Quote:
Originally Posted by openartist
Hi all,
Kaeser seemed to be the only one interested in implementing any sort of redesign. It's often the case that designers can be met with a kind of resistance to something that people have grown attached to.
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OTOH, flat and monochrome with poor contrast text to grey backgrounds is a productivity fail. Vista was stupid with the eye candy, MS admit it now. Win3.x with the "3D update" is similar to Win9x, NT4.0, Win 2K and in XP the "fisher price" style and even graduated shading could be turned off, also all the animation. Even Vista could relatively easily be made like Win9x / NT4.0/ win2K /XP.
GUI is not an area that benefits from major shifts of appearance and operation. Win10 is almost not configurable. It ignores everything Xerox researchers learnt in the 1970s and everything MS did from 1992 onwards.
GUI element failures in Win10:
- By default scroll bars hide (this at least can be turned off)
- By default windows snap (can be turned off, but hard to find setting)
- About three main places for settings
- App store/tile/We don't call it Metro now programs in a different place to "regular" programs.
- Is the text a link, a checkbox, part of a radio-button set or a label. Does it open a popup window (modal or not) or replace the window.
- Is this window behaving like a browser with Back instead of Close, OK, Cancel?
- Why do no buttons have even a slight highlight / shadow (reversed when pressed) and rarely an indication if locked out or default.
- Overly skeuomorphic elements and buttons are silly eye candy, but totally flat grey and dark icons simplified to the point of being unrecognisable is a failure.
There is much more. But, please no-one copy Win 10. The word "modern" doesn't mean what MS thinks it means. There are ideas from the dawn of time (wheels, fire, beer, bread, wine, cooking), 1st Century (books instead of scroll, central heating), 16th C etc and especially the 1830s to 1930s (Victorian bent wood chairs, Bauhaus chairs) that are timeless. We don't scrap real world ideas because they are more than 20 years old if the design is sound.
Also Google's Android "Material Design" is a failure. In general their GUI is poor.
Mozilla has progressively made Firefox and Thunderbird on the desktop hard to use.
A small screen, desktop and a TV need quite different designs of GUI. MS with Win8 made the same mistake as with Win CE but in the opposite direction. You CAN'T have the same GUI for everything, though check boxes (please no images of slide switches), tabs, radio buttons and actual buttons can be similar.
Just because a UI looks like a corporate B&W laser printout and is regarded as "modern" doesn't make it any good.
The Nielsen Norman Group did good stuff 15 years ago. I've no idea if they have caught the flat and make everything awkward on the altar of excessive "simplicity". W10 is at the opposite extreme to Vista. Both are failures, but W10 is worse as there is almost no user control and the settings that do exist are hard to find.