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Comment by 1over137 | Hacker News Reader

Stop letting graphics people decide these things by aesthetics. There is hard data from people that actually work in usability on how UIs ought to be built.

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Every day, there are so many comments complaining about the open-source/free software they tried being too old and the UI being stale. I never notice someone offering the example of their modern UI. "But the UI is terrible!" maybe graphic designers are needed.

Windows 8, 10, and 11 are good examples of modern UI being over-refreshed and receiving hash feedback by their users.

This is nitpicking but Windows 10, while annoyingly buggy during development (they dropped their QA for windows insiders during that period), was a return back to sanity after Windows 8's UI.

I think it's inevitable (and fine) that aesthetic trends influence UIs, however, what is terrible (and already happening... again) is that people will create all kinds of faulty reasoning and justification as to why the new trend is empirically better UX when what likely is at play is a tiny bit of innovation and a lot of novelty.

IME, there could be a lot more clarity in product and UX if more people were honest with themselves and others about just wanting "better" looking UI.

Yes, but those usability people have a tendency to design interfaces for the lowest common denominator. This often ends in disaster as the lowest common denominator often cannot even navigate a “usable” interface. Meanwhile, those who aren’t in that group feel almost infantilized.

I will take my extremely dense UI over an accessible interface that shows only 10 rows on a spreadsheet in 24 point font. Think of those with low vision!

> Yes, but those usability people have a tendency to design interfaces for the lowest common denominator. This often ends in disaster as the lowest common denominator often cannot even navigate a “usable” interface. Meanwhile, those who aren’t in that group feel almost infantilized.

I fully agree with you. But ...

> I will take my extremely dense UI over an accessible interface that shows only 10 rows on a spreadsheet in 24 point font. Think of those with low vision!

You will be Ctrl + FrontMouseScrollWheel to read your 3rd monitor too eventually.. be nice on HN.

> You will be Ctrl + FrontMouseScrollWheel to read your 3rd monitor too eventually..

I'm failing to parse this

I parsed that as: one day, you will have to use the zoom too.

Ctrl-+

Just because one doesn’t need accessibility features now, doesn’t mean you won’t ever. A little bit of empathy would not be a waste.

> Meanwhile, those who aren’t in that group feel almost infantilized.

For me, the perfect examples of feeling infantilized (I like that word) are the following: I feel infantilized by government or hospital illustrations that are meant to convey a simple message to the lowest common denominator. I feel infantilized by Youtube videos and TV ads that use these happy but annoying 'toddler' sounds in the background.

Graphics people have been deciding these things ever since personal computers became mainstream. You are almost three decades too late to preach this.

There's also hard data suggesting the perceived usability is higher when the user interface is aesthetic. So it goes both ways.

Care to share said hard data?

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