Posted by michaelmior 2 days ago
The democratization of skill-learning is splendid, but boy is it hard to find a non cookie-cutter designer these days.
If you know anyone ..
Ofek (at) nestful dot app
if your product is a personal page or art/game, sure, understandable. Otherwise for apps it is beneficial to have consistent UI. It was the case for decades on desktops, it is true to a certain degree on mobile phones, and it makes users' lives easier.
Nobody on iOS cares what/how your app looks/works on Android, they care that the UX meets the expectations they have of that OS because they're switching between apps on that platform all day every day, people actually moving Android<-->iOS are few and far between, I mean literal decade(s) time-frames that people aren't switching.
They should be tuned for the platform.
I can't use gestures on a PC or Mac but I can on a iPad or Android. Similarly I can control a PC or mac from a proper keybord and mouse but the usual use for iPad/Android is via a single finger.
That’s the worst part of webapps is that they have their own look’n’feel. I don’t want your branding and colours. I want the functionality and get out of my way. I want my own colours and fonts.
First and foremost an UI shouldn't confuse or even worse mislead the user, now button as hammer for everything chaoses of old or branding idiocy of today both are guilty of those crimes.
The art of UI's has progressed, sadly some fresh designers are dogmatic as they are mostly exposed to "beautiful" B2C products rather that internal products and often miss the effectiveness factor of tools.
https://medium.com/@aneel.kaushikk/bulk-rename-utility-redes...
Layout and usability are independent of widget design. I'll take the widgets shown in the "Bulk Rename Facility" over the any of the flat UI "material" nonsense where it's not clear what is clickable and you cannot by process of elimination explore the UI.
That said, usability definitely has been improved over the years. So no, not everything was better then, but the widgets were.
So I immediately got why this could be an example of "out of control UI/UX"... but immediately my eye was drawn to the bolded headings at the top of each section, and then the numbers next to them.
And so pretty much immediately after that it was clear how this worked: select the files I want to rename, checkboxes to select the transformations I want, and press the big Rename button when I'm ready.
Their redesign feels worse. Hiding the details of each transformation feels well intentioned, but it'd get very annoying having to open and close sections: never getting a full picture of the pipeline I'm putting together.
It also hides features I wouldn't expect to exist, like the Js renaming and translation.
I think if we hadn't let UI become implicit marketing and kept it highly HCI-driven we could have had the best of both worlds. But I guess the software industry decided we need new product releases to look different enough to warrant collecting more money, so we're deep down the current path.
People often complain about lack of consistency between Linux desktop apps (e.g. Gtk vs Qt), but the differences are usually compared to the differences between web apps.
Edit: And even for UX -- I am confident in saying we did not reach max usability yet. Some people (me included) are willing to take the risk of (some) unfamiliarity for potential innovation
Well, I might start from researching multi Kinect coordination to scan myself, but I'm not a sane person. You probably are.