This is an upside for the developer only. And a downside for the user as the GUI will probably not be consistent with its OS.
> over the past decade it seems like many apps have eschewed this anyway
And I regret it.
Depends on what kind of "user". Many professionals that spend their day in software like the Autodesk suite of applications, Music production, Animation or other creative endeavors expect consistent GUI across OSes when using the same tool, not consistent GUIs within the specific OS for all tools.
How often we use something and what type of things we're doing on it (work, play, etc) probably greatly affect how we think about this. I expect my tools to work the same no matter where I use them. For things I don't rely on to get essential work done, I care less, on a sliding scale.
This is definitely not the case. For some apps/branding, a particular style is more desirable than making sure a checkbox looks 100% native on each platform. And even the things that benefit the developer are not upsides just for them (think lower initial design & dev costs, lower testing costs, lower costs of new features - all of which mean resources can be allocated elsewhere).
> the GUI will probably not be consistent with its OS.
Like I mentioned, there seems to be a trend away from this as a goal anyway (even within the set of OS-provided apps). Probably it's a combination of it not mattering as much as we originally thought it did, and because end-users now have a familiarity with a core set of UI concepts. There's a short list of things you do to make a button be "button-y", and users know to click on it. They just don't care if it looks different than the buttons in some unrelated app.
Could someone please inform Microsoft of this, so maybe they could try that in "Skype for Business"?
I have to use the fucking thing at work, and it's even more afflicted by the fucking Flat Where Everything Looks The Same look than the rest of their apps and OSes. For instance, whenever I'm in a chat with someone and initiate an audio call by clicking on the round blue handset button, it pops up a helpful little tooltip/label in the form of a (squared-off, because Modern) speech bubble! to tell me that what I've just initiated is a "Skype Call". Then I sit there and wait for them to pick up for a while, before I remember that the fucking speech bubble IS A BUTTON, and that I need to click again to start a call.
Holy fucking goddamn shit! The absolute worst company at following Microsoft's UI guidelines is... Microsoft.
Another example: Just a few hours ago I was switching back and forth between Excel and my text editor, copying stuff from one to the other. Half the time when I though Excel had focus, it didn't -- because the fucking thing can't even de-highlight its bloody title bar! Their interfaces absolutely suck nowadays.
> This is an upside for the developer only.
Strongly disagree. How is a consistent user experience enabling developers to support more platforms at a higher level of quality going to lead to worse end-user experience?
To me: it's not, this is just anti-browser sentiment dressing itself up as enlightenment
This is just a management speak where degradation in quality is called 'next generation'. It is worse because it is resource hog and slow even on high end machines.
As a technical user I understand at least what is happening. On other hand non-technical folks are unable to articulate their frustrations which slick developers seems to take as users are satisfied.
And what of other factors? If it is worse in the dimensions you list but superior in:
* accessibility * cross-platform capability * debuggability * library availability * user familiarity
and more, then what does this matter? Each choice made in such a domain as this is picking a point in a high-dimensional tradespace, and to blatantly disregard this obvious perspective citing "management speak" and "slick developers" doesn't really inspire confidence you're arguing in good faith
For the actual user, the experience is inconsistent with the rest of their system.
This point is moot. If your argument is that each system has its own GUI semantics, and the developer fails the user by not developing within those semantics for that platform, then you are proposing the developer must do 1 unit of work per platform where previously it was 1 unit of work for all platforms. Therefore exactly 1 platform will be supported, and users on the unlucky ones will have exactly no experiences with this tool.
If you actually care about what you make and want to make it good, there are no shortcuts. You need to put in the work.
No such thing exists.
> and disregard platform-specific semantics
Again, this is a bad thing for users.
> Again, this is a bad thing for users.
Can you make a supporting argument for this? You state it as fact. I do not see why globally strong UI/UX should be a bad thing for users just because it disregards some standards of unknown quality on an unknown platform. Most methods of interacting with applications today are standardized and have no platform reliance; it is unclear to me why a developer whose tool delivers value in and of itself would suddenly not be delivering value to users just because their UI implementation did not perfectly match said user's preferred OS' UI standards. Actually, it's perfectly clear to me that the opposite is true.
Except "globally strong UI/UX" is usually just design wankery that totally ignores decades of usability studies.
> just because it disregards some standards of unknown quality on an unknown platform.
Yeah, because the bleeding Windows UI guidelines that were in force for decades and known by hundreds of millions -- or are we in billions territory? Probably -- of users are "some standards of unknown quality on an unknown platform" nowadays.
Pull the other one, it's got bells on it.
Hmm... is that actually true though? If so, in what way?
For example, right now I have open, among other things, Spotify, Visual Studio, Vim, Chrome, and the Windows 10 Settings app. It's a fairly big mishmash of UIs in terms of styling, but in terms of how I interact with them, there is very strong consistency.
On the other hand, I have many specialized tools where the UI is superior that of the OS and if anything I would like everything else to look more like those. Ableton Live was an early pioneer of the kind of flat minimalism that people associate most often with Material Design, for example. At the time it was launched most music software manufacturers were still obsessed with skeuomorphism, albeit for entirely justifiable reasons because musicians often fetishize and want to emulate the sound of particular pieces of studio equipment.
Personally, at least for popular apps, I prefer being able to explain how to do something to someone else and it just working the same way, regardless of what phone they are on, or if I'm lucky, to some degree even if it's between mobile and web.
Depends on how you look at it. I'm building an app and if it was not for Electron and web technologies, no user would get to use that app because it would not be built in the first place.