Quote:
Originally Posted by Barty
Current trend in UI design is to use thin fonts, no separation lines, low contrast. Look at all the web sites that use gray text on white background. Because black text is too harsh or something. Never mind that most computer monitors are crappy lcds with poor contrast so the text is already gray to begin with. Designers (or the people who pay them) seem to assume everybody has 25 year old 20/20 eyes and large, hi res, good quality monitors they themselves use.
|
I've ranted about that in the Vent and Rant thread not too long ago. I've actually ranted against the web designer in one of my previous companies.
"Dude, you're using a €1500 color calibrated Eizo monitor that shows you every single 0-255 step in each color. You're not yet 30, and you have 120% vision. So you can read light gray text on a white background. I get that. Most people have €100 TN-LCD-screens, and not perfect eyesight."
His reaction basically was: "So what? This is how modern websites should look, and thus I shall design them like that. If you can't read it, tough luck."
Combine that with the huge sticky headers, the combination of huge titles, pictures and banners with tiny body text, and you have a receipt for disaster.
Quote:
|
There's also the tendency to put "accessibility features" in a category by itself rather than designing UI that suits a continuum of needs. You either have perfect eyesight or you're legally blind. I fall in between and it frustrates me to no end dealing with modern GUI.
|
Exactly. My old laptop has a 15.4 inch screen, 1280x800 (98 dpi), and it ran Windows 7. I used that screen at 100%, set the font type to Verdana 10 instead of Tahoma 8, and all is fine. I've been doing this since 1995.
Enter my new laptop. It has a 15.6 inch 1920x1080 screen which I refuse to believe is workable for normal people, as it's 134 dpi. You have to have perfect eyesight to use that. So, I set it to 150%, which basically comes down to 1280x720 @ 15.6 inch, or 94 dpi. However, on Windows 10, I can't set the font to Verdana anymore, and the default Segoe UI is very thin. Add the bloated "let's add huge amounts of white space" GUI of modern programs into that, and you get a computer that is very hard to work with.
I'm not even mentioning newer versions of Office, with tiny grey context menu's that don't even upscale when you set the font to a larger size. Those menu's are hard to read at 150% already on this laptop, let alone at 100%... and if you have a laptop with a TN-screen, you're just totally *****ed.