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Comment by cosmic_cheese | Hacker News Reader

Very nice. Does anybody else find it a bit striking how gracefully this look has aged? With a little bit of tuning it could feel pretty modern.

Modern UI design could stand to take not just a few pages but the majority of the book from both the Windows 7 variant of Aero and the OS X 10.9 variant of Aqua, in my opinion. Legibility, information density, and communication of interactability and widget function have all been lost as we’ve careened towards egregiously thick padding, low contrast, and low differentiation.

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I used Windows 7 in my formative years, so I'll always have a fond spot in my heart for it.

That said, I really do think the Windows NT era had the best UI in terms of brute usability.

Again, I love Aero's faux glass, cyan highlights, high gloss, etc... but it is indeed a lot of noise and I think it's a bit distracting.

The 95-like look (of which I think the 2K variant is best) does have a bit of an edge in terms of usability, but it also looks considerably more dated. A similarly legible theme from that era that I think time has been more kind to is Platinum, the theme used by Mac OS from System 7.6.1 through Mac OS 9.2.1.

Any new UI design looking to incorporate Aero’s good bits would be smart to tone the look down a little.

The default theme from QTCurve and a good color scheme.

On flat themes, I like Zukitre, which I modded the highlighting color to black instead of blue. It's the only usable theme I found not being either blinding light nor often unreadable dark. It has a grey neutral tone, something Apple understood for platinum if you worked on graphic design, video and photo editing, or as a journalist (the 99% of the Apple users in late 90's).

> It has a grey neutral tone, something Apple understood for platinum if you worked on graphic design, video and photo editing, or as a journalist (the 99% of the Apple users in late 90's).

Modern day “light mode” would benefit from taking notes. The surge in demand for dark mode lines up pretty cleanly with the advent of the stark white themes that the flat UI epidemic ushered in.

Windows 11 beta 1 I think had a mix of aero and windows 10s start menu and felt two to three times speedier than win10. I wonder what happened to ditch the transparency

They retained it so they can stack apps with a sliding-scale of transparency on HoloLens and other frontends,

most likely.

Liquid glass is the new faux glass

That's because Windows 7 was the last release purely focused on usability on desktops. We all know what happened with Windows 8; Windows 10/11 still have to account for multitouch displays.

Also, they screwed up the start menu/screen search in windows 8 and it has sucked since then. :(

Who do I assign blame to for horrible modern UX design? Is it the hubris of designers who believe that the constraints of the human body should be felled by minimalist purity? Is it bean counters who weaponize industrial psychology to create flat, boring UI to increase engagement/addiction? Is it the average technology user who has simply become too stupid to use anything other than a touchscreen? Why does it seem like everyone I've talked to about this agrees that basically all modern technology products are boring and uninspired compared to just 15 years ago, but it also seems like we keep building (and buying) boring, uninspired technology products?

I’m a dev not a designer, but I’d personally point to a few things:

- An influx of print/commercial/etc designers into UI design, who lack the full suite of knowledge and skills to design usable UI, crowding out the UI designer old guard

- The likes of Dribbble and other social media kicking off self reinforcing minimalism trends within the field

- The rise of “UI as branding” which places brand identity far above practical usability in terms of priorities

There are other factors like indie devs not wanting to hire a designer for their projects and just phoning that part in (which flat is conducive to), but they don’t have nearly as much sway on industry trends at large.

> With a little bit of tuning it could feel pretty modern.

This little bit of tuning is called Shine 2.0 and is still the most modern desktop user interface, even though it was published in 2010:

https://www.deviantart.com/zainadeel/art/Shine-2-0-for-Windo...

There were quite a few nice looking XP and 7 themes on DeviantArt. It’s too bad that there’s no good way to browse the modern day version of that site, with how they’ve removed categories and search being somewhat broken. Snapshots from archive.org provide a small window into that era, though.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140511174529/http://www.devian...

MacOS X 10.4 was peak Apple UI design from my personal experience. That metal look was pretty…

Android, Windows and iOS all look similar now… macOS is shifting that way…

Bring back skeuomorphic design…

I concur, I think the successor flat design trend has nailed on reducing the styling visual clutter and keeping the user just focused on the "substance" from the app UI whilst keeping the UI itself minimal with no distractions.

The problem is that minimalism and maximalism in UI design exist on a kind of horseshoe curve. Extremely maximalist UI is indeed distracting, but past a certain point of pruning so is minimalism, just in a different way. Instead of having your eyes drawn away from the content by flashy widgets, you’re poking and swiping to find the function you’re looking for, like someone feeling around trying to find the exit in a pitch dark room.

What's bizarre is not seeing any mention of Windows Vista, when it laid the foundation and had most of these design aspects and elements people fawn about.

All true, but 7 was a bigger hit and saw poplar usage for much longer than Vista did. A lot of people skipped straight from XP to 7. With that in mind it makes sense why 7 has the stronger association with Aero.

True,7 had a lot of polish, but Vista in its black version was very striking when it arrived.

I'd like to see someone create the longhorn vision though.

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