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Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, people are upset with every UI redesign that is not an incremental change.

So stop redesigning your damn UIs!

I know why they do it. That's because if you don't change the UI, it is like you didn't change anything, and people don't feel the need to upgrade. It is important for marketing and therefore I don't expect it to change.

But if you really care about usability, don't change your UIs without a good reason. Also, keep in mind that not every user is a young tech addict, it is hard enough to explain to my grandparents how to use a computer/smartphone without them being thrown off by UI changes. Ok, it may not be where your money is, but that's part of accessibility.

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I don’t see how your argument applies to Apple‘s transition to Liquid Glass. Apple only did incremental design changes for years, IIRC this is only the third major UI/UX iteration since the early 00s.

UX is not timeless, features emerge or go out of fashion, user behavior and expectations change, the hardware on which the UI/UX is operated changes. You only can incrementally evolve your ui/UX so far, as you can’t know what the future will look like.

Liquid glass is objectively worse than what came before it. It's literally harder to see what the fuck is going on, and everything takes more time to do.

There are zero legitimate benefits to it. It's just neat and cool, which is a very poor reason to do something.

They should've just... Not done it.

> Yes, people are upset with every UI redesign that is not an incremental change.

Speaking for myself, it's also annoying when the redesign is half assed. I think it's awfully embarrassing that you can still dig deeply enough into settings panels in Windows and get XP themed panels. Hell, dig deep enough and there's probably even older ones lurking still.

Hah! I've seen the same TCP/IP Advanced Networking config ugly panel since Windows 95, up to Windows 10. It makes me feel at home, but it confirms your assessment.

To me that is more a sign that I finally arrived at a dialog I can trust to do what it says and which actually achieves what I have been looking for the whole time. To me trying to change something in Windows seems to be a hunt for that old window first, before I can do anything useful.

You're not wrong, and I share the sentiment. "Modern" panels are near worthless, I have to dig down to something crusty to actually expose useful settings I can tweak.

That's true about the stuff you reach from Settings. But I also learned that Windows has a nice way to adjust the settings, every setting is described by a few paragraphs, it is structured in a tree and actually understandable. And you even can enumerate them and know you have considered all of them, there is nothing playing hide and seek with you. Really crazy that this is built in into MS Windows. It's called Group Policy Editor. Not sure why not everyone is using that instead of the crappy slow Settings app.

Windows 8+ UI is just plain incompetence.

You may like or may not like the new settings panels, but making them incomplete and redirecting you to the old ones for the missing features is just wrong. Even worse, they have been gradually adding the missing features for more than 10 years, breaking all familiarity, and they still didn't manage to finish the job.

I don't know what happened internally but Microsoft went from being arguably the best in the world to something that is objectively terrible. You may not like liquid glass, but at least, there is intent behind it. With Microsoft today, it looks like a collection of internship projects.

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