Why I dislike Modern UI | Hacker News Reader

Why I dislike Modern UI

nirm.al

29 pointsmysticmode24 comments

I dont know how this type of blog posts get into HN.

One guy ranting saying "I dont like this, period" without any elaborated answer fits into the same clickbaiting crap that we get elsewhere...

You may be downvoted to oblivion for asking how it gets on the front page (some people think it is of interest is the usual answer, IIRC), but honestly, however this ended up here, I am struggling to work out the point of it is.

It's four short paragraphs, short enough for a forum comment, of someone vaguely talking about UI, with zero examples. It's also the only post on the site. Fishy.

I feel bad saying this as the author may just have English as a second language but due to some wacky, essentially meaningless sentences, I did wonder if the point was it's an example of text generated by "AI".

Edit: And this gets downvoted within seconds. Ridiculous.

From TFA: "When I see these modern interfaces and all these animations/transitions, I get sudden emotions which seems good, but that fades away quickly and after that it turns out all too noisy. There is no serenity in it."

He's getting sudden emotions? What does this even mean? And do I really need "serenity" in a GUI?

For me, the real problem with GUIs is that it's not easy to repeat or automate a task.

The sudden emotion is "hey, that was neato" but that feeling doesn't last and often doesn't serve the content at all.

For me, the criticism is pretty specific:

  When I see these modern interfaces and 
  all these animations/transitions

Probably because it resonates with me. The experience is that someone else has decided what the perfect amount of time I should wait to do what I want to do...someone I don't know who does not know what I am actually trying to do (something for which using the UI is only an incidental step).

Over my years in design, I've see a pretty regular pattern when someone walks through their design for a project that boils down to: the user arrives here and is forced to do X. Narrowing down the user's possibilities via force is probably a reasonable backup strategy for parts of a penitentiary. Most of the time, I find good design creates possibilities.

So for me, the brevity is warranted because the problem is so fundamental. A couple of years ago I opened up my copy of AutoCad R14 from the early 1990's in a VM to goof around. It was radically different: type a command and it executes instantly. Modern UI's have the tail wagging the dog. There is latency in web interfaces due to round trips over the network. Animations can be a way of papering over that latency in lieu of not stalling while waiting for data. They are not an independent end...good design addresses actual problems.

Computers are meant to be automating certain things in this world, so that you could concentrate on the important things in your life. It is not meant to be a life force of one's life.

I also dislike animated, time wasting UIs, but because computers are one of the most important things in my life and I want to spend more time on the cooler things they can do :-)

Indeed.

For going on 20 years, I've been waiting for the adults to be in charge of UI/UX.

I think this make tons of sense. It seems like some designers or people that make interfaces try to ~show off~ to users with cool UIs, crazy animations, etc.

This resonates with me (though is terse on proposed solutions). As an example of a very effective UI, I use vim with multiple buffers, ctrl-p and ctags in a largish c/c++ project. It lets me fly around the code effortlessly. My colleagues are pointing and clicking through tabs in sublime text. Sure sublime is probably faster to learn, but it certainly has a lower upper bound on performance.

I would love to see the keyboard used more in modern interfaces, the discrete nature of keys can make for a crisp experience compared with the finely quantized continuous space that is the domain of the mouse. Think of problems like hunting for the right place to grab and divide a window border, key combinations could get you the same result without the hunt.

"give me cli or give me death"

I think his blog is very much "modern UI."

The styling is well-considered, deliberate and does the job nicely. UNLIKE the naked HTML/no-css that some people here PRETEND to admire.

Webpages should be pleasing to the eyes. Pulling this off requires a sense of taste and significant work (although not necessary by the content author).

I kinda agree, but I'm not sure the problem are animations or effects, but where is the focus and the priority of the design, and the management and reduction of information and visual noise.

Reminds me this old post of mine from 5 years ago: http://www.feiss.be/blog/post/157

I can understand why a super productive i3wm is good for developers. It just keeps the focus on the task.

My mom still uses Lubuntu on my 2006 laptop with 1 GB RAM, when Gnome and KDE require at least 2+ GB.

What are examples of "Modern UI"?? I think of Mac OS X, my Garmin watch or the Leica M10 UI. They are modern but I do think their UI would still be good in 40 years

I think he/she is referring to Microsoft's design guidelines ?

Anyway, some exemples would be welcome.

I used macOS and I'm not sure of others. I'm not totally against animations on Modern UI. But I think it is used heavily in certain places like twitter for example. The profile parallax transition and other animations is kinda laggy when I'm on the low-end processing machines. Also Airbnb's new design and Apple's product pages are heavy if I'm on a slow network. Animation/transition are mostly used to cover the slow network latency. Also most people think that it is fancy to use animations rather than solving a problem. I think design should be consistent across devices and networks, showing a different design for users on a slow internet connection is kinda ugly.

Complaining is easy. If you don't like how modern UI's work, do something about it instead of making more noise.

a huge part of this "modern UI" wants to be invisible, and not fancy at all. Transitions, transparency, animations are techniques and methods to make a digital thing become more humanized.

I like this post because it validates my opinions!

IMO this is the pinnacle of web design: https://stallman.org/

With 5 lines of CSS added it would be. Currently it's not.

When I read something from Stallman I always take the time to either download the html and convert to pdf or manually add some CSS for font size, line length and centering justifying.

Nice to be able to do even that. Many sites these days won't even let me highlight, which I often do while reading. It is infuriating.

I use my own default CSS, so it's pretty nice to read for me. It's sad that most browsers have crappy default CSS.

It really shines in text-mode browsers, though.

It looks broken, like someone's typoed the css filename

You lost me at "Computers are meant to be automating certain things in this world".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com