• she/they

pdx queer dev, now an Old


lagomorphosis
@lagomorphosis
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IndiLatrani
@IndiLatrani

...and the reason this happens is capitalism.

Really, I think there are a lot of reasons why things have gotten flatter over time. A lot of times this isn't exactly what I'd call UX design per se (which herein I define as 'the process by which we center the needs of people when we design things). A lot of it is really trend-driven, yeah.

But if we dive a level deeper, I see this coming back to profit-motive in some really frustrating ways.

The OP actually makes a motion in this direction talking about how some of it is due to covering phones. I'd go more broadly: These design trends, and reliance on design systems, is in part done in the interest of making it easy to scale. It's never enough to build an app that does one good thing on one platform. You have to be ready to do everything on every platform. You're not just a chat client for desktops, you're a "communication platform" across desktop, mobile, and gods know what else.

This also ties into something I've lamented myself, which is how much apps have moved away from just having "fun" features. This really hit me the other day when I was playing around with the music app on my old 3DS, discovering it had not only all sorts of little Nintendo-themed visualizations (in 3D!) but also some audio filters which, while being objectively bad, are still silly fun. And I was thinking, when was the last time I got excited about the visualizer on a music app? My phone apps don't even HAVE them.

So here's the thing. Every feature that gets added to a commodity app has to be tied somehow to metrics, all of which ultimately come down to "making money," and fun doesn't make money, at least not in a way that makes it work out for the people who make product decisions. You might not believe it, but 'designing for delight' is a thing UX designers actually talk about a lot as somthing to strive for. To reference my definition of UX design above, it addresses a user need, in this case an emotional one. Fun feels good. But tying that to revenue is very hard, and so that stuff gets cut, or never prioritized in the first place.

Aesthetics are, in this perspective, a form of 'delight', the one that actually get some attention, because your app has to look like something. But there's the cheap-as-free way to just 'put some aesthetics on it' by using that trendy minimalist flat design. Because doing more requires more effort, for unclear profit, so doesn't get prioritized.


illuminesce
@illuminesce

Yes, love this breakdown. Hard agree.


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in reply to @lagomorphosis's post:

if you're using desktop Firefox you can use custom CSS (and possibly canned add-ons? i forget) to style the scrollbar. mine's always a certain higher-than-default thickness and dark, for example. and doesn't disappear if a page is scrollable.

you know, it used to be a little more turbulent like 3-4 years ago but since then, i haven't noticed my CSS customizations degrading once, as far as i recall.

my one-line UI looks like this, quite a drastic change from default. (the vertical tabs are an add-on. and pardon all the pinned tabs)

usability is actually better in windows 2000 than it is in modern windows. not only is everything much easier to distinguish, but you can change settings without drilling down through a series of windows that span 20 years of implemented-obsoleted-but-never-fully-replaced control panel designs

its genuinely so nauseating to me whenever i have to actually Do something to my computer and it means grappling with the fact that windows 10 is just an uglier wrapper for vista which is, itself, just an uglier wrapper for xp. but im not allowed to just take off the wrapping paper.

honestly yeah, that is the main thing that fucks shit up for haiku i think. definitely not the ONLY thing, but i love how it feels and if i could only use it as a defacto internet kiosk then that'd be an upgrade from it being mostly a novelty cool-UI-toybox

having never used os 9 before (engineer dad -> surplus windows machines from work), using it just feels comfy. i know where UI elements stop, there's enough eye candy with animations etc. to make things feel satisfying to use, i can imagine exactly how the title bar feels to run my fingers over

theres absolutely gonna be jank that i havent run across cause im not gonna connect an ancient laptop to the internet, but feels wise: mwah chefs kiss good nice job

in reply to @IndiLatrani's post: