Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sohcahtoa82 | Hacker News Reader

I absolute hate the modern UX trends of minimalism and hiding things.

How did we get here? It seems in the late 90s/early 00s, we did tons of usability studies and formed our UIs and UXes around the results. We wanted to appeal to everyone.

And now, we've thrown it all away. Functionality is hidden. Discoverability is considered ugly and cluttered. Usability is thrown out the window in favor of something that looks "sleek" or "clean".

I've personally decided that rejecting a design purely because it's "dated" and not on any technical merits is evidence that you don't know how to think for yourself and just follow trends, whether they're good or bad.

View on HN

> How did we get here?

I would guess it's an unholy confluence of putting people who prioritize appearance over usability in charge of UI design, plus the diminishing actual returns of computer technology coupled with an incessant pressure to "innovate."

People aren't rational, and the meme "new is improved" helps paper over a lot of dysfunction.

>> How did we get here?

I think it is lazyness. By that I mean these toolkits are so complex, things get dropped because it would probably double development trying to get 5% extra into the product.

> these toolkits are so complex,

They might be at an API level. At GUI level, they are very simple.

Form over function.

Every so often I use some old windows native gui apps and lament how clear the ui is and how fast they run

My personal wish is a compromise -- there should be a universal button that we designate as the "SHOW ME WHAT I CAN DO" button.

It would show scrollbars, enumerate every shortcut, hilight everything clickable, indicate everything draggable, indicate everything right-clickable, etc.

Then perhaps an OS-setting to keep it permanently active.

Both Mac and especially newer windows has a huge number of weird hidden shortcut options that I still haven't learned after 5-10 years.

Same with phones, weird things like holding the spacebar on the IOS keyboard to scroll through your prior typed text.

I remember when "mystery meat navigation" was a phrase and viewed very unfavorably.

From what I heard, this was the reason Apple only shipped their mouse with a single button for so long. They didn't want developers to hide things away in right-click menus; everything should be somewhere else and discoverable by looking at the UI. Shipping with a single button mouse, even when they supported right-click, was a way to force developers not to get lazy with it, since they couldn't count on users having a right-click on their mouse (or knowing control+click was a thing).

100% this. These problems were solved in the 90's. The people who solved them moved on to other things, retired, etc.

Designers and PMs don't get promoted for keeping things the same. So they went ahead and broke usability and gave each other high fives for making the UI "modern".

There are many variations of this theme. Look at Google Maps. It was solved a decade ago. Whoever built it has presumably moved on. New people are in charge and they won't get promoted if they leave it untouched. With every change, usability gets worse.

I have to use Windows 10 at work. The flat white UI makes navigating File Explorer excruciating. Borders between panels are nearly invisible, clicking on them means fine mouse control to juuuust hit that one or two pixel trigger point, functions are hidden in ribbon panels, ... the beat goes on. In exchange I get absolutely nothing in terms of capability or performance.

One of my big surprises when I started in the business world was how many decisions are driven solely by fads and mimickry. It all gets wrapped in a lot of jargon and fancy presentations to make it look like poeple are being thoughtful and sophisticated, but 95% of the time decision makers are just shooting from the hip and latching onto whatever random idea caught their eye somewhere else.

It's discouraging to think about how much time gets wasted on useless or even regressive work. Once I started seeing this everywhere my tolerance for pointless refactors and redesigns went to zero.

That's not to say that changes are always bad, but the burden of proof should be on the side arguing to toss something that works for $ShinyNewThing, but in the tech industry the bias is usually on the opposite side. Newness gets lauded for the sake of being new and objections get stifled by the trend followers saying that you are afraid of change or don't appreciate evolution. No, I've just seen the same hype cycle play out enough times that I'm sick of wasting my time on bullshit.

I worked at an app company where they kept re-designing over and over and over, and it wan't even anything very clever or innovative: It was just "other apps started using these design fads, so we must now use them too". Over and over. We had critical bugs to fix, areas where battery usage and performance were very poor, lots of spaghetti code and things that needed cleanups, but no, where did we invest our effort? UI re-designs.

Because the younglings graduating UX design want to do it all over again from scratch - but this time without all the old-foggy committee produced HIG standards and more based on looks, feels and jazz.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com