Trends in interface design: from love to hate
Buttons that do not look like buttons, MENU CAPITAL LETTERS and much more ...
Flat is becoming very popular. This direction of development first appeared in the design of Microsoft Windows Phone 7. Large elements, buttons, bright colors without any texture or ornament - ideas that later spread to Windows 8, iOS 7, OS X Yosemite, Android L and all applications running on these platforms. Applications no longer tried to portray their contents as objects in the real world. The screen is not a canvas or paper, so why should applications look realistic?
Thus, on the many convenient things used by the old interfaces, the new interfaces simply closed their eyes. We (a group of authors Arstechnika - approx. Transl. ) Come together and have developed several trends in the development of modern interfaces that lead us into a rage. We are sure that you can easily add to this list, we, making it up, tried to keep calm. If you hold back a bit of hatred for modern interfaces, feel free to find her way out in the comments to the topic.
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Too flat buttons that look like plain text.
These small text lines written in red below are actually buttons.
One of the common UI elements that appeared in iOS 7 is a button that does not look like a button at all. And Google is moving there with its Android L. Touch interfaces usually quite easily allow you to start work, but a new trick of iOS — either highlighting or not highlighting text on which you can click — causes me to poke into the screen much more often, without achieving a result. And since the OS behaves inconsistently in terms of what it considers to be a button, I cannot work out a reflex depending on the specific color or font style.
This problem was covered some time ago in the UX Critique blog. It was noted there, for example, that the set of iOS 7 interface elements are buttons masquerading as plain text, or vice versa. In one of the notes , the audio file editing screen is shown , where the word Trim (“Trim”) occurs twice: once as the command header, and the second time as the button, and the difference is only in a slight change in the font thickness:
To start poking your finger at the text, you need a certain habit, because there is no constant color that would distinguish text buttons, but in the end you can put up with it. The worst is the lack of rules as the OS should highlight the button that is clamped. Yes, I'm looking at you now, Shift button.
Reduced information density
Modern operating systems are entirely devoted to space, allowing the elements to "breathe" and be located at a strictly defined distance from each other, in order to optimize for sensory interfaces. This is good ... But all this is achieved at the cost of reducing the density of information. The drawing is taken from the Android History article. It demonstrates how the Youtube application has evolved over time. On the one hand, the early versions look rather miserable, and on the other, the later versions only intervene on the screen with a half video:
This trend is found in other places. Tweetbot 3 shows, by default, less information on the screen than Tweetbot 2:
Folders in iOS 7 on the iPad can display no more than 9 items, compared to 20 in previous versions (although the folders in iOS 7 can hold an unlimited number of items on different screens, while in iOS 6 the number of items in the folder was not more than 20). See how the GMail app grew when it was aligned with Google’s Material Design Guidelines and you’ll understand what I mean. In general, the new design looks nicer, but the number of elements on the screen is steadily decreasing, even though the screen sizes of smartphones are beginning to approach the size of the tablets. Is there really no other way to make an application look beautiful without having to constantly use scrolling?
Unnecessary use of transparency
While many solutions aim to reduce the density of information on the screen, there is another feature so beloved by Apple, which also complicates the understanding of information - translucency. It is worth noting that OS X started with a lot of semi-transparent elements, but over time their number has greatly decreased, and the transparency has been significantly reduced. Transparency creates visual clutter, making it more difficult to find the item you need right now.
But Apple could never completely forget translucency and this resulted in some cases of its return. In OS X Leopard, they made the menu bar transparent, which allowed the menu to shine beautifully, opening up the desktop background. Everything would be fine, unless you use a dark pattern as a background, which makes the names of menu items almost indistinguishable. As a result, the guys from Cupertino surrendered and allowed to turn off transparency.
Now the transparency has returned and it is everywhere. Any window at the whim of developers can become translucent. Thus, users are now forced to rely on the mercy of developers, who determine whether the information in the window should be clearly visible or should be lost in the chaos of background elements that appear through the window.
Apple has earned a reputation as a dictator because it made many decisions based on the opinions of OS developers. These decisions were made to ensure the visual integrity of the interface, because the company felt that end-application developers, with no control and availability, could make front-end solutions hostile to end users. By making transparency optional, Apple gave carte blanche to application developers as if to say, “don't care, do what you want, we don’t care about your users.”
Menu written with CAPS LOCK clamped
The invasion of the menu in ALL CAPITALS mode in modern applications and operating systems from Microsoft is THIS HORROR:
Microsoft could not think of anything worse, well, except that display the menu in white on a white background. Visual Studio’s design team made some sour comments a couple of years ago about why all caps on the menu are a good idea, which is repeated repetitions of the thought that “This makes the menu more visually different” and that “All other applications Microsoft is doing it. ”
No, well, you believe: “First of all, the use of uppercase letters in the menu is a strong feature of modern applications for navigation and in the headers of Microsoft interfaces”? This is ridiculous. Of course, there are ways to fix the menu of some applications so that they are displayed in the correct case, but there is no general way to do this centrally. As well as transparency, the menu, written entirely in capitals, is a terrible design decision and significantly reduces the usability.
Worse, this trend flows into other operating systems. The menu, written by subscription, is a curse of the recent release of OneNote for OS X. Such a menu does not just violate the OS X design agreements, it takes them, drags them off to the back yard, pours gasoline on them and sets fire to them.
Microsoft, what about you? Dismiss the employee who decided that ALL CAPITALS is a good idea.
Flat is becoming very popular. This direction of development first appeared in the design of Microsoft Windows Phone 7. Large elements, buttons, bright colors without any texture or ornament - ideas that later spread to Windows 8, iOS 7, OS X Yosemite, Android L and all applications running on these platforms. Applications no longer tried to portray their contents as objects in the real world. The screen is not a canvas or paper, so why should applications look realistic?
Thus, on the many convenient things used by the old interfaces, the new interfaces simply closed their eyes. We (a group of authors Arstechnika - approx. Transl. ) Come together and have developed several trends in the development of modern interfaces that lead us into a rage. We are sure that you can easily add to this list, we, making it up, tried to keep calm. If you hold back a bit of hatred for modern interfaces, feel free to find her way out in the comments to the topic.
')
Too flat buttons that look like plain text.
These small text lines written in red below are actually buttons.
One of the common UI elements that appeared in iOS 7 is a button that does not look like a button at all. And Google is moving there with its Android L. Touch interfaces usually quite easily allow you to start work, but a new trick of iOS — either highlighting or not highlighting text on which you can click — causes me to poke into the screen much more often, without achieving a result. And since the OS behaves inconsistently in terms of what it considers to be a button, I cannot work out a reflex depending on the specific color or font style.
This problem was covered some time ago in the UX Critique blog. It was noted there, for example, that the set of iOS 7 interface elements are buttons masquerading as plain text, or vice versa. In one of the notes , the audio file editing screen is shown , where the word Trim (“Trim”) occurs twice: once as the command header, and the second time as the button, and the difference is only in a slight change in the font thickness:
To start poking your finger at the text, you need a certain habit, because there is no constant color that would distinguish text buttons, but in the end you can put up with it. The worst is the lack of rules as the OS should highlight the button that is clamped. Yes, I'm looking at you now, Shift button.
Reduced information density
Modern operating systems are entirely devoted to space, allowing the elements to "breathe" and be located at a strictly defined distance from each other, in order to optimize for sensory interfaces. This is good ... But all this is achieved at the cost of reducing the density of information. The drawing is taken from the Android History article. It demonstrates how the Youtube application has evolved over time. On the one hand, the early versions look rather miserable, and on the other, the later versions only intervene on the screen with a half video:
This trend is found in other places. Tweetbot 3 shows, by default, less information on the screen than Tweetbot 2:
Folders in iOS 7 on the iPad can display no more than 9 items, compared to 20 in previous versions (although the folders in iOS 7 can hold an unlimited number of items on different screens, while in iOS 6 the number of items in the folder was not more than 20). See how the GMail app grew when it was aligned with Google’s Material Design Guidelines and you’ll understand what I mean. In general, the new design looks nicer, but the number of elements on the screen is steadily decreasing, even though the screen sizes of smartphones are beginning to approach the size of the tablets. Is there really no other way to make an application look beautiful without having to constantly use scrolling?
Unnecessary use of transparency
While many solutions aim to reduce the density of information on the screen, there is another feature so beloved by Apple, which also complicates the understanding of information - translucency. It is worth noting that OS X started with a lot of semi-transparent elements, but over time their number has greatly decreased, and the transparency has been significantly reduced. Transparency creates visual clutter, making it more difficult to find the item you need right now.
But Apple could never completely forget translucency and this resulted in some cases of its return. In OS X Leopard, they made the menu bar transparent, which allowed the menu to shine beautifully, opening up the desktop background. Everything would be fine, unless you use a dark pattern as a background, which makes the names of menu items almost indistinguishable. As a result, the guys from Cupertino surrendered and allowed to turn off transparency.
Now the transparency has returned and it is everywhere. Any window at the whim of developers can become translucent. Thus, users are now forced to rely on the mercy of developers, who determine whether the information in the window should be clearly visible or should be lost in the chaos of background elements that appear through the window.
Apple has earned a reputation as a dictator because it made many decisions based on the opinions of OS developers. These decisions were made to ensure the visual integrity of the interface, because the company felt that end-application developers, with no control and availability, could make front-end solutions hostile to end users. By making transparency optional, Apple gave carte blanche to application developers as if to say, “don't care, do what you want, we don’t care about your users.”
Menu written with CAPS LOCK clamped
The invasion of the menu in ALL CAPITALS mode in modern applications and operating systems from Microsoft is THIS HORROR:
Microsoft could not think of anything worse, well, except that display the menu in white on a white background. Visual Studio’s design team made some sour comments a couple of years ago about why all caps on the menu are a good idea, which is repeated repetitions of the thought that “This makes the menu more visually different” and that “All other applications Microsoft is doing it. ”
No, well, you believe: “First of all, the use of uppercase letters in the menu is a strong feature of modern applications for navigation and in the headers of Microsoft interfaces”? This is ridiculous. Of course, there are ways to fix the menu of some applications so that they are displayed in the correct case, but there is no general way to do this centrally. As well as transparency, the menu, written entirely in capitals, is a terrible design decision and significantly reduces the usability.
Worse, this trend flows into other operating systems. The menu, written by subscription, is a curse of the recent release of OneNote for OS X. Such a menu does not just violate the OS X design agreements, it takes them, drags them off to the back yard, pours gasoline on them and sets fire to them.
Microsoft, what about you? Dismiss the employee who decided that ALL CAPITALS is a good idea.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/229697/
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