I miss 80s computer UIs when everything was high-contrast boxes and thin colored lines. 90% of modern UI design is boxes with rounded edges and shadows. Weenie Hut Jr's-ass design. I want to feel like I'm deploying my shitposts on a lunar orbiter not ordering a Happy Meal at a suspiciously sticky McDonald's kiosk
Agreed, if only because a return to this kind of UI would mean a return to DIFFERENT buttons for DIFFERENT things, which SAY what they do instead of expecting the user to memorize a set of proprietary glyphs for each device, none of which even appear until you hover the mouse over a specific completely unmarked spot on the screen.
Yah we as a culture need to sit down and have a long conversation about what the hell we're doing with icons. If I have to mouse over a UI element so I can get a tooltip that tells me what an icon stands for, you've failed. FAILED. Like, here's the side panel in VSCode, which I spend literally my entire working day looking at. We've got:
- files (generally recognized)
- search (generally recognized)
- random circles (it's git, not sure how recognized that is)
- start debugger (busy, but can be inferred by the bug)
- random squares (It's the plugins)
- More random squares (github actions)
What are we doing here. Why does everything need to be an icon. If your icon is just an abstract shape that doesn't actually stand for anything just try again. Icons make sense where you have a generally recognized ideogram for something. Like the search magnifying glass, or a sign at a beach that has a bonfire with an X through it. If there is no generally recognized ideogram, or it's a context where you can't draw a detailed pictogram (like a small button on a UI, or a sign that someone is viewing from a distance inside a car) then just don't use a fucking icon. Just use a word or something. Even if you do have a bunch of icons that are properly understood ideograms, if there's too many of them your brain just gets overloaded trying to convert between a concept and any number of available abstract images.
This might sound dramatic, but go onto the internet an search Flight Management Computer. As in, the computers they use to run fucking airplanes. Not a god damn icon or ideogram in sight. Just words, letters, numbers, and abbreviations. Not a great setup for a casual user of a UI, but for an expert user, like a pilot or someone staring at the same software window all day, it requires less cognitive load to find a single button in a complex UI, and an expert user can more easily guess what a button does. Maybe this is an utterly left-field take or something, but PLUG is a lot easier to parse than "three boxes and another box". Comparing cockpit UIs to software development might sound excessive but come on, it's a field where people devote entire careers to human factors and human-machine interface design. We need it too, jesus (and don't get me started on checklists, something that almost every Ops team is absolutely awful at designing, while NASA and the NTSB have spent millions of dollars and published countless papers on so pilots don't skip over a takeoff checklist and crash their fucking plane after they forget to set the flaps).
