and the author simply doesn't like where the tradeoff has landed, and completely ignores the market leading apps and OSes to similar design decisions.

This is why accessibility is everyone's responsibility when making software. Users should never feel confused about what they're trying to do.

Wish the post provided more screenshots to name and shame.

I can tell all the major browsers apart just by looking at the window chrome. I'm pretty sure this makes me really cool.

There’s only so much you can do with pointing and clicking on a flat screen. To me, part of the problem is that most non-mobile OS’s still haven’t embraced touch as part of the UX. Hopefully, there’s more inroads with “spatial” computing too.

One thing that I see glossed over on the engineering side is reactive UI that changes as the models its built from change. This is good for many things except when it comes to presenting the user with UI objects they need to interact with. It has to be one of the dumbest and most infuriating things in UX and is often seen as working as intended. If you present something to the user do not change the options right before they click. If you aren’t ready to show any options, don’t!

I agree with the author's opinion.

I believe these will come back at some point and someone will claim they invented them. But right now we're in the enshitificaiton phase, UI things are changed but slowly functionality is taken away from users on purpose.

More of an old-man-yells-at-cloud rant than anything actionable here. I agree with the broad strokes, in particular the UX trend towards making everything as flat and monochrome and sparse as possible. I really get the impression that "modern" UX designers won't actually be happy until their app is functionally reduced to a big white fullscreen borderless rectangle with a three gray words in the middle that you have to mouse over before you discover they are actually clickable.

I disagree with this part of the article, though:

> We need to bring back the Ok and Cancel buttons.

Historically, OK and Cancel was mainly a Windows UI custom, and the problem with them is that they often leave a lot of room for ambiguity. I see some variation of this at least once a week, you tell me what happens here, I'll wait:

> Are you sure you want to cancel the upgrade? This may result in an unbootable system. > (Cancel) (OK)

There are multiple other problems with OK/Cancel which I don't have the energy to get into, but the highlights are:

1. Who decided that OK/Cancel made better answers to boolean questions than simply Yes/No?

2. Buttons like this should _always_ be verbs for very short phrases that describe what you are doing when you click on the button. That way, the user is much more sure of what they are doing, and the programmer does not have to write (as) complicated questions. This has been a standard UX concept for decades that is still frequently ignored.

3. I have seen multiple websites/apps where OK/Cancel buttons are swapped arbitrarily. Sometimes OK is on the left, sometimes OK is on the right. This how programmers can gaslight their users.