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Comment by npunt | Hacker News Reader

Thanks. Guess I'm not impressed, some are fine layout-wise but overall these look like basic rather ugly forms. These might have been fine 10-15 years ago but the bar is higher these days, the style you get out of the box is essentially html 1.0. (fwiw I designed & built a json-based form-builder several years back)

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A problem here is the "adaptive" in Adaptive Cards. The idea was a unified "backend" for UIs in Bing, Teams, Copilot (the app formerly known as Cortana), LinkedIn, and all sorts of other "hosts". The hosts all have their own, different design languages and so all show different designs of these cards. The examples given on its own webpage are truly "lowest common denominator" and expected to be further restyled by whatever hosting application is used. This design is kind of intentionally "HTML 1.0" because it is meant to be a low level "control framework" for design teams to build on top of, rather than a final design in and of itself.

Not that that entirely excuses the web page from trying some better styles or better yet a "theme chooser" style approach to better illustrate how the base concepts are meant to be design-flexible by maybe actually showing design flexibility in action.

Good point about the adaptivity. Yeah the omission of any examples with themes really shows the silo’d nature of Microsoft, and makes it look like the whole project was low effort and built by people who aren’t even designers and were just building to some abstract spec. If Microsoft really valued design they would build complete UI frameworks including visual style and then hand them to the respective teams (more wood behind fewer arrows), rather than making it a shared effort where no one team has made informed decisions about the whole thing end-to-end. I’m a bit spoiled right now because I’m deep in Apple’s HIG and it’s just on an entirely different plane of competence and thoughtfulness, whereas this looks like the little leagues.

Are you stuck on the actual design of Fluent UI?

To some extent. Fluent1 is utterly charmless and not even good at usability (is this square a button? why are these icons so thin and illegible?). It looked at the already bad trend of flat design and decided it wasn’t flat enough and needed some more hard edges to drive home the point. It honestly looks like it was designed primarily to be as difficult as possible for an engineer to screw up during implementation, rather than explore the possibility of making an interface anybody actually enjoyed using. It’s 100% downside protection, which at least shows some self awareness on the part of Microsoft about their own design capabilities.

Fluent2 looks to correct many of those sins in a big way, so kudos to Microsoft for course correcting. I like it better than Material.

As far as these cards, they don’t even seem to meet the Fluent1 bar, again they’re more HTML1, and the examples aren’t even great at typographic layout. They built a system that looks theoretically capable of containing good design, but it doesn’t seem they had any designers on staff to actually verify that. It looks like it was built to some abstract spec an engineer and PM came up with on their own.

(Sorry for sounding like a hater but this world deserves better than to have these kinds of low effort designs everywhere, and my guess is with Microsoft’s reach these designs are going to be everywhere)

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