Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

Disagree: Our malaise is not boredom from simplicity, but fatigue from inconsistency.

"Flat" interfaces aren't bad because they lack an ineffable whimsy of embodied human experience, they're bad because they threw out the baby the bathwater, tossing decades of conventions and hard-learned accessibility lessons in the name of supporting a touchscreen.

Compared to 20 years ago, everyone is shipping half-website-half-desktop abominations (e.g. with Electron[0]) and reinventing UX wheels. Too many apps/sites impose "their own look" instead of following what the user has already learned. [1] Often users must guess whether certain things are even clickable, how a certain toggle looks when enabled, whether certain settings are a single-select option or a multi-select tickbox... And memorize those rules with per-app or per-website granularity.

> You can talk while clicking, listen while reading, look at an image while spinning a knob, gesture while talking.

Those are all things people do after "make computer do what I want" has become automatic.

Now when--for example--trying to find the 21st item they just added inside a list that is vertically limited to 20 and the custom grey-on-grey scrollbar is always hidden unless you've currently hovering a mouse exactly in the right 5-pixel-wide strip between two columns of the interface.

[0] A sample listing of software readers may be familiar with: https://www.electronjs.org/apps

[1] That may be due to deliberate "remember us" branding, whatever was fastest-to-ship, because things to look new to get somebody a promotion, because they want to create a switching-cost so current users feel bad trying to use a competitor's product... Or because someone like the blog-poster has misguidedly tried to make a "richer experience."

To add insult to injury, not only is everything inconsistent thanks to incessant wheel reinvention, nearly all of the reinvented wheels are halfassed at best and missing functionality compared to what they’re replacing. When a company writes a new widget to match their theme they only build the bare minimum necessary to visually match mockups. UI controls have become vapid and devoid of function.

Agree. The constant UI reinvention of lately is super strange to me. Companies want to save money but most developer time in simple apps is spent on it.

I remember 20-25 years ago mostly using Windows widgets to make Enterprise apps. It was fast to make, fast to run, and users back then knew how to use. Didn't look the best, but at least was consistent.

The next 5 years we sort of tried to do our best, but most things were still sort of standard-ish.

Then for about 5 years or things like Bootstrap, Material, etc, dominated. It was nothing special, but at least consistent between apps.

But in the last 10 years pretty much every company I worked on had a custom UI built ENTIRELY from scratch by a designer and a small army of developers to implement it. It looks "the same but different" in an uncanny valley way.

I honestly feel like this is the worst possible use of frontend developers, period. Not only from a financial perspective but also from an end result.

But hey jobs are generated so what do I know...

If most software were following DDD, UI should be a generic domain. But they bind themselves to Electron and bring the whole kitchen with them. And then a note app bring a whole audio and video ecosystem among others.

Before software only needs to be useful. Now the C Suite thinks it needs to be engaging and isolating like a casino.

The "great flattening" fashion has made computers harder to use for many people.

Older UIs separated computer output from where user input is expected. Compare Windows 7 or 2000 to Windows 10 or 11 and the older Windows versions win. It's the same with Android.

UX designers follow fashion as much as the garment manufacturers on the catwalks of Milan, even if the fashion is uncomfortable.

Just because something is new, that doesn't mean it is better.

I'm currently using Gnome and their UI may not be the most beautiful or complete, but they've gone all in on consistency. I don't mind software like Blender, Audacity, and others having their own design systems as their domain is much more complicated. But a lot of software only needs a few controls and the native ones should suffice.

I don’t think it’s a coincedence that out of the Linux DE ecosystems, GNOME has probably the biggest presence in little third-party utilities made to match the environment. The DE itself is quite flawed in my opinion, but its consistent and opinionated design system catches the eyes of devs and would-be devs and motivates them to build things.

A similar effect I believe is what’s been largely responsible for the healthy botique indieware scene on macOS too.

I think what motivates people to patch over Gnome deficiencies is its position as the de facto standard "enterprise" DE, where you basically have no choice but to use it.

There’s a handful of third party apps that serve that function, but that’s really more the domain of GNOME shell extensions.

What I’m talking about are apps built not because there weren’t serviceable options in their categories prior, but because there weren’t any that made an effort to be at unity with the larger GNOME desktop. Apps like Errands[0], Folio[1], Shortwave[2], and Newsflash[3].

[0]: https://apps.gnome.org/en/List/ [1]: https://flathub.org/apps/com.toolstack.Folio [2]: https://apps.gnome.org/Shortwave/ [3]: https://apps.gnome.org/en/NewsFlash/

There is also a big elephant in the room that we are sort of ignoring with the whole AI stuff, which is when flat design came about, a lot of the designers who weren't really good now suddenly had jobs because everybody could put a flat thing on the page and call it a "button".

Good designers still exist but they are simply crowded out.

The same is happening today with the AI generated apps. Most front ends now in another 10 years will be filled with AI generated apps. But good design and applications will be around but they will be crowded out.

And you see this in almost other industries as well. For example, architecture has simply gotten worse. A building from today looks much, much worse than let's say a building from even 300 years back.

So we will simply have worse software and worse performing software which breaks down all the time in the near future and we will all suffer but there is no solution out of this.

Things don't always get better.

> A building from today looks much, much worse than let's say a building from even 300 years back

You don’t even have to go back that far. They still knew how to build decent buildings just 80-90 years ago. I think it all kinda changed after the Second World War. Maybe they needed to conserve money and build as much as possible?

I'm not sure how accurate it was in its argument for causality, but I recently saw a video arguing that architecture worsened from the invention of caulk for building sealant. With the ability to fill all gaps easily, buildings no longer needed to be designed and built with overlapping layers to prevent water and other elements getting in. This significantly reduced complexity and led to very simplified buildings.

On the argument that a bit of aesthetics is relatively minor if your building is otherwise super expensive?

The argument is that pre-caulk, the aestetics of a building came in pert due to design requirements. Those designs requirements disappeared post-caulk, as you can just fill gaps between any 2 panes with caulk. And with all things, we seem to regress to the lowest common denominator.

100% SaaS will suffer the most, mostly big SaaS.

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