The desire to be subtle and pretty, even where this makes things less obvious (some flat designs are particularly bad for this: little indication of what is actionable, scrollbars becoming single lines of pixels or invisible entirely, title bar text being slightly-whiter-than-mid-grey when active and slightly-darker-than-mid-grey otherwise and sometimes the reverse).ģ. The conflicting priorities of the range of devices (trying to make something work on a small touch-based mobile and a large desktop environment, often creating something that is imperfect on both).Ģ. There are several parts to the consistency problem, and the overall UX-is-more-shite-these-days problem, including:ġ. It is amazing how hard it can be sometimes to see at a glance which app currently has input focus on a Windows desktop, particularly with multiple screens. And it isn't just the apps: whole OS UIs have fallen apart, with levels of inconsistency well beyond that which Mac and Windows people used to poke fun at the Unix world for. I wasn't aware it was a secret! Though it certainly isn't just web apps: the desktop has taken steps backwards too, and not just where bad web apps are hosted in simple desktop wrappers.īack in the 90s and 00s I remember a strong push for consistency and discoverability, where now that often takes a back seat to aesthetic matters and shiny new things. > The dirty secret of web apps is that we’ve mostly gone backwards in usability compared to native desktop apps from 25 years ago. But still, just like 20 years ago, people can still make bad software.Įdit: lol - just now as I'm trying to uninstall some AMD drivers, I get a dialogue box asking me to visit a long Microsoft Store URL, and it's neither clickable nor copyable. I think overall, I think there is a positive trend for usability of software on both the web and 'desktop' (whatever that means). dubious quality (I'm staring at you, new macOS Settings)

Not to mention the issue that both macOS and Windows suffers from being in the middle of a UI-kit transition, with a bunch of half-and-half apps across the system, with the new system being of. Is this UI modal? If I click this will it 'pop' me to another view? Or will it open a new window? Is that window represented in task bar/switcher/dock/whatever? How do I get back to where I was before? How is this limited to the web? 'The Desktop' suffers significantly more from not having a single, understandable paradigm. 'Web is bad, the old days were good, designers are the worst, developers are the best' This review of old Netscape Composer reminds of how important that was. Everybody could author a HTML page and some gradually built their skills towards apps. Worse often wins by its simplicity and ubiquity. The web is the worst application delivery platform of the past 30 years, so of course it’s the one we got stuck with.

(Or maybe it’s just an icon and not a button? No way of knowing, since the conventions that made buttons obvious have been thrown away.)

Just pray there are tooltips so you can figure out what happens if you press one of these icon buttons in a web app. Icons are nowadays tiny monochrome line scribbles without labels. On the web, designers are primarily graphics artists who pick fonts and pride on making buttons look like nobody else’s buttons. The user never quite knows whether an action will trigger a multi-second page refresh, whether the back button does anything useful, etc.ĭesktop UIs had professionally designed human interface guidelines based on decades of actual research. Pieces of desktop UI are reproduced using a woefully limited framework inside a static request-based page navigation model. The dirty secret of web apps is that we’ve mostly gone backwards in usability compared to native desktop apps from 25 years ago. “So, how was it to use a WYSIWYG web page editor from over 20 years ago? Quite pleasant, actually.”

Mozilla web development