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The "flatness" in many designs these days really bother me.

My 85 year old dad has completely given up on using technology. He has always struggled with it, but at least in the Windows 95 / Windows 2000 days, things were pretty consistent: an embossed button, that looked like a physical button, was clickable. A scroll bar meant that there was more. Icons usually had significantly different colors from each other and so were easily distinguishable.

Now days, how am I to explain to him what can be clicked, and where you can drag to scroll? Every app has their own "visual design language", and all try to aim to be as flat, colorless, and minimal as possible. You have to know "secret codes" like where to swipe, to do actions. It's tough for folks who don't live and breathe software every day all day.

2 comments

Until the early 2000s, consistency between applications used to be a top priority in UI design. There were decades of serious usability research underpinning the Windows and Mac interfaces, and the APIs were finally getting to the point where you could spin up a standard UI with useful controls and trust that it follows platform guidelines, inherits accessibility features, etc.

Then came the double punch of web and mobile. All the hard-won lessons of desktop consistency were thrown out of the window. Many UI designers used to have a background in psychology and cognitive science; they were replaced by graphic design graduates whose primary concern was picking custom fonts and drawing pop-up menu buttons that look nothing like the OS standard component.

A lot of managers got “design thinking” religion and drew exactly the wrong lessons. They started believing design leadership is a fourth-grade Steve Jobs imitation: wear a turtleneck, bark opinions in meetings, and make sure their product UI is a completely custom thing with lots of blank space, no useful information density, and controls that look like plain text.

There’s no going back. Apple could have made a difference by enforcing iOS UI guidelines more strongly in the early days of the platform, but that opportunity was lost. The web remains beyond hope as even the most basic UI components are constantly reinvented by graphic designers wielding Figma because the browser is a useless UI platform.

On top of that, I always loved that standard GUI elements like buttons and text fields came with batteries included: they could be navigated with keyboard only, they were easy to read for screen readers, they followed OS contrast settings for the vision impaired, and so forth. All of this required minimal or no effort at all on developer's side.

Accessibility has dramatically gone downhill since then. Everyone's re-inventing the same thing in Electron, but rarely do they reach the usability of a standard dialog in Windows 2000.

Dark Mode is particularly my pet peeve: as long as applications in that era referenced OS color constants instead of hard-coding color values, they automatically followed OS color scheme without any extra work. Nowadays companies put out press releases and blog posts and parade dark mode around as if it was an achievement.

> There’s no going back. Apple could have made a difference by enforcing iOS UI guidelines more strongly in the early days of the platform, but that opportunity was lost. The web remains beyond hope as even the most basic UI components are constantly reinvented by graphic designers wielding Figma because the browser is a useless UI platform.

I can't help but to wonder what UI that's designed for maximum usability and familiarity would look like. Something extremely boring and functional, perhaps close to the old Windows looks, before they had a bunch of different design systems in the same OS.

Perhaps a vaguely modern project like this would be something like SerenityOS: https://serenityos.org/

Or, for something more mainstream, I think Linux with XFCE and one of the Redmond themes comes close, but then again lots of software doesn't conform to that (e.g. anything that's based on Electron): https://www.xfce-look.org/find?search=redmond

That said, the Wise design looks appropriate when compared with the current state of the rest of the industry and the color contrast compliance is nice.

Exactly. Even those that used to be the leaders, Apple and Microsoft, seem to have forgotten the user aspect of a user interface.

Most apps are designed for power users, since that's the cohort that drives revenue and LTV

I disagree, most apps are designed for the lowest common denominator, though they do a poor job of that.

Power users want settings and customizability to make their flows better, but those are not "beautiful" or are "distractions". See: the decline of evernote.

As a power user, I much prefer denser and more information rich UIs. Just tried Windows 11 for the first time today. The file browser's "detail" mode (which I'd consider the power user mode) has been destroyed by making it multi-line and adding a ton of padding, so now I can only see half has many files on a screen as before...