|
It sounds like your main concern is preserving the native look and feel of the OS. I understand the argument, but I don't really understand the reasoning behind it. This is probably me being naive, but (assuming any performance problems are solved) the only reasoning I see to prefer native OS widgets would be to preserve compatibility with adaptive technologies (i.e. screen readers, OS keyboard shortcuts, high scale displays, etc), and to allow for automation of the UI. Maintaining compatibility with adaptive technologies and allowing for automation both seem like good arguments to me. I think it would be challenging to solve those problems, but I think it could be done. Html already has mechanisms to deal with this, so I think another tool kit could take a similar approach. Preserving the native look and feel however, doesn't seem nearly as important to me. I usually customize the look and feel of most desktop applications anyway. For example, changing the color scheme of my terminal, text editor, and IDE. I would hate it if I was forced to use the OS defaults. For example, on osx it's not possible to customize the look and feel of the iterm window, where as with hyper (an electron based terminal emulator) it is possible, and I find that I strongly prefer the later's UI (despite the electron performance issues). Even chrome allows me the ability to customize its UI. Of all the desktop applications I regularly use, there's very few these days that exclusively use the native OS widgets - at the moment evernote is the only one that actually comes to mind. With some exceptions, users seem to manage pretty well on the web where every website already implements a different style of UI. For simple widgets like windows, buttons, textboxes, checkboxes, etc minor differences in style just don't seem like an issue to me. I think users will be able to visually identify a button even if it looks slightly different, and the advantage of allowing customization feels like a worthwhile tradeoff. For more complex UIs (like 3d renders, music editors, video editors, or games) most seem to already implement customized UI elements anyway. What you're suggesting actually feels like a step backwards to me, so I'm genuinely interested to understand why you would want to maintain the same look and feel between applications? How do you currently customize the look and feel of your own environment? |
That's not necessarily true. It's easy on a site like GitHub, where they actually have a UX team and user studies to guide their decisions, but stuff like the Intel HD Graphics Panel would be better if they had just used stock WPF.
See also: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design/