[Frieren]

> "hamburger buttons"

I work on a desktop PC and "hamburger buttons" frustrate me beyond reason, in the same way that many other "modern" designs. I understand that cost benefit of having just one implementation for mobile and desktop. But it is still annoying.

> Frameworks, languages, computers, come and go, but the human body doesn't change and the knowledge I have in design, I carry every day and have barely changed over the years.

This is the part that adapting interfaces for the small tactile screen of a phone and then using them on big desktop screens seems so wrong. The design is probably fantastic but it is applied to the wrong interface. The people that designed the desktop interface were good at it and should not have changed. I wish UI designers went back to desktop interfaces for big screens. But mobile has economy of scale on its side so probably it is not going to happen.

> "the design of everyday things"

Great book.

[fifticon]

I mourn that the scrollbar has been hunted to extinction, even on windows 11 desktop. Windows explorer slowly starts to behave like a web page app. If you enable many columns in the explorer file view, this design is bonkers: To navigate those columns, you need the horisontal scrollbar. But modern design lunacy dictates that this scrollbar must be INVISIBLE. So you have to guess where it should be, and wave your mouse around in that area, until the windows 11 geniuses decide to fade in and reveal that - oh My!, THERE WAS A SCROLL BAR THERE ALL ALONG. So, now naive you might think "OK, we both agree there is a scrollbar there now, so maybe we can keep it in view?" NOOOOHHH! as soon as you have used it to find your new columns, it must of course disappear again, so you must once again wave around your mouse in its general direction, next time you need it :-(.

A similar insanity happens with window borders in general, because heyaah, wow, minimalism is cool. So when you need to resize a window or, god forbid, drag it by its title bar(), that too is minimized into unrecognisability. To be clear, the problem here is, that you can't tell where window A ends and window B begins, because of design minimalism, so it is simply hard to discern where the drag-border is.

() which leads me to window title-bar anorexia: It has also become oh so popular to minimize and compact the windows title bar, so that there is no area left where your mouse can grab the window to drag it. Web browsers, among many other apps, are guilty of this. The intent behind is to avoid the "double windows top", where you have first the title bar, then the menu below that (they have been collapsed into one); but apparently no one thought about "but how can users then drag their windows?".. I guess we are not supposed to, because the app is supposed to be full-screen maxxed, on the tablet we are drooling on. Or if there is another way, I, director Skinner and Homer's dad did not get the memo.

[mtVessel]

At least there's a way out of scrollbar madness (at least, for now):

Settings -> Accessibility -> Visual effects -> Always show scrollbars

No such luck for title bars, though, or the general Fisher-Price-ification of Windows overall.

[RHSeeger]

Omg, thank you. Just getting my scrollbar back on the browser makes me so happy!

[eviks]

> Or if there is another way

Of course there is a much better way for all your troubles! Window move: hold a modifier and click&drag anywhere in the window area instead of wasting time precision hunting the titlebar. Window resize: same, use a big 30%-window-width area close to the border instead of hunting for those few pixels of an actual resizable border Horizontal scroll (though strange, Win 11 explorer has horizontal scrollbar immediately visible, though maybe that's a config?): hold a modifier and use the more convenient mouse wheel (or use a window manager with shortcuts or visual grid) None of that, of course, is part of your unhelpful OS

> But modern design lunacy dictates that this scrollbar must be INVISIBLE.

In a real modern design there is no lunacy as wide/tall scrollbar is mostly a space waste as you have better control options, and narrow/short ones are still that, but also unergonomic to use. So you'd have a wide/tall invisible one, which in those smaller % of cases you need them would become visible, but still wide/tall ones

> I, director Skinner and Homer's dad did not get the memo.

That's unfortunate indeed that the bad old ways of window management and scrolling persist for so long and the better ways aren't integrated in the OS

[lsaferite]

Your suggestions highlight what I hate about the new Android gestures interface. You have to know those patterns in advance and remember them. They aren't visually apparent like scroll bars, drag handles, titles bars, and window frames. I am quite versed in keyboard shortcuts, but keeping *all* of them in my head gets a bit much sometimes. When I forget one, rediscovering it is a serious PITA. The rediscovery (or initial discovery) is orders of magnitude harder for things like the Android gesture interface.

Couple this with App and OS designers feeling a *constant* need to change things and make them "better" and you have a disaster in the works. I've been grousing about Android changing things just to change them as I get older. The other day even my 12 y/o daughter was complaining about them changing how things worked.

Anyway, my point is simply two-fold. First, any UI that requires knowing and remembering interactions that aren't easily discovered *is a problem*. Second, constantly changing UI interaction patterns, even when they are discoverable, *is also a problem*.

[eviks]

Oh, sure, those are indeed major fails in all of the OSes - no guides and no easy way to find anything about fundamental operations (it should be easier than googling).

But these are separate issues. For example, even with the scrollbars there can be a change between two behaviors: click on the empty bar jumps to that % or jumps by 1 page. And one can be a click and another a Shift-Click - where in the OS would you discover that??? And the scrollbar width - can only find a registry hack to restore that from some tech article/blog post/ etc, nothing in that waste of the Win 11 Settings app.

[funcDropShadow]

But with a visible scrollbar you would have a visible indication which behavior you triggered. If the scrollbar is invisible you get a changed viewport in both cases but you have to infer which gesture triggers which behavior.

[eviks]

No, when you use a scrollbar it becomes visible, so you get exactly the same indication

[bigstrat2003]

> I understand that cost benefit of having just one implementation for mobile and desktop. But it is still annoying.

Of course it's annoying. When desktop software is using mobile UI, that's the result of a deliberate choice to make the software worse (something you care very much about as it affects you) in order to save the company money (something you don't care about). It would be weird if you weren't annoyed by such blatant disrespect for their customers.

[akoboldfrying]

> blatant disrespect

Let's stop pretending that "companies" could just do things better at no extra cost.

I prefer a desktop UI on a desktop, but I also prefer paying less for software I use, and halving the UI development costs to enable that is a pretty sensible tradeoff.

[whstl]

Companies are definitely not saving money here.

They're actually spending a shit-ton of money on designer-hours and developer-hours in order to have everything custom, but still with a subpar experience.

It's similar to accessibility: a huge chunk of free off-the-shelf options are more accessible compared to the non-accessible chimeric design system of most modern web apps and sites.

[amonith]

Here's the funny thing though (as a developer which worked for various companies that didn't have designers):

It looks custom designed because... it's not designed at all :D

At this point I'm not even sure if what you said is an insult or a compliment.

Almost all projects I worked in looked more or less like the following:

- a BA meets with the client and creates unstyled wireframes with all of the requested features. (BA doesn't really think about UX here, more or less applies some generic patterns).

- the development team grabs the wireframes, uses a generic preexisting "design system" which is the cheapest for the chosen technology (can be whatever: Bootstrap, Tailwind, Material Design) and max. adjusts colors a bit to match the client's brand

That's it. There is no design.

[whstl]

Doesn't match my experience as a developer.

I haven't worked in a place that doesn't use Figma, since Figma was released.

And haven't worked in a place that didn't get a dedicated designer before the company was 6 months old.

However: I must have worked with 30 different designers in 10 years and TWO of them actually knew how to properly use components and Figma. The rest just copy pasted shit around.

[codr7]

And on the rare occasions where there is a designer on the team, they just throw their fantasy user interfaces over the fence to be interpreted by developers as well as blamed for any complaints.

What we really need is developers with solid design skills, that should have been part of fullstack from the start.

[whstl]

Totally agree. I can count on my hands the number of developers that actually produce consistent good-looking shit.

And the number is *two* if I count the ones who also understand technical nuances, accessibility and proper usability.

[KronisLV]

I second this, it’s like people live in completely different worlds when it comes to getting stuff out the door.

Of course, that’s still better than a 1 pizza team of full stack devs attempting to create their custom UI component library from scratch, now that’s a total mess.

[whstl]

Grandparent here. Alright, I totally believe you and everyone else, and would probably also be much happier in a less wasteful environment that you mention.

In which industry/company size are you? Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places.

[qzw]

> They're actually spending a shit-ton of money on designer-hours and developer-hours in order to have everything custom, but still with a subpar experience.

Are they though? My impression is that most companies are just using frameworks or sdks that promise some degree of cross platform uniformity, and that’s why they don’t use the native toolkits. The savings come from not having to develop UI for multiple OS targets.

[whstl]

Pretty sure there's places doing it, but I haven't really worked anywhere that used a Vanilla framework, except for the first few months, or have used an app that just uses something off the shelf.

I'm in the YC startup space, though, but have seen this also in enterprise.

[eviks]

Yes they can (tm)!

Consider the latest UI disaster - Apple with liquid glass making stuff worse in the most fundamental way - decreasing readability. Doing worse was extra cost, so yeah, in many cases companies can just do things better by not wasting the design money and spending part of it on actual design improvements. No need to bring up the myth of the huge 50% savings when using a single menu everywhere, there is no way it costs that much (neither does having different padding values per platform)!

[jkestner]

They don’t have to do things better. They just need to stop changing things. Computer UIs used to be designed by HCI people. There were volumes of books explaining best practices. Then companies prioritized curb appeal and forgot their own heuristics that were backed by actual research.

[bigstrat2003]

I too prefer to get things cheaper (all else being equal). But in this case they aren't equal, which is kind of the rub. I would much rather have desktop software which doesn't suck, even if I had to pay more for it. And of course don't forget that just because the company is saving money, doesn't mean you the customer do. Companies are very happy to cut their own costs and pocket the extra profit, so it's difficult to say whether this reduction in software quality is actually benefiting us by making things cheaper.