A few weeks ago, we talked about a project within KDE to revive two of their classic themes, Oxygen and Air, and polish them up to make them usable on the current versions of KDE. The developers and designers working on this project say they’ve been utterly surprised by just how popular this news has proven to be, and Filip Fila published a blog post with some thoughts on this unexpected popularity. Why are people yearning so strongly for user interfaces from the past?
That’s the real story underneath the retro-yearning. It isn’t a simply story of people wanting their childhood from the 2000s back. It’s that a lot of ‘the new’ we’ve been offering doesn’t satisfy. It doesn’t have personality. It doesn’t feel warm. It doesn’t feel like it was made with the idea of being anything more than a clean product that gets the job done. The escapism towards the past is a symptom. A symptom of unmet needs, not mere sentimentality.
↫ Filip Fila
Fila uses modern architecture as an example, and I think it’s an apt one. While monumental modern architecture can easily be beautiful and striking, it’s the mundane buildings all around us that just don’t seem to elicit any positive emotions, no sense of belonging or safety. As Fila also notes, the decades-long swing to minimalism in both architecture and UI design isn’t merely because of a preference among designers, but also because minimalism is a hell of a lot cheaper to produce. A building with very little ornamentation and basic, straight lines is much easier, and thus cheaper, to design, construct, and maintain. The same applies to graphical user interface design.
There are some signs that the pendulum is starting to swing back towards more instead of less, in all aspects of design. More and more people are loudly demanding buildings to adopt more classical elements, and as we can all attest to here on OSNews, the longing for aspects of UI design from the ’90s and early 2000s to make a return is strong. And not just among us deep in the weeds, either; I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen normal people utterly confounded by modern UI design.
Anyway, bring back beveled edges.
If I can ever find time to finish my “Millennium Universal Native HIG” (It’s gonna take a while, because doing it properly requires digging back into things like the history of the Apple Lisa to be able to make authoritative citations to the user studies that showed that design decision X wasn’t just aesthetic), then one thing that will show up in that “Aesthetics-agnostic run-down of what we’d be seeing if the convergence of Windows 9x, classic Mac OS, GNOME 2, KDE, etc. had continued” document is an instruction on how to use raised and recessed stylings to indicate interactability.
(I can’t say more than that yet, because, while “buttons should be raised” and “text-entry fields should be recessed” is obvious, checkboxes and radio buttons have existed as either and I want to dig into what the actual intended rules were, rather than trying to reverse-engineer something like “Things which can take input focus should be recessed unless they are not stateful, in which case they should be raised”.)
…and yes, design elements like putting keyboard shortcuts in menus where they can be easily discovered first appear in the Apple-internal Lisa User Interface Standards document from 1980 and digging around on sites like folklore.org can find mention of replacing earlier designs with ones we now take for granted based on user testing.
Thom Holwerdaa,
I agree with this and while some would probably abuse us of seeing through rose colored glasses, the flat thin minimalism is actually making UIs more difficult to see/click/interact with.
Screens have so many pixels for expressive interfaces, and yet feature density is going down. Despite these developments UI designers have gotten so stingy that often hitboxes for things like scrollbars and window borders have less feedback and become more error prone to use. I get there but disappearing controls and misclicking add to the frustration and for their part modern designers are apathetic to it. Old designers would have fixed it. And the comedy of it all is that many applications are filled with empty whitespace – useless whitespace took priority over usability! I do think there’s merit in bringing back UI and usability guidelines, but it seems like most people are driven more by fads than usability. So I wonder if this is actually “backlash” or just a new retro fad?
> the flat thin minimalism is actually making UIs more difficult to see/click/interact with.
Is it a button? Is it just text? Click on it, see what happens next!
Without blur the windows will look like one : https://imgur.com/a/e7l2Hr9
This is crazy and so hard to use! I miss the old days like BeOS and WinXP/7 being to use the windows and prompts without even searching much on the screen!
I miss the old, wide, persistent scrollbars. I particularly dislike the hidden scrollbar that only reveals itself when the pointer is hovering over it, and then only in its thinnest form, expanding only when you actually drag it.
*nod*
“Overlay scrollbars” (the jargon for those hover scrollbars) are objectively inferior in every way except one: When you’re on a portrait-mode smartphone driven by fat fingers (a “coarse pointer”, in CSS jargon) and desperately need every ounce of horizontal space you can get.
ssokolow (Hey, OSNews, U2F/WebAuthn is broken on Firefox!),
On mobile the cost/benefit analysis changes for scrollbars.
1) There’s much less screen space
2) Scrolling the content directly using fingers is intuitive and fairly fast (misclicking can be an issue).
But when UI designers decided to gimp scrollbars on desktop, it made the desktop experience worse without a corresponding benefit (other than more empty whitespace). Most designers go for form over function, but this makes them guilty of creating new accessibility problems that previously didn’t exist. I remember when google did this to chrome and mozilla did it to firefox… all these years later their usability is still bad. The desktop would be more accessible if they had done nothing.
Don’t get me started on why “natural scrolling” on the desktop just aint.
TL;DR: Trackpads and mouse wheels move the viewport (i.e. the scrollbar thumb), not the content being viewed.
Yeah, I don’t understand the move toward flat/minimalist UIs on the desktop. In no particular order:
* I miss the use of bevels and gradients to distinguish between UI elements that are movable, clickable, and resizable and those that are not.
* Menubars were very good. One reason was that they made keyboard shortcuts easy to discover. Another is that the commands in them are searchable. A third is that they follow a consistent pattern across applications; even if I’ve never used a piece of software before I know how to export data from it or where to find its documentation.
* Scrollbars are handy for reasons you might not think of. Among other things they make it easier to tell whether a frozen webpage is a problem with the page/browser or with your input device.
* Sometimes Maximalism is just fun, man. It’s satisfying to burn up a window or throw the desktop cube around or have a desktop where every application looks like a piece of greasy machinery. There are places in a UI for well-chosen artistic flourishes.
That’s been decaying for much longer. I think it might have been GNOME that pioneered the cargo-culting of UI design that is “Edit > Preferences…” when, if you look at the Macintosh HIG, it’s pretty clear that it’s intended to be for operations which alter “user content”.
(TL;DR: The “Edit.” menu is supposed to contain document-scoped operations, not application-scoped ones. That’s why, outside GNOME, you find preferences in a menu like “Tools” (commonplace on Windows, historically), “Settings” (KDE convention), or “Options” (FeatherPad, etc.).
Firefox is guilty of this in that it has a Tools menu with things like “Extensions and Themes” if you enable the menu bar but it pulls “Preferences” out into “Edit” on Linux.
Concerning minimalism, I use JWM (Joe’s Window Manager ) for X on my OpenBSD and Debian/Void linux boxes. JWM is configured (e.g. menu system) using a single XML file, making it easy to clone/modify a window-manager setup for same/different operating systems. A relatively simple approach in avoiding the more bloated desktop-environment paradigm.