Rose-Gold-Tinted Liquid Glasses | Hacker News Reader

Rose-Gold-Tinted Liquid Glasses

lmnt.me

44 pointsmantia8 comments

I have a feeling that Liquid Glass is just made for a younger demographic than most people complaining about it right now, and I don’t mean this disrespectfully; the design field has always been brimming with the ideas of young designers, and I’m pretty sure it’s the same thing at Apple.

All the affordances and interface clues we used to have were made with users in mind that had low familiarity with digital interfaces. It’s different now. Children that grew up with iPhones don’t need them; just look at the Instagram app. It’s confusing the hell out of me: you can swipe everywhere, click things that don’t look clickable to me, there’s nested menus like five layers deep. And yet, every single teenager out there is navigating this mess easily.

So I guess this just means the world is changing in a direction many older people don’t like too much, and I don’t really know what to make of that yet.

This isn't true in my experience. They're just used to interfaces being inscrutable by default, so tap and swipe around until something works. And of course they learn how to operate an app like Instagram if they use it all the time. Even the most confusing UI can become muscle memory if you use it frequently. That doesn't mean that it suddenly is good UI.

I never said it was good, just that it follows different paradigms than what older generations are used to.

> Somehow, the introduction of UX designers into the field has marked an era with worse user experiences across every platform.

I often get the sense that every company with a large design org is doomed to eventually ruin its own user interfaces. All those designers aren't being paid to just sit around - gotta justify the headcount to the people approving budgets. If you aren't developing new products then they will instead be tasked with redesigning existing ones, whether or not this is necessary, beneficial, or was ever asked for by users.

I've seen it happen too many times with too many companies to not notice a pattern.

I’ve been doing Ui for 20+ years and I’ve almost never seen a complete design make it out the door. When the project timeline slips it’s the first thing to get compromised by project managers or engineers making decisions to hit a target budget or deadline, none who value a complete user experience. I get that it’s not as valuable as other disciplines but it bothers me when people act like designers ever get to determine what actually ships.

So much truth in that article, I won't reiterate it all. I'll just say that I could have been a rabid fan foaming at the mouth (to put it humorously), but Apple themselves weaned me of that with consistent, repeated and deepening disappointments (“the pendulum never swung back”).

I'll probably keep maintaining my existing macOS apps for the foreseeable future, but my next GUI project will be a Qt app on Linux.

Steve Jobs's words, “design is how it works” have been forgotten in more ways than just the visual style.

I am kind of happy that people are looking back at iOS 7's style & flat design in a whole and can just say: "I hated it then, I hate it now". Because I surely do. Back then if you hated it, you were just being stubborn, you were against change. But I even hate it more today. How is this the visual design that has stuck around for the longest of times?

Is it just me or is the default font / size on this post difficult to read? Sorry for off topic post, but it was hard enough to get through the first paragraph I had to back out and will read later in reader mode.

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