Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

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> This really wasn't an issue in the 1990s and even into the early 2000s. Back then, most applications [..] followed rather clear and uniform UI conventions.

Hah. Haha. Hahahahaha.

If you pulled similar samples of UIs from the 90s and from today, I bet you’d find about the same proportion of fucked up designs in both (and that proportion would be shockingly high).

Some applications (especially on Mac OS) tried to stick to Apple’s human interface guidelines, and some of those were successful, but even on the Mac there have always been heaps and heaps of horrible broken user interfaces. And don’t get me started on Windows applications from the 1990s. What a steaming pile...

I think what’s changed today is that (a) with ubiquitous internet and a very easy install process, people end up interacting with more applications (at least to download, play with once or twice, and then forget about),

The consistency of a UI is quite distinct from the quality or the usability of a UI. You're incorrectly blurring these very different concepts.

I never claimed that all UIs back then were "perfect", or that there weren't "badly designed" UIs. I was very clearly talking about consistency between different applications running on the same system.

When using applications from that period of time, one could expect to find a menu bar and menus that were quite similar to those of other applications. Of course there were application-specific menus and items, but there was at least a common subset shared by nearly all applications, especially any that were designed with even the minimal level of care.

The same held true for toolbars, keyboard shortcuts, common dialogs, and so forth. There were also general conventions for how the application-specific parts of UIs looked and behaved. While not everyone followed these conventions, of course, most of the major and seriously-designed applications did.

We have lost much of that today. It's particularly bad when it comes to mobile apps, and getting worse when it comes to desktop applications. Yes, Microsoft and Apple themselves are to blame, to some extent. But it goes much beyond that these days. Inconsistency is the norm, and that does lead to inefficiency.

> Some applications (especially on Mac OS) tried to stick to Apple’s human interface guidelines

It would have worked, too, if Apple had ever been willing to follow suit.

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