[ftio]

Plagiarizing a comment of mine from another post:

In general, cutesy UIs are fun only the very first time you use them. But they’re a liability in the long term because once the novelty of the cuteness wears off, you risk really annoying your users, especially in high-stress scenarios.

Expanding on that: Clippy is endearing now because it hasn't annoyed anyone for a decade+, but it was a real nuisance — difficult to disable and not nearly useful enough to justify its incessant interrupting.

Avoid cutesy UIs.

[BossingAround]

In the same way, I really dislike using references to popular movies or characters in code samples or sample projects, esp. if it is the official docs for a framework or something similar.

I see a ton of "battle of superheroes" kinds of apps that try to demonstrate cool stuff, like deploying distributed applications over multiple clouds/k8s distributions, using serverless, Istio, and who knows what. But I just can't get over the fact that such tutorials are not made for me, as I've not watched any superhero movie since I was ~10 years old.

[eyelidlessness]

This is why most of my cheeky references in test fixtures are from David Bowie lyrics. Almost everyone will recognize them, and if you don’t… congratulations, now you get an opportunity to be more familiar with David Bowie! No one doesn’t want that.

[SebastianKra]

I don't think cuteness anything to do with it.

It's when style interferes with the functionality, that people start to get annoyed. But that applies to any aspect really: Animations, Minimalism / Skeuomorphism, Simplicity / Complexity...

Many apps successfully introduce cuteness through iconography and illustrations. Eg. Duolingo, Bear Notes, TunnelBear. Also look at Panic who have a (very mild) playful aesthetic in their power-user development tools: https://nova.app

[jchw]

Cutesy stuff is mostly just a culturally dependent thing, our appetite in the U.S. seems rather low whereas sensibilities in Japan and maybe East Asia in general are much higher. But really, in my opinion, if you're going to do something cute in a UI, the most important thing is to treat it like art rather than directly as means to accomplish some "business" end like appealing to a demographic or worse, for emotional manipulation. It's best if it's done to authentically make something pleasant and comfortable, rather than to check some weird boxes from the higher ups. Otherwise, it's going to feel immensely fake, and fire off the bullshit alarm of a large population of people.

[yard2010]

Let's not forget we're talking about the 90's Microsoft. Cute or not they were bad at UI/UX, so bad that no guideline would help them.

[hulitu]

You should see today's GUI. They are terrible.

[ycombinete]

Doubly so with cutesy “aw shucks” error messages.

[JusticeJuice]

Never put a pun in a UI