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At least in the windows 2000 time every app was using the same UI toolkit. That helped a lot

What made some stuff hard was that there were not many pixels available for icons due to the more resolutions in those days, which made icons hard to recognise.

> I don't think that the dumbing down of UI (and reducing palette/layers adds to that) for the dumb users is necessarily a bad thing. At the end of the day I am also a dumb user.

I think UIs should be dumbed down for dumb people. This is a good thing.

What I have a problem with is that UIs are forcing power users into only being able to experience software as if we were dumb users.

I'm deeply concerned about the future of software.

> While I agree with the article, that some elements are harder to spot as interactable, I would still say that they are way more coherent than programs from W2K era ...

Maybe that's the thing. More coherence might be nicer, yes. But it might also not make UIs easier to use. Maybe sqeezing apps into a tight framework of UI coherence, makes the overall appearance of what's on the screen more appealing but at the same time loose usability.

Think of special applications like technical ones (Blender) or office (Thunderbird, LibreOffice) and also simple ones like a notepad application. Now try to find a common set of UI elements to use for all of them. What you'll probably get, is an OK notepad but a disturbingly bloated Blender.

TLDR Niceness does IMO conflict with usability and the former sure shouldn't be prioritized over the latter.

> Maybe that's the thing. More coherence might be nicer, yes. But it might also not make UIs easier to use. Maybe sqeezing apps into a tight framework of UI coherence, makes the overall appearance of what's on the screen more appealing but at the same time loose usability.

It's a balancing act and you can screw up in either direction. What's clear is that limiting options and limiting depth is at a certain point really better from a UX standpoint - and I'd say old Windows toolkits are an example. It doesn't even mean there is missing anything, but that it is structured differently.

> Think of special applications like technical ones (Blender) or office (Thunderbird, LibreOffice) and also simple ones like a notepad application. Now try to find a common set of UI elements to use for all of them. What you'll probably get, is an OK notepad but a disturbingly bloated Blender.

Neither of these apps would have a problem with a GUI framework/toolkit per se. It's more an implementation detail of the specific frameworks/toolkits and the apps in question (also consider the time when they were founded).