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by munificent
1812 days ago
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> The fact that most users don't explicitly care is irrelevant — platform conventions are important. They teach a user how to use a new app without having to poke around. I agree that's important. But I think it's much less important these days now that operating system developers seem happy to churn their platform's UX every couple of years too. The days when you could read the Apple Human Interface Guidelines and understand how all Mac apps would behave for the next decade are long gone, unfortunately. For reasons I don't totally understand, the platform vendors are themselves constantly invalidating the information in users' heads, so there's simply less in there for application developers to build on anyway. |
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Since the top-level comment in this subthread is about accessibility, I should mention that the churn is especially bad for blind people using screen readers. That's why I'm apprehensive about Windows 11.
When Windows 10 came out, I was the developer of a third-party screen reader. I did what I could to deal with the platform churn, in the limited time that I could give to it. But I was happy that no critical applications (even Office) were following where the Windows team was trying to go with the platform; once you started up your applications, your PC basically worked the same as before -- even more or less the same as Windows 7.
Then I joined the Windows accessibility team at Microsoft. I suspect that if there had been any significant UI churn in Windows while I was there, the cognitive dissonance that I felt during that time would have been stronger. Perhaps I could have done some good for the experience of using Windows 11 with a screen reader if I had stayed, but then again, an individual developer in an org that big usually doesn't have a lot of power. Anyway, I had my reasons for leaving, and I'm glad to be free to share my honest opinions on Windows again (within the bounds of my NDA).