I might just be me but as I get older I'm finding it harder and harder to navigate UIs even though I've been an early adopter of technology throughout my life. I wonder if it is a sign of cognitive decline or just the consequence of having to remember an increasing amount of perpetually changing UIs.
Huh? No way I'd go back to the 90s for UIs. I'm not saying our modern UIs are perfect, and there is a lot of changes for fashion reasons, but there are generally far better these days on whole.
Well, either you were there in the 90s and had a very different experience than I did, or you weren't there in the 90s and are romanticizing what you have read about UIs back then. I mean, you can strip out a vast amount of functionality from a modern UI and get back to the simplicity of the 90s, but you'll hardly get anything done.
Funnily enough the new GNOME is quite great according to the listed requirements - everything is discoverable, Fitt’s law is taken into account (the corner has infinite size), but at the same time it is very good for power users, you get super+search, super+mouse wheel to change between desktops, and the best, really smooth gestures on laptops to change between neighboring virtual desktops.
If you add that the whole thing is extensible, I really feel like all its criticism comes from “it’s different than what I used”, if not more malicious views.
Wow, I disagree with you on almost every point! :) Which is not a bad thing, people naturally have different perspectives after all. I tried to like GNOME for literally years, but as a power user found that it got in my way more often than not:
* Features that I got accustomed to and used on a daily basis got removed in order to clean up some module or another, under the justification that "nobody used it anyway." Well, nobody asked me apparently? Requests to bring these features back were politely declined or ignored.
* GNOME seemed to go all-in on a "hybrid computing" experience because the developers believed that the future was portable devices that you could both carry around with you and then dock to a keyboard and screen at work or home. That never materialized (or hasn't materialized yet) so now a lot of GNOME functionality is stuck _between_ these two worlds and doesn't mesh cleanly with either.
* The GNOME devs' answer to functionality not invented here is to just make an extension for it. Except that installing extensions is (or was?) a burdensome affair, and GNOME breaks the extension API often enough that you might not be able to upgrade your GNOME if the extensions you use haven't been updated by their maintainers.
* As a desktop user, I want to be able to resize windows. But, there are no longer any window borders. Instead, there is an area that you can grab with the mouse to resize the window. But it's invisible, you can't _see_ it unless you hover your mouse over it. And it's on the _inside_ of the window, meaning it actually covers up application controls. Thus, you can place your mouse cursor directly over a scroll bar, click, start dragging, and find yourself resizing the window instead of scrolling the document.
* Don't get me started on the thicc window title bars.
* I prefer focus-follows-mouse and this is just super-duper broken in GNOME, in a number of ways.
I think software developers would do well to get away from the idea that their one project can possibly be suitable for all users. We clearly have users with different goals and levels of experience and it's not a bad thing to more narrowly target those users.
Your first point is literally what I mentioned, “it’s not what I’m used to”. Gnome got completely revamped, and that in itself should not be a criticism of the new thing itself.
Gnome did take into account this hybrid way, but as I mentioned didn’t compromise on anything for that. It’s perfectly usable on both desktop and laptop.
Gnome is an opinionated desktop environment, and the more customization you allow, the bigger the surface area of your software is. I think gnome struck a good balance between being customizable to a degree, but not making their unpaid job all that harder. I use vanilla gnome for what its worth.
As a power user you likely have your hand on the keyboard, so a resize is just super+right mouse, which has a huge target area of almost the whole window. Same for moving.
I have tried focus follows many years ago, but can’t say anything about its current state.
Was it really peak UI? Software is so much more complex today and accessibility and UX is actually a thing now. I feel like if you tried to make a modern program with a 90s UI approach, it would have glaring flaws.
I don't have that much trouble with modern UIs, but that's because of accumulated generalized experience with UIs and programming, plus modern UIs are simpler by virtue of most new software being perpetual MVPs / toys. However, I've also noticed I have much less patience for "UI innovation".
When I was younger, I was under less pressure and could blow some time having fun with new software. These days, I have very little free time, and usually have a specific job or task to do for the new software - the UI is effectively standing between me and my goal, so the more I have to learn about it, the more irritated I get.
It's always irritation and never hopelessness, because I have 100% confidence I can figure the UI out given enough time - I just hate having to spend that time.
Note: that's not the same as "simple UIs == better UIs". Complex and powerful UIs with good manuals are the best for me. After all, if I used some software once, there's a very good chance I'll need to use it again, and again, and then some, probably in one or few sessions. Whatever time and frustration simple UIs and toy software save on first use, come back tenfold when I realize the UI is so dumb it doesn't have any way to batch repetitive operations.
Slightly differing UIs are not interesting enough for your brain to activate problem solving and learning. But they are different enough for you to get slightly confused in minor ways.
I think that’s why some people streamline their UIs as much as possible: vim/emacs/terminal everything, same bindings everywhere etc. all optimized for muscle memory and comfort.
Part of Englebart's great demo was about how they'd designed different kinds of interfaces for adults and children. Adults would have sequences of (chorded keyboard) commands that they could learn to do work rapidly. Children would have UI like is ubiquitous today - it could be explored and would be discoverable.
I never knew what research that was based on, but it sounds like you'd prefer the grown-up experience that most companies just don't make. The closest we see are hotkeys for things like Office or our IDEs, but those can lack consistency from one version to the next and certainly from one piece of software to the next.
Not only do I need to guess which of the 3 horizontal bars is the resizable one, it's literally a single pixel in height and very hard to click.
Flat design is such a regression in terms of UX it's difficult to comprehend how intuitive the Windows 95 style was, largely from reliance on universally familiar spatial metaphors.
That's ignoring the fact that none of the icons have labels so you have to learn the Mayan alphabet to figure out what they do (and these icons change sometimes too!)
It also seems like preference dialogs have just sorted given up any pretense of trying to make sense. Instead of navigating a hierarchy, I'm supposed to guess which keywords to search for in order to find the correct option I want to change. It's a real downgrade. The affordances of search boxes are notoriously ambiguous for this exact type of task. I want to change the pixel scaling on the screen. What do I search for? Screen? Display? Resolution?
>> That's ignoring the fact that none of the icons have labels so you have to learn the Mayan alphabet to figure out what they do...
Remember when the file menu was removed and you couldn't figure out how to save your work? Oh, it's that decorative symbol looking thing in the corner above everything else. And when you click it, there isn't a menu at all, but a huge control panel thing appears.
Every user that creates something wants to save it. This is not where you put the save command.
Amen. Obsidian is a good example of what you are talking about. So many different icons I have to remember plus the way to search my notes involves clicking on what appears to be a text label (Files) to reveal the search icon.
Wow, that is a really good example of how bad things have gotten. That software is both confusing and very ugly.
One thing I've thought about is some kind of "Quick tooltip", like a toggle to make the UI always show tooltips instantly on hover. That could be an accessibility feature built into the OS.
Dark themes have a habit of being bad at this, the way that in your screenshot there’s no distinction between panel title and panel contents, and intra- and inter-panel borders are all the same. You’ve just generally got fewer grades to practically work with than in light themes, even if you don’t mess things up through a badly misguided sense of æsthetics (which they have).
A light theme would be much more likely (though certainly not guaranteed, since the flat craze began) to have a light grey background on the panel title, a white background on the panel contents, and no border between the two (or at least a lighter grey than the inter-panel border), so that the only border (or at least the strongest border) would be above the panel (that is, above the panel title), making things much clearer. (The panel toolbar would also tend to get a light grey background, similar to the panel title’s or between that of the panel title and panel contents.)
