Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 20th Apr 2012 17:05 UTC
Tobias Bjerrome Ahlin, an interface designer at Spotify, is a big believer in skeuomorphism. Whereas Apple is a strong advocate of this design concept, Microsoft is clearly moving in the exact opposite direction, while Android is in the process of moving away from skeuomorphism entirely, to a more digital experience. As a passionate hater of skeuomorphism in UIs, I found Ahlin's examples to be a bit weak.
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Member since:2005-07-06
do a task as quickly and easily as possible
Yeah, dream on. For a while now it's quite certain we're long past Ballmer's developers x 3 point in time (regardlessof his state of mind
it really was a fairly good dev. period), and you can't be surprised to see almost all UIs targeting people who don't really do tasks, and if they do, their importance is hardly so high not to appreciate the "beauty" and "usability" of the wobbly magic of the new generation of useless and dysfunctional UIs.
Member since:2007-09-23
So any developers reading this...just stop okay? We don't want to be entertained by your stupid program, we are NOT gonna find it "fun" because that is what we have games for, okay? We just want to do our task as cleanly and quickly as possible with as little hassle as possible and I have yet to see any of this junk that keeps getting added everywhere do anything but slow everyone down.
You, sir, are spot on!
An interface should be pretty enough to not be noticed as ugly, but also simple enough to not be noticed either. In fact, the aim of an interface designer, much like the aim of a security admin, should be to have his/her work being noticed as little as possible.
I love it when my users' bug reports, comment, feature requests are about functionality and content, not about the interface itself; this means I've succeeded in my UI design.
On another note: "fun" is totally subjective, and this he uses as a base for his whole argument. Fail.
...making it infinitely easier and more intuitive to carry over knowledge of one application to the next.
This.
Proper UI design takes the memory of the user into serious consideration.
Oh, he worked for Spotify, btw? Not really a well designed application anyone. Not on my Windows 7 box at least. As bad as iTunes and Safari.
/rant
Member since:2005-07-06
> ...making it infinitely easier and more intuitive to carry over knowledge of one application to the next.
This.
Proper UI design takes the memory of the user into serious consideration.
Oh, he worked for Spotify, btw? Not really a well designed application anyone. Not on my Windows 7 box at least. As bad as iTunes and Safari.
This.
Proper UI design takes the memory of the user into serious consideration.
Oh, he worked for Spotify, btw? Not really a well designed application anyone. Not on my Windows 7 box at least. As bad as iTunes and Safari.
Well, Spotify presumably looks the way it does also so that the target demographic groups - large part of them supposedly already used to iTunes - can just carry over their experiences...
Member since:2008-08-27
that stupid "shrink/grow" morphing crap on their UIs
That's not really the same thing, though. I agree that fluff for the sake of fluff is a waste, but feedback on actions is not fluff. And animations, if quick and to the point, are a good method for giving feedback: They are fairly ignorable, while also hard to misunderstand. And if those few hundred ms of animation (that does not keep you from immediately using another window) slows you down, well...
Edited 2012-04-23 09:50 UTC
Member since:2007-11-11
How EXACTLY is this giving any kind of useful feedback? Your argument would have made sense on lets say Win95, where you had a complete new UI paradigm that people needed to learn, but who doesn't know that programs are going to the taskbar? Even adults who have NEVER used a PC before understand this because there is an icon and the name of the program sitting right there in front of them where it wasn't before. And I actually know of which I speak because i recently taught a 53 year old man who had never used a PC how to use both it and the web.
And the simple facts are if it were JUST this one thing? well that would be fine, but in Win 7 for instance we are talking about TWENTY different desktop effects! Its like MSFT and services, if you are running on mains with some monster hexacore then frankly you won't care how much crud they add, but when you are talking mobile devices all that bling bling sucks cycles and hurts battery life.
Honestly I wouldn't even care if MSFT made it easy for the end user to choose, but they don't, they leave it buried under 3 sub menus that the average user will never trip over and with ZERO explanation as to what these things are and what they do. If they gave the user a little wizard at first startup, or even one in ctrlpanel, something that explained what they are and asked if they wanted them? Again not a problem. but all this needless bling added without asking the user and without an easy and simple way for the user to understand what it is, where it is, and how to turn it off is simply inexcusable IMHO.
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Member since:
2007-11-11
The problem with this crap is the same problem with Unity and wobbly windows or MSFT and adding all that stupid "shrink/grow" morphing crap on their UIs and that is for the vast majority they just want to do a task as quickly and easily as possible and all this crud does is slow you down!
You can tell the designers of all this extra fluffy crud think their stuff is so wonderful yet you talk to the users and they'll find it irritating, even if they don't know what it is exactly that is irritating them. Take clippy, I don't know of a single person that was actually helped by that stupid thing but i know a LOT of people that got the brakes put on what they were doing by el stupido popping up at the wrong time and breaking flow. Or all the UI effects, i don't know how many times people have complimented me when i'm done working on their PCs "I don't know what you did but its so fast now!" when in reality all I did was turn off all the stupid effects they were wasting time waiting to finish.
So any developers reading this...just stop okay? We don't want to be entertained by your stupid program, we are NOT gonna find it "fun" because that is what we have games for, okay? We just want to do our task as cleanly and quickly as possible with as little hassle as possible and I have yet to see any of this junk that keeps getting added everywhere do anything but slow everyone down.