What Happened To User Interfaces? 

Google needs to be broken up by Congress. It's horrible how evil they actually are. I'm old enough to remember "Don't be Evil". The hypocrisy should be palpable by now. I'm so tired of having to check if I'm being censored. That should be evidence enough of some sinister behavior.

Hey, do you remember what was the name of that screen saver/animated background for android at 2:57?

Yeah some games look awesome but some of them have TERRIBLE menu navigation bevause of that

Highfleet is my favourite example. It has an amazing skeumorphic UI.

Yeah Call of Duty having one pixel thick line for your armor If we're supposed to be sitting more than 6 ft away from the TV then these lines need to be thicker. I should really make it so that you could read it if it was on a 144 display so you don't have to stop to understand what the F is going on without being distracted and die.

Huuu I hadent thought about that but yeah!! Now I wonder what a Minecraft style ui website would look like

@@Kynatosh Should be more dynamic, right? Imagine one of those Windows XP bugs which summon too many error dialogs, but as the number of error dialog boxes increases, the sound effect used changes. As I said, _dynamic._ Perhaps they stop using dialog boxes and simply bring up a terminal window. You could be fitting a mascot character into all of this! This change might stress out a user less and still let them believe that the computer _is_ having "severe problems", but in a more _"believable"_ manner, and let then know that the issues won't affect anything outside the computer, though they will require restarting the computer. Imagine restarting your computer and having the mascot tell you that stuff went wrong, but that it's been alright since the restart. You wouldn't even have to view logs this way! Win-win for being both a cool and functional UI that _expresses_ things very well!

Correct. It's why high refresh rate matters. Can shorten delays while still showing animations.

@@LiveType that's not how refresh rates on screens work, nor does CPU speed matter for how fast an animation is done (doesn't matter compared to old computers like in the IBM turbo button and before where everything was mostly timed based off the clock speed)

I do like really fast animations (finishing in less than a second) to show that I'm navigating inside and interacting with the UI, but also, I like when I can still control the UI even if an animation is playing (it's non-blocking).

Animations typically can be interrupted, you don't have to wait

​@@GIRGHGH typically it's exactly the other way around. And sometimes if they can be interrupted, it breaks something (a famous example is clock design in Android for setting timers, if you are faster than animation it sets to different values than what you selected).

I still have nightmares from that

@@enricotartarotti Just think of applying for jobs through those website

@@enricotartarotti That's the best website we have cuz its for foreign people, I wish you had tried the website we use to file Income tax returns xD By the way, are you hosting a meetup? I'd love to meet you in person when you come to India. I'm from Bangalore (Bengaluru)

India is not for beginners🔥

German and Croatian websites are right up there.

This comment is so underrated. Thanks man. As a Product Designer, that's exactly what I was thinking.

YES, I thought that too. I think it's just cheaper to use automatically generated UI design patterns from libraries like SwiftUI, UIKit, etc. rather than thinking deeply about the different requirements of a music player, a shopping app, a photo database, etc. and implementing them yourself. Maybe games are the last playing field for innovative UI designs?

the thing is that everything is a button now a days

It's great, I wish we still had some apps that do such things these days

Imagine having to sit through that crap every time you had to delete a burner virtual card today

I'm using the winamp from 2023 with my music library and great modern skins 🎉 in 2024 and planning to keep it.! ❤

@@MyrddinREmrys Does it still whip the Llama’s a$$?

It wasn't even Winamp, but Sonique, at least the one with the green head!

Didn't Winamp also run on Windows 95? I definitely remember using it on Win98.

Well you can still get winamp level customisation feel with reaper because it's made by the same guy😂.

Thanks for the perspective!

Flash websites are awful, they have a "flashy" UI but terrible UX. Not to mention they're security nightmares.

@@bltzcstrnx The user experience was great on many of these sites, and while flash caused many security issues that didn't apply to these design studio made sites. The problem was they were only really useful for say showing off 1 particular project or product. A pain to update or make changes and pretty bad if you had to send through any information in a form. HTML did sorta catch up, But its always been more restrictive and no one does these promotional microsites anymore as social media sites just perform better.

@@Axel_Andersen Don't think for a second you represent most people. The bland boring minimalist aesthetic apple popularised is a boring plague that counter culture will eventually turn back on as is currently happening. You're a product of post modernism, functionality at the cost of beauty, art and exploration and that mentality can piss off like the cardboard tasting slop it is. If you applied your dogshit mentality to everything you'd be fed intravenously because taste is irrelevant to productivity. Beautiful things make people happy and relieve stress and we wonder why everyone is so damn stressed and unhappy these days surrounded by mass market templated designs that all looks the same... stress is bad for productivity... But at least your grandmother wont trip up on some fancy steps or click the wrong link.

@@blakeariusexactly the issue is a lot of people use the excuse of it’s easier for users to understand how to use minimal interfaces than complex ones but that’s not true, we can make a learning curve that combines interesting interfaces that is easy for people to understand not completely dumping it for a lazier style

Yeah, it's like UI designers were so desperate to get away from Windows 7, that they went all the way back to Windows 1.0. One thing Microsoft was really good at in the 1990s versions of Windows was making thinks look like they could be clicked on. They got fancy with XP through 7, but did a full reset with 8 and the flat crap.

Everything has to be designed with a "Mobile first" mentality. They don't care about desktop users as we are just a small market compared to mobile users. Problem is MS hasn't accepted that we are the majority of their market since they have consistently failed in their attempts at the mobile market.

@@Roxor128 I finally found my corner of the Internet. I agree with everything you’re saying things back in the day felt like they had effort put into them.

Yes! You do not see many touch sreen in military vehicles. Iterate ... that really is the mentality of the valley, fail fast, don't get it right the first time. Works for somethings, but not space exploration, aviation, cars...

Like many craft, the space shuttle had many refits over it's service life, including changes to the control panels. Also like most air and space craft, the panels were built around "MFDs", or Multi Function Displays. These are programmable LCD screens that can be configured for whatever purposes the pilot finds most useful at the time. But yes, everything was extensively documented. Good interfaces still require this!

@@SimonBuchanNz I know. But they were not TOUCH screens. And they were carefully crafted and tested. Unlike most UI we see on consumer gear, cars or on the web.

@@Axel_Andersen Yes, there is a tradeoff of being simple vs being able to master an interface. Most apps today optimize for being simple for first time users. The cost is, that an experienced user at some point cant become more proficient.

@@SimonBuchanNz MFD style screens with programmable buttons is what the auto industry should've adopted instead of going all out on touchscreens for their infotainment I like having a nice screen to display infotainment, but also want tactile buttons to control music and navigation. An MFD would combine both of these things

well, I've seen quite a few buildings already where doors are only discernable from walls because they some kind of minimal handle somewhere. (gaps in the walls don't help finding those, because they get regularly inserted even if there is no door)

This. I hate having to spend time trying to figure out these gestures of every new gadget who decides they're too cool to have a few clear buttons

Rectangles are the future, mon.

simple UI is good. nothing is simpler than a box with a text label. animation exists for feedback only. btw, this is not a "modern" interface, eg vim had no buttons 30y ago, only a status bar and several text input boxes. and people love vim so much

Been trying to teach my mom how to play OpenTTD. She kept clicking on the labels, because she assumed they were a different set of buttons.

We need to separate usability and recollection and visual load. Yes they work together of course but serve different purpose. And as you say should not canibalize on each other. The balance is also different depending on app and use case.

1) Not saying accessibility isn't something to consider, but we are optimizing a 5% case instead of the 95% majority? And we are eliminating possibilities of making something cool, but don't because of the 5%? 2) That sounds more like company culture: Do we want to make something that barely works, and just fullfills the requirements or something we can be proud to have shipped.

@@Mark-wz9uh 1) There is no definitive answer and different people have different opinions. Personally, enabling 5% of global internet users to participate is an absolutely valid trade-off; at least if we’re talking about platforms that are essentially considered a utility, like social media, streaming platforms etc. Where the target audience is NOT global I would agree it may not be of massive concern. Also: I never said accessibility is the only consideration. As I wrote in my last paragraph: I believe there is a lot of room for improvement even WITH accessibility in mind. It’s not “either-or”. 2) I don’t know if you have ever worked in a large software organisation. Personally speaking from experience: getting software built (at all) consistently is already incredibly difficult. There is an inverse relationship between “fun & exciting” and “code maintainability”. With limited time & resources the short-term economic decision for a lot of companies is to prioritize “maintainability”. Of course, this comes with long-term impacts on user happiness; but that’s a lagging metric with nebulous impact on long-term revenue. Thus many, if not most companies are willing to ignore it for short-term growth and profits. I said it before and I said it again: I am not in favor of these incentive structures. I am just saying they exist; and boring design is rarely a lack of will by engineers and designers, but by necessity imposed by large organisational structures.

This.

@@Mark-wz9uh yes it is allowing the 5% to actually live a normal life, I don't know what's so hard to understand about that, acessibility no matter the field implies doing that and this doesn't mean you are hindering the life of people by doing this, it's quite literally the opposite

also if you wanna act like it's a conspiracy you can't even blame acessibility because acessibility is still mostly an afterthought, other factors at play are way more important and I imagine the original commenter also means acessibility in the sense of understanding, looking at an UI and having proper understanding of it

Butter 🧈

Imagine someone walking out and listening to him calling his house ugly 👁️👄👁️

To be fair, that's a correct assumption.

I'm a late GenXer. Our generation (and older Millenials) grew up with technology as it progressed. We went from the command line interface to clunky UIs that were so slow they weren't very functional. Windows 3.1 was a little better, but Windows 95 was a revelation. It opened up accessibility to people who didn't need to understand how computers work but needed to write a document or create a spreadsheet. But as time has progressed and accessibility for ordinary people has improved (even if it is a bit boring but it improves access for disabled people) what has really fallen down is education. Younger generations should have learned a limited array of functions so that they can navigate the increasingly technological world but they have not. I'm a college professor. The level of technological illiteracy in younger generations astonishes me. I'll give you an example - one class (population genetics if you care) I was teaching *PhD students* and there were some statistical calculations that needed to made. Nothing complicated, just the chi-square test. In order to ensure they understood what was going on under the hood, so to speak, I made them do all the steps of the calculations from scratch in Excel. I made a lovely, easy-to-use spreadsheet with the data, and all they had to do was input a couple of formulae to do some basic calculations (but not using Excel's native chi-square function). It was essential for these students to understand (hilariously, some students go into biology because they think there's less math.) One student wasn't getting the right answer, so I went over to help (small class, only 5 students, so it's easy to give personalized help). I navigated to one of the cells where she needed to input a simple formula to calculate allele frequencies. It didn't have a formula, just a number. I asked how she had done it. She had used the calculator app on her iPhone. I was honestly staggered. Why are we churning out people who don't have a basic grasp of common workplace applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Adobe Acrobat? Going back to my original point, we have come to a place where some highly simplified UIs are killing the ability to learn more complex programs. Unless you have an interest, you don't need to learn how to navigate a CLI or write code in a common programming language (although it might be good if they did). But you do have to navigate the business world, even if you flip burgers or clean offices for a living, especially if you want to advance into a career. I'm a CLI girl which is why I love Linux. I still use vi to write code because I'm super old-school and don't need the bells and whistles of an integrated development environment (IDE). I like using LaTeX for writing. I'm forced to use Windows and Office because writing manuscripts or creating a presentation is easy when you have non-tech colleagues who may need to make comments and suggestions. I don't expect younger generations to be like me, but we have got to stop oversimplification that is leading to technological illiteracy.

​@@clairesimpson7329 Rest In Pepperoni for those students that got into biology to avoid math and ended up on a PopGen course. 😂 On a more serious note, I do feel that my ability with software has gone down as UI has simplified. I don't need to think as much about what I'm doing anymore. Which has lead to the feeling that all of my workflows are sub-optimal. "Surely there must be a better way to do X task" has been an increasingly common thought.

yep. less reliable because of everything, radiation, durability, repair, everything..

The blandness of Windows up to 2000 was the good kind of bland: it kept out of your way but made it easy to tell what could be clicked on and what things did. A little reading comprehension got you 70% of the way there, experimentation took care of another 20%, and reading the manual (or help files) did the final 10%. The blandness we have now doesn't make it clear what's clickable, avoids text like the plague so there's no way to use reading comprehension to try and figure things out, and rarely even includes help files at all, meaning figuring out a new program is almost entirely trial-and-error.

++ hope your app turns out to be fire.

If you like your job, I'd suggest you don't. Look up data-driven development before taking the advice of unemployed RU-vidrs.

Yes. Same as books and magazine. Sure playful comics. Children books and some fancy art / fashion magazines is cool. But there is reasons we many books is basked in shared design guidelines. They work and as you say reduce the cognitive load. It is meant to be neutral as the content itself is the key thing to focus on. Not the ui. It should ideally be easy to understand but apart from that fade away into nothingness

I themed my macOS so that it looks like the version 10.6 (Snow Leopard). Those old icons are beautiful.

I bet they're going to try to bring it back in the next decade but in the most unauthentic and unstylistic way possible

Some wires get damaged and the display goes dark. Old Space Ship: Just feel your way to the right button by touch. Elon Space Ship: Completely blank screen, impossible to know what menu you're in, or if it even registers touch actions.

Like everything it’s a balance. Also let’s not forgot that many micro interactions are not just there to be fun and nice looking they also serve cognitive functions

Honestly, most of these "simplified" UIs also have less function than older interfaces, by removing features to get a "cleaner" look.

@@Cyfrik I think it’s very different. If we talk mobile ui then there was not really any old. If we talk more desktop app then they mostly have same features or have them implemented in a better and more intuitive way. Then there is a lot software last years with less features. But that is not due to the ui but due to targeting a more casual mainstream audience.

@@litjellyfish I think that's a very naive way of looking at it. It's fully possible to target mainstream audiences and still provide a full range of advanced features for power-users. This is about taking control away from the users and putting it in the hands of the corporations.

Hear hear! Agree with most of that. Having said that I think one of the things is that designer forget the old adage "Make it as simple as possible, BUT NOT simpler".

In some user interfaces for websites I can not tell the difference between a disabled button and a button, because the design between websites are inconsistent.

@@Voreoptera Hear hear!

​@@Voreoptera Oh yeah, consistency in design is dying as well. Remember when checkboxes were square and radio buttons were round? Nowadays, designers just flip a coin to decide the shape of their UI elements. And yeah, the “gray button that may or may not be disabled” and the “piece of text that may or may not be outlined with a thin line and may or may not be a button” don’t help, either.

that's what microsoft did with windows phone

It’s ironic how you brought up ancient Egyptians, whose hieroglyphs, that originally represented the thing that they looked like, have devolved into the very letters, you used to write this, becoming completely unrecognisable and devoid of their original meaning :D

Skeumorphism can be interesting but looks really bad most of the time

It's really not, it is because it is best practice.

@@mayatrash Functionality should come over looks everytime. This is where skeumorphism is a win many times.

Honestly, I've been annoyed at the "clean interface" trend since the late 2000s. More often than not, removal of features is its main purpose, while user-friendliness is the excuse.

Exactly. Putting extra aesthetic touches into designs costs money, which eats into profit margins.

Why? Just why? For everything that happens you blame capitalism. Up there with a stuck air in your lungs.

Capitalism just means freedom. You get to keep your stuff and not get robbed, murdered, or enslaved. If you mean the profit motive, it would motivate you to not just reduce costs, but make stuff that people will want to buy.

Lmao, capitalism is based on stealing. What are you talking about @Lestibournes

@@bradbradson4543 Lol. That's just commie propaganda to convince you to become a serf in return for "free stuff"

artifically speeded up the video and its irritating as fuk

yea but my is potato so i cant go real al out

Linux ricing said hi

@@barutaji Yee, I tried switching to it a month ago. Unfortunately, I have too many programs that only exist on Windows to fully switch over. It is oddly miles better than Win11...

it's called nexus, if you have an android phone you could install the apk i think

Yes. One interesting thing. In Android the settings button has always been easy to access with a max 2 step interaction On iOS there is still only two ways to find settings. Search for settings or press the setting icon (that might not be present on your Home Screen) I always wondered why Apple never made it part of control center. Was it because they did not want users to go ikro setting as much ?