Rendered at 18:39:21 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
cosmic_cheese 21 hours ago [-]
I think this and many other questionable UI decisions across the industry in recent years is the fallout of the old guard of UI designers having rotated out for younger replacements in the past decade with little transfer of knowledge occurring.
The lack of transfer I don't think is out of unwillingness from the old guard, but rather due to the greenhorns throwing everything that came before their time out without questioning the reasoning behind any of it (Chesterton’s Fence) and assuming that whatever they came up with was superior and better fit for the modern era ("those old principles can't possibly hold, we have touch screens now!").
It's also been made worse by UI design roles having been taken by those with backgrounds in unrelated design disciplines, as well as sites like Dribbble which reward pretty mockups over working products. This leads to overemphasis on the visual aspect of the UI and not enough on its functional and usability aspects.
linguae 19 hours ago [-]
Alan Kay (of Smalltalk fame) has a similar, related explanation: computing is a pop culture with little regard for the past (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bbm:978-3-319-90008-7/...). There are thousands, maybe millions, of developers who have little knowledge of the history of our field. I’ve found this true even of graduates from highly-ranked computer science bachelor’s programs. Think of all of the current-day LLM researchers and engineers who have never heard of Minsky, McCarthy, Lisp machines, and other aspects of the history of AI before we learned that attention was all we needed.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Apple’s UI/UX teams are staffed with people who have never heard of Don Norman, Bruce Tognazzini, Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Susan Kare, Larry Tesler, and other pioneering figures who contributed to Apple’s legendary 1980s and 1990s software.
It’s a lack of onboarding and knowledge transfer, combined with an Eternal September of thousands new CS grads being constantly produced annually, who are sadly not being taught enough history of computing at their universities.
My dream as a CS professor is to help rectify this, at least amongst my students.
montagg 19 hours ago [-]
It’s when people confuse User Experience Design, which is a systemic and architectural discipline, with UI Art, which is an aesthetic discipline. If you have someone who is professionally the latter doing the former job, you get things people think look good but don’t work well.
This isn’t even to knock either: UI artists are essential to making a UI understandable and enjoyable. But people think the skill sets are the same, and they aren’t.
Disclaimer: am a UX Designer.
ale 7 hours ago [-]
There’s no such thing as UI “art” as a separate process from “UX”. User experience is just a vague term Norman used to describe the general impression of using digital interfaces. He’s never actually even defined what criteria constitutes “good” or “bad”. So the term is as useless as “dining experience” is for restaurants. UX designer as a title and quasi-discipline became a thing the same way “agentic engineer” is a title nowadays, they’re not actual disciplines, they’re titles void of any history that consultancy firms come up with to sell more services.
The real title for this discipline is “interaction designer”, as that stems from HCI research, which itself was an extension of systems design. There is a clear lineage. Also: user experience absolutely is an aesthetic field, but again because the title is vague in practice so is its education. The thinking is that “UX” designers have a set of skills about design that are scientific, but there’s virtually nothing about human interaction that’s scientifically provable. Like you don’t do A/B testing and move a button’s position from a delta result based off of Fitt’s law or Gestalt theory (I don’t think I’ve ever met a UX designer who knows about gestalt theory). You just observe results and move the goalposts accordingly. And again apropos aesthetics: user testing just never works with wireframes, the closer you are to the final result the better the feedback.
The need to science-wash this ultimately volatile process comes from the need to assure clients that their investment in an emerging market (digital platforms from the 80s onwards) has provably positive results.
another-dave 6 hours ago [-]
I think the idea of a separate discipline of UX design came along is because, outside of big companies, a lot of designers in the field at that point in time were coming from a print/graphic design background rather than HCI.
It was a bit of "let's not forget this element of application development".
shilgapira 6 hours ago [-]
Fantastic comment, thank you
groundzeros2015 18 hours ago [-]
Outside of big tech I’ve never met a UX designer who wasn’t just a graphic designer. Not a single one.
nkrisc 11 hours ago [-]
Because lots of companies pushed their graphic artists and designers into UX roles without providing any training, expecting them to learn on the job. I saw it happen at every job I’ve had and heard about it from people I knew at other companies.
groundzeros2015 6 hours ago [-]
I don’t think work training turns you into someone who thinks logically about systems and about human psychology.
nkrisc 5 hours ago [-]
In my experience it doesn’t. I came at UX from the interaction design/HCI side of things so I was already generally that kind of person, but the people who came at it from the design side weren’t as strong weren’t as strong. They were still very good at design though.
bluefirebrand 17 hours ago [-]
I have met exact one and the stuff he made was amazing
intrasight 7 hours ago [-]
Same. He made the project so rewarding for us all.
pbronez 6 hours ago [-]
How do I find and hire a UX person like this?
hliyan 4 hours ago [-]
Once the responsibilities of creating a UI is divvied up between a visual designer and a domain expert, I doubt there is much for a UX designer to do. At least not at each product/application level. Perhaps at an industry level, there may be a need for a small number of these roles to advance the state-of-the-art of human-computer interaction, but it is not a problem that needs to be re-solved at the level of each product. In the 80s and 90s, these roles existed within the operating system companies and they came up with things like scrolling, pull-down menus and tabbed interfaces.
jonhohle 5 hours ago [-]
> Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
- Steve Jobs
sandworm101 8 hours ago [-]
>> Disclaimer: am a UX Designer.
Please tell your fellow designers to stop injecting their lifestyle into their UI/UX design. Even in the OP, a simple monday-sunday list of days, the designer has inserted their lifestyle. Friday is popcorn, Saturday is a party popper, and Sunday is for sleeping off the hangover. That might seem innocuous but is a tiny microaggression felt by all those who do not work 9-5 M-F jobs. Or those who have places to be on Sundays other than in bed. Better yet, just avoid all UI/UX designs that reflect a particular schedule or lifestyle.
inertstyleshiet 3 hours ago [-]
I didn't know what I wanted to add... ~7,5 kb (seems that the imagehost don't show transparency...but it is...)
But thanks that you made it a topic, thought it was about the .php and the (spoken in german) "Klirr!" everybody noticed the sound, but nerds-term about the webpage he was building ment "CLEAR" ...crowded room, everyones laughing around...so OT to ask one of those "elderly computerpeople"...CSS... never mind... (-:
pyinstallwoes 10 hours ago [-]
Or rather, information architecture.
publlus_enigma 18 hours ago [-]
I concur, though I fear that as a discipline we haven't done ourselves any favours here in how we pass knowledge between generations.
In decades past, books and journals served as the primary mechanism for capturing and transferring CS and Software Engineering knowledge. Older knowledge was curated and remained easily accessible.
When I studied CS and engineering in the early 2000s, I learned a lot about the history and evolution of the field simply by browsing old books on the shelves of the university library. Thousands of them. I read back to the 60s and 70s, and I felt it really helped me have a broader perspective and evolution of the field.
That same university library has now transitioned to mostly online materials. The physical collection has been drastically pruned based on what is currently relevant and in demand.
The online collections don't have the same historical depth. And websites and online repositories come and go - think of the vast troves of knowledge that once existed on Usenet that have been lost to obscurity.
I also think the joy of browsing through topics you didn't know existed as given way to search-driven retrieval.
In our efforts to use computers to document what we know about computers, we have lost all that was good about not using computers for information management.
smelendez 14 hours ago [-]
It’s hard to fully pass on UX knowledge. For one, a lot of software and hardware isn’t available, including recent software. You can’t use a version of Slack from 2019 or AIM from 2001, for instance.
But also, it’s hard to convey the full experience of actually using old software as a tool (or toy)—trying to maintain your company records in Lotus 1-2-3 or looking up something in Microsoft Encarta knowing that if you couldn’t answer your question you’d need to go to the library, or even trying to solve a puzzle in a game with no reference materials.
I’m sure this is true of other technology: You can learn to ride a horse or read about how telephones and telegrams worked, but can you really capture the experience of riding from NYC to Philadelphia in 1840 or trying to convey an urgent business message the same way in 1920?
olwmc 17 hours ago [-]
"Computing is a pop culture with little regard for the past" this literally just clicked so many pieces in my brain all at once I had to close my eyes and sit with it.
diskzero 14 hours ago [-]
I worked with all of the aforementioned people at various companies and cannot see myself working at any of the companies where this experience would be useful or could be transferred to others. Apple, when I left in 2006, was almost unbearable to me.
I don’t know if this means I am jaded, burnt out, overly cynical or what, but the thought of working at Apple, Google, Facebook or any other big tech company is anathema to me.
Steve Lemay worked with a bunch of us, including a very curmudgeonly Don Norman, but just look at what happened to Apple UX while he was there. Yes, he is now running the team and the small improvements may be a direct influence of his, but he sure was steam rolled by others the last twenty years.
osnium123 4 hours ago [-]
Do you think the problem is that students are not taught about the history of computer science or is it because the kinds of students who study CS are not inclined to study history?
lsh0 19 hours ago [-]
> Alan Kay (of Smalltalk fame)
Alan Kay (of Alan Kay fame)
mixmastamyk 16 hours ago [-]
> not being taught enough history of computing
Are they being taught any of significance? In school I only remember a blurb about Newton here or a blurb about Pascal there. Briefest of mentions about Unix at the start of a C class.
All the rest I had to dig up myself, from the Mythical Man Month to Edwin Black's book. Believe it was the Joel on Software blog who got me interested in those type of books, never knew they existed in school.
pjmlp 9 hours ago [-]
It depends pretty much on the university, I was rather lucky, my nerdiness for strange OSes and programming languages comes from having had some great teachers, then again maybe up into the 90's there were another quality standards.
clickety_clack 7 hours ago [-]
When the senior designers at Apple stared out, desktop UI was still being invented and they needed to be a kind of avant garde UI designer. They’re probably still hiring those people, but the job now is totally different, with desktop UI design being in a kind of maintenance mode.
dogleash 2 hours ago [-]
That sounds like a just so story invented by motivated reasoning.
theendisney 18 hours ago [-]
I had some hilarious experiences by telling people that they did well, now make the same thing again but make it better. I was quite surprised they put up with it many itterations and even more surprised that each round (with few exceptons) was actually better.
Gravityloss 10 hours ago [-]
Ahistoricality is a problem. On the other hand it might be that a small group that worked on some paradigm among the sea of many thinks they're the official forebearers of a large field - while in reality influence came from many places.
jbs789 6 hours ago [-]
Every life is lived once. We are always rediscovering what came before us.
bayindirh 8 hours ago [-]
> It’s a lack of onboarding and knowledge transfer, ...
I have been trying to kindly forward what I have learnt and experienced over these years to new people we start to work with, and I have been called a wrinkly boomer who doesn't understand modern times more than enough times.
Of course they have come full-circle on some of the things they were disagreeing, but sometimes people have to crash and burn before understanding something.
I have no hard feelings for these people, but kindness goes a long way even if you don't agree on everything.
DonHopkins 16 hours ago [-]
"Things seem to hang on in computing just because they work a little bit." -Alan Kay
Alan Kay also said this about his famous "Point of View is worth 80 IQ points" aphorism, which I think poignantly explains why React costs a net of 160 IQ points compared to Svelte:
>I have been keeping to "80" IQ points in the saying (thus avoiding inflation). However very few people have noticed there is no sign bit in the aphorism, and that it works just as well for "poor perspectives being worth negative 80 IQ points" (and I think we could claim inflation of stupidity in many bad directions these days ...).
linguae 16 hours ago [-]
I love this quote! When I taught programming language paradigms at San Jose State as an adjunct, I introduced this quote as a motivating factor for learning different ways of programming, particularly introducing functional programming, logic programming, Smalltalk, and the Common Lisp Object System to senior-year students who coded mostly in Java, Python, and C (though this was during the COVID pandemic, right before the advent of vibe coding).
DonHopkins 14 hours ago [-]
Here's the whole thread from six days ago, started when I shared the "Folders" esolanguage article and hn discussion, which I think is interesting for students and language hackers:
On 16 Oct 2026, Don Hopkins wrote to Owen Densmore, David Rosenthal, and Alan Kay:
Somebody took your filesystem-as-objects patent idea to the logical extreme!
I fear there is some really old prior art for several parts of it.
Best cheers
Alan
On 16 Oct 2026, Don Hopkins wrote:
Yes, it's Sun's US 5,187,786: "Method and apparatus for implementing a class hierarchy of objects in a hierarchical file system." Owen and David filed it in 1991, it was granted in 1993, and it expired in 2011, so anyone can use it now, including people writing esolangs about folders.
You're right about the prior art, and the idea came straight from your side of the family tree. Tom Stambaugh helped Owen work out how to adapt Smalltalk patterns to it, scribbling on napkins at a poolside table at the old Hyatt Palo Alto. In the patent, directories are classes and instances, PATH files encode the inheritance chain, and you send a message from the shell with something like "SEND aF001 methodA args".
It's the same trick Owen used for the NeWS object system in PostScript. Classes were dictionaries, and sending a message pushed the object's class chain onto the dictionary stack, so ordinary PostScript name lookup did the method lookup for free. NeWS 1.0 had single inheritance through a parent dictionary. TNT added ordered parent lists and multiple inheritance. The patent does the same thing with the shell path playing the dictionary stack: walk the directories, and the first match wins.
Owen's 1986 Monterey paper on object-oriented PostScript:
I've been running with it in MOOLLM, which leans more toward Self than Smalltalk. A directory is an object, its files are slots, and a "parents:" list delegates to other directories, in order, first match wins. It's prototypes rather than classes, and the LLM does the message dispatch by reading the directory. The filesystem is the object graph, so it's inspectable, diffable, and versioned in git for free:
Owen and David can correct my history, since they're on the thread.
-Don
On 16 Oct 2026, Alan Kay wrote:
Hi Don
I should have said "prior art before Smalltalk" ...
Best cheers
Alan
On 16 Oct 2026, Don Hopkins wrote:
In a way, the patent is just pure prior art, plus perspective, which is worth a certain number of IQ points I've been told. ;)
Which pre-Smalltalk ancestors were you thinking of? Sketchpad's masters and instances, Simula's classes, and Multics search rules walking a hierarchy of directories all seem like pieces of it.
-Don
On 16 Oct 2026, Alan Kay wrote:
Hi Don
I have been keeping to "80" IQ points in the saying (thus avoiding inflation). However very few people have noticed there is no sign bit in the aphorism, and that it works just as well for "poor perspectives being worth negative 80 IQ points" (and I think we could claim inflation of stupidity in many bad directions these days ...).
I don't like to claim priority for any ideas (including my own). Bob Barton liked a great saying of Goethe's:
"We should all share in the excitement of Discovery without vain attempts to claim Priority"
and I imprinted on that in grad school.
So, without claiming priority, I would point to Engelbart's NLS for unifying the structure of the file system with the basic hierarchical structuring of their content (and this included how code was represented, written, and read). A few years later I used a different kind of unification in the FLEX machine that Ed Cheadle and I did in the mid-60s to have "every large thing" be an instantiable process, including things that were more "file-like".
This is just FYI, partly because of the above Goethe quote, partly because the FLEX project was done within the aerospace conglomerate LTV, and was proprietary. My thesis advisor Dave Evans had to go to considerable work to get permission for me to do my degree write ups on a tiny subset. The later Smalltalk was a "cold restart" on these ideas (and LTG was not a problem by then).
And -- for Smalltalk -- the notion to make "everything large and small" an object was a quick way to get going on the comparatively speedy Alto, and Dan Ingalls (and his Smalltalk group) were able to do most of the SW engineering to make Smalltalk act semantically as though everything was an object.
Best cheers
Alan
vitaflo 2 hours ago [-]
I've been designing UI's professionally for 30 years and have seen a lot of changes over time, but I will echo what you said and give an additional reason: design education.
When I was getting my design degree, a large majority of what you learned was how to give and take a critique. It was central to everything you did. You were also taught things like "It's not your idea, it's an idea" that allowed you to critically think about solutions to problems without falling in love with your own designs.
This was fostered at the companies I worked for in the late 90's/early 2000's. We would have intense debates about designs, play devil's advocate (sometimes against our own designs!) in order to leave the room with the best ideas and solutions to problems. It was collaborative, energetic, peer reviewed, and we produced great designs for users.
This is not taught anymore. Critiques aren't given in school so as not to offend anyone. Much of UX Design has also transitioned to boot camps vs college design degrees which focus on pumping out students who can manipulate Figma, not students who understand the process and techniques of real design.
As such, professionally it's very hard to have real debates about design without someone getting offended or fighting for solutions that are sub par because it's "their" idea they can't let go of. The critical thinking and detail that used to go into design has been replaced with vibes.
And don't get me started on the fact that many students coming into the workforce simply don't have the design chops in the first place.
quacked 21 hours ago [-]
The two things that pain me the most are:
(1) Clickable elements no longer visually signifying that they're clickable. Words aren't underlined or written in a special font, sometimes the profile avatar is the clickable link to the profile but sometimes the name is, etc.
(2) No more clean, compact directory trees. We used to have high-contrast compact UI design to look through nested ontologies. Now it's rounded-edges card-based, often without trace lines, and barely ever compact. RIP
cosmic_cheese 21 hours ago [-]
> No more clean, compact directory trees
Even plain old tables with sortable rearrangeable columns, a staple of all of the traditional desktop UI frameworks, are increasingly falling by the wayside in favor of mobile-style single-column lists with cells consisting of stacks of labels.
quacked 20 hours ago [-]
It's incredible. And the labels are all turned into pills or chips. Then they don't allow pivoted views of their lists, or if they do allowed pivots it's a visual nightmare.
bluefirebrand 17 hours ago [-]
Your average UX person has no idea what a pivoted table is
Hell your average developer probably doesn't either anymore
ivanjermakov 1 hours ago [-]
Dense UIs are a work of art when done right, especially in combinarion with keyboard centered workflow.
crooked-v 20 hours ago [-]
This is exhausting with web stuff. Every designer wants flat everything, not even so much as underlining links, let alone enough design to actually make it obvious what's a clickable button.
quacked 20 hours ago [-]
I think it's this cargo cult attempt to tap into what Apple had pre-2010 on the iPod and first iPhone. They're missing that the design leadership and attention to detail was unparalleled at Apple in that era, so they just flatten everything for a streamlined look and miss every signifier Apple put in its UIs in those days
calvinmorrison 20 hours ago [-]
How about on windows, no visible borders just overlapping off-white
quacked 20 hours ago [-]
Drives me nuts. It makes everything feel like working on a poorly organized desk.
ahartmetz 20 hours ago [-]
I think new UI designers might mistakenly think that they are in the fashion industry, when actually they are in the ergonomics engineering industry, or should be.
gleenn 19 hours ago [-]
The amount of times I absolutely cringe from super lux UI which clearly a lot of time and energy went into prettifying at the absolute expense of usability and affordances. I love Apple TV but flip to any screen with multiple buttons and not being able to tell which button is selected. Or the Russian Roulette of Youtube trying to select any of the overlayed buttons on the actual video frame. I would 1000% trade shiny for more usablility in 99% of apps.
0x457 2 hours ago [-]
To be its Car Play, amount of times I thought I have selected "Go", but it's actually "Back" that is selected. Drives me crazy. Partially fault of my car having shitty "touchpad" instead of a knob.
tensor 15 hours ago [-]
The Apple TV one drives me insane. The selected button is so subtly raised that it takes a lot to see. Usually I need to move it back and forth and look for the motion.
robszumski 5 hours ago [-]
it really baffles me that Apple lets this happen with a design system/framework that has had years of battle testing. Clearly it's not working if today's apps are all insanely hard to use on a daily basis. Users that are power users. The system needs to protect us from app devs being able to ship stuff this hard to use. The remote is not helping of course.
The-Bus 1 hours ago [-]
The YouTube UX is terrible. From watching a video in full-screen on an iPad to then going back to search (for the next video you want to see) takes three interactions (minimize, swipe down, then click on search).
I want to search, in a search bar, for the next video. This should not take three interactions.
YouTube is fine designing a UX where I am one click away from pulling up an AI-generated list of questions I may have about the video, though.
adrianmonk 19 hours ago [-]
I don't like it either, but they are in the fashion industry.
Why did the label on my Fig Newtons get redesigned? It's not because it lacked in usability. It's because the company knows that customers respond to visual updates. If something looks the same year after year, lots of people will see it as old and tired. A redesign makes it feel modern and fresh. At least to enough people that it matters.
I had the same experience on a recent trip to The UPS Store. The color scheme was all different from the previous time I shipped a package. I commented to the clerk that they'd redecorated. He said they do it pretty often.
Software has a visual aspect to it, and the same forces are in effect. Part of a UI designer's job is to be on that treadmill. That's probably not what the job should be, but the people who pay their salary want it to be.
0x457 2 hours ago [-]
Sure, Fig Newtons got redesigned because after seeing something over and over again it kinda blends, and design refresh and suddenly it catches your eye again.
No idea why UPS keeps redesigning other than signal "we still up to date with trends", its not like its rebranding going to make me want to ship anything that I don't already need to (and will ship with USPS unless its overnight in which case I will go with FedEx).
Interfaces get redesigned, in opinion, either because: a) just because (bad) b) certain things worked the way it worked only because it had to fit existing design and eventually old design just couldn't fit new feature(s) (can be good or bad, depending on execution)
ChickeNES 17 hours ago [-]
At least on the brick and mortar side of things it’s not so bad since the refresh also allows a maintenance cycle while the store is temporarily closed. And I can think of many examples (KMart especially) where the lack of store refreshes/deferred maintenance torpedoed the entire chain (Walmart and Target were not afraid to teardown or abandon outmoded locations).
isolatedsystem 18 hours ago [-]
Well stated, but I will say, it is not impossible to do both.
Tantacrul is my favourite (and, actually, only) example of this. His work with MuseScore, with Audacity, his videos about them, and his takedowns of Sybellius etc. all opened my eyes to the world of designers who do things with hard-nosed analytical thinking, user studies, good principles, and make something useful. Even his little digressions about Paint3D and Ubuntu's Mobile OS are illustrative.
LastTrain 18 hours ago [-]
You are right but man the new Fig Newton packaging looks just like the store brand fruit cookies what were they thinking?
PaulHoule 18 hours ago [-]
I was so frustrated 1995-2005 that the designers I worked with had a print mindset. Now I'm frustrated that designers are no good at all.
It's no help at all that people expect Apple to be fashionable, like if you read a review of an "operating system" in Arstechnica you'd think it's all about little details on the scrollbar, not about filesystems and microkernels and namespaces and stuff.
outofpaper 20 hours ago [-]
There is both ux and and graphic design and they both have their place. Saddly far too often one wins out over another instead of finding balance.
ahartmetz 20 hours ago [-]
Most UX designers seem to come from a graphic design direction, and they generally do a better job than developers - but not as good as the old school people who did research and wrote detailed guides and such.
bobthepanda 17 hours ago [-]
The research and guides went out of fashion because actually methodically studying users costs money. I worked at a place that allegedly prioritized design and was really trying to launch more redesigns but also somehow kept losing positions for designers.
mx7zysuj4xew 15 hours ago [-]
>> because actually methodically studying users costs money.
you mean "actually methodically studying users is boring and requires competence"
these people only care about making pretty pictures, they dont care about the actual effort to deliver a good product.
bobthepanda 19 minutes ago [-]
It’s time and labor intensive and you generally need to compensate focus groups for their time. Sometimes that overlaps with laziness or apathy, but who hasn’t worked on something and been told the business can’t afford the time or money to do it right?
mx7zysuj4xew 16 hours ago [-]
this is an understatement.
i remember the studies used to design windows 95
nothing modern ux amateurs do can compare to the oldschool HCI professionals
wmwragg 9 hours ago [-]
I'd forgotten there used to be a whole discipline called HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) which seems to have largely disappeared now, at least in a commercial context
Symbiote 7 hours ago [-]
I am reminded of the HCI lecturer at university whenever I use something other than my usual KDE desktop.
With a maximized or suitably positioned window, pushing the mouse all the way to the right of the screen activates the scroll bar. To the top right activates the close button.
Small things, but they become annoyances when they are missing.
Mikhail_Edoshin 14 hours ago [-]
A mere fashion industry would be fine, because you could just ignore that and stay old-fasioned. This fashion industry is coupled with enforced corporate dress code.
ajam1507 13 hours ago [-]
You can do both, that's what Apple was famous for in the past.
Several years ago, I pointed out to a couple of UI designers that their design didn't take Fitts' Law into account. They looked at me like I was speaking ancient Sumerian. They had never heard of Fitts' Law, and they were supposedly degreed/credentialed/whatever UI designers. I was only a lowly software developer (albeit with a specialization in implmenting UI), and I knew what it was. I think it's only gotten worse.
jerf 16 hours ago [-]
In Chesterton's fence analogy, the person who wants to tear a fence down is at least aware there is a fence there. I think a lot of modern UI is being done by people who aren't even aware that there was logic being used to make decisions and are just steamrolling over the fences without even being aware they existed.
In their defense, it's not like good UI has ever dominated very many spaces. It is very hard to come up with a concept of good UI concepts from a natural meandering through the shattered landscape of UI paradigms anyone computer literate ends up subjected to. And then it's even harder to convince a manager that it's worth so much as a moment's thought about such things. Not impossible. But not easy.
iamcalledrob 12 hours ago [-]
The young'uns all cut their teeth on the web, where every project tends to reinvent the wheel (poorly).
It's funny (depressing) to me that there is now "web app" design language and a "native app" design language, and most new desktop apps are following the web because they are built in html and CSS.
burningChrome 21 hours ago [-]
>> This leads to overemphasis on the visual aspect of the UI and not enough on its functional and usability aspects.
Accessibility has been left in the dustbin as well. You go to all these sites extolling these beautiful, innovative sites and they're completely useless with a keyboard or screen reader.
bunderbunder 20 hours ago [-]
Or if you have any sort of non-correctable visual impairment. I'm sighted but recently I had actually been thinking of learning better how to use a screen reader because I genuinely struggle to visually parse a lot of modern UI design. The big move toward flat designs, but with everyone choosing their own idiosyncratic special snowflake way of doing it, leaves very little visual redundancy for people to use as a fallback. Sad to hear that it might not be the solution either.
Also, holy hell, this obsession with huge swathes of negative space is a disaster for anyone who needs to zoom the page for readability. I'm here to see content, not an homage to the backrooms.
wolpoli 11 hours ago [-]
I am amazed at how UI design continuously come up with new reasons for additional margins and paddings. What used to be mere navigational links that were stacked vertically now have white space around the label, icons in front of the label, pill shape container around the clickable area, extra space between each link to give the container space to breath and a place to show the shadow effect.
Maxion 12 hours ago [-]
This weird love of negative space is particularly aggravating. Even when you're zoomed out you end up seeing nothing of note, then add in a 133% zoom and now you're reading a paragraph of text, scrolling horisontally and menus cover 75% of the viewport.
isityettime 17 hours ago [-]
I'm in a similar position. I can see a hell of a lot. But I have some problems, and I get lost in shitty, 'modern" UIs.
bunderbunder 17 hours ago [-]
Yeah, same. It seems like the only times I actually feel disabled are when I’m using a web browser, and when I have to work in a project where somebody set the autoformatter’s line length up to 120 characters.
leapingdog 9 hours ago [-]
Making software accessible often has beneficial side-effects, like being more usable on crappy displays or bright lighting conditions.
abletonlive 18 hours ago [-]
Rightfully so. Your entire premise is that design should be made with accessibility in mind whereas in reality, accessibility tools should be built to handle those concerns and design should be free to do what it needs to do full stop. If that's being accessible that's fine, but trying to enforce accessibility standards is like saying that Levis needs to make pants for people without legs.
bunderbunder 20 hours ago [-]
We can also lay some blame at Agile's feet. I've seen UX and UI designers genuinely struggle to fit their work into the sprint treadmill. 2 weeks' notice is not enough time to do any sort of serious usability design study.
The move toward fullstack developers, too. When everybody is a jack of all trades, nobody is a master of anything. Least of all UI design, which isn't worth thinking too much about because it's the least likely potential subject of pushback during code review.
mpyne 20 hours ago [-]
> We can also lay some blame at Agile's feet. I've seen UX and UI designers genuinely struggle to fit their work into the sprint treadmill. 2 weeks' notice is not enough time to do any sort of serious usability design study.
Windows 95 significantly overhauled the desktop GUI metaphor, in a way that is still the skeletal structure of desktops today.
> We recognized that we needed much more opportunity to create a design, try it out with users (perhaps comparing it to other designs), make changes, and gather more user feedback. Our desire to abandon the waterfall model and opt for iterative design fortunately followed similar efforts in other areas of the company, so we had concrete examples of its benefits and feasibility.
You're right that you can't go start to finish on a design in a single 2-week sprint. But that's why you have a repeating series of sprints, you're not supposed to go from start to finish in a single sprint.
The Windows 95 team always had a shippable OS to demo internally to devs, QA, beta testers and users invited by the UX designers for usability testing. Just because you demo something to the product owner does not require that you then release the result immediately to end users. Decouple development from deployment and from release and you'll find agile methods can work just fine.
bunderbunder 20 hours ago [-]
Perhaps instead of Agile I should have said "What Agile became in the 21st century." I know how Scrum is supposed to work. I just haven't seen anyone actually do it that way since about 2013.
pjmlp 9 hours ago [-]
Even earlier, I was already into the wonderful scrum of scrums mid 2006.
AlexandrB 19 hours ago [-]
I don't think you can credit Windows 95 to agile when the agile manifesto was first published in 2001 and the whole sprint nonsense didn't start until sometime later. Iterative development goes back to at least the 80s and doesn't require "scrum masters", "sprints", or "t-shirt sizes".
mpyne 18 hours ago [-]
> I don't think you can credit Windows 95 to agile when the agile manifesto was first published in 2001 and the whole sprint nonsense didn't start until sometime later.
Agile manifesto coined a term for things that already existed. It didn’t create it from scratch, nor did it claim to. But W95 did employ methods we would call agile methods today.
bunderbunder 18 hours ago [-]
I do think that they were right, though, to point out that the practices already existed and that they aren’t inherently at odds with, and ideally support, good UI design. And the linked article makes a good case that Win95’s UI design was done in an agile way.
That’s not the part I intended to criticize; it was the modern tendency to discard iterative design and instead just treat sprints a series of immutable milestones with fixed deadlines, except the scope is fixed in a just-in-time manner. But it’s on me for not stating that more clearly.
cosmic_cheese 20 hours ago [-]
I think the trick here is to not co-mingle the development of UI toolkits and the software built with them. Agile works fine if the UI framework itself is its own project with its own lifecycle, suitably long sprints, etc.
This goes against the pattern that's most often observed in the past decade of every product hand-rolling its UI from scratch, though.
LtWorf 19 hours ago [-]
I've worked at companies where to save a few thousands € to not buy a Qt license, they'd basically pay 50x more to have a bad copy of it that was also much slower due to using electron.
gmueckl 20 hours ago [-]
When the end of a sprint is a hard cutoff point for tasks, agile is done wrong. Just carry unfinished work over - it won't go away, anyway.
ksec 4 hours ago [-]
>This leads to overemphasis on the visual aspect ....
For Apple, and specific to Apple, when they fired Scott Forstall, there is no one to protect the software UI guys. The 2012 reshuffle in the name of "collaboration" by Tim Cook saw Design team taking over everything design, including Software. 2013 saw iOS 7 and then they spend 3 years to walk back a lot of iOS 7 UI changes. In 2016 many of their old UI leads "retired". Having no old guards to defend their turf, giving Alan Dye more rooms for power grab.
Since then, if not earlier, despite the whole UI becoming more android and cluster mess, there have been little to zero major UI changes other than new skin.
And like Apple's software, that is 10 years of resume driven development where they just want to ship features after features.
lelanthran 14 hours ago [-]
> I think this and many other questionable UI decisions across the industry in recent years is the fallout of the old guard of UI designers having rotated out for younger replacements in the past decade with little transfer of knowledge occurring.
Not just limited to UI decisions; many tech decisions were made the same way. I've said more than once, WRT to npm, that there were no adults in the room when they "designed" it, and npm is not the only tech stack that I look at and have the same thought.
nntwozz 17 hours ago [-]
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
We came from CLI with white text on black. Now dark mode is all the rage for the last couple of years.
I know OLED and all but interfaces feel just like fashion now, to hell with affordances and improving how things actually work let's just make things pretty for that micro dopamine drip and change it up just for the sake of it because jazz hands looks new makes $$
TonyAlicea10 7 hours ago [-]
I am in what I feel is a unique position: I’ve been a dev and dev educator for 25 years, and I also have spent 15 years in HCI/UX/User Research.
I’ve spent countless hours facilitating usability tests and then building the software in response to them.
I 100% agree with the “dribblization” of usability engineering.
More so, I think the term “design” has become overloaded. A graphic designer who wants to actually get paid and eat goes into UX. But where does their joy come from? From the visual, not the usability.
This year I got hired at Nielsen Norman Group, helping train designers to understand the theories of the human mind and applying them to UI.
I am finding the range of knowledge and background amongst designers is massive, precisely because of the imprecision of the word “designer”.
If we called it “applied cognitive and behavioral psychology” we would get closer to the results we want and perhaps a smidge more respect for its necessity in the age of slop UI.
disgruntledphd2 2 hours ago [-]
> If we called it “applied cognitive and behavioral psychology” we would get closer to the results we want and perhaps a smidge more respect for its necessity in the age of slop UI.
Yup, I have a psychology degree and we had courses in HCI. I ended up skipping them because the lecturer (who was great, and his notes were phenomenal) was just telling project management war stories, and I'd spent the few years previous in construction listening to the same stories in a different domain.
Now, 20 years later, I'm the one telling those stories.
bigbuppo 20 hours ago [-]
We let the wrong sort of designers do the design. The designers that simultaneously made changes under the guise of "UX" just sort of made it up as they went along without any basis in reality. That's how we got stuck with the hamburger menu.
esafak 15 hours ago [-]
The hamburger's just where you put bad ideas you can't say no to :)
20 hours ago [-]
PaulHoule 18 hours ago [-]
Back in the 2000s I would team up with people to put social applications in front of people and the one way you go could go big back then was carefully tune up every aspect of the funnel and get the viral branching ratio > 1 preferably >> 1 so you greased the skis and looked for every possible reason why people might not complete the process. It was life or death.
Around the time Facebook figured out what it's business model was platforms suppressed virality and people got used to the idea that you have to pay for traffic. You'd think that people would think "I'm paying $40 to acquire a customer, losing that customer to bad UI comes right out of my shareholder's pocketbook..." and somebody probably does, but a lot of people don't. Like zero interest rates and some people are just made of money and some people in business are lazy and, if their business is profitable, won't pursue cost reductions unless competition makes it life or death. Or something.
So I am appalled at so much bad software marketing that makes me think "is there anyone left who's had to tune up a marketing funnel?"
Like you see 200+ bug reports on Adobe's tracker about how Acrobat displays a total of 8 distracting UI elements to promote AI summaries the instant you open a document. And you can't clear them. And that's enough to make people see red.
But if you actually click on one of these stupid links you see a series of ads for things that are not AI features and that they don't make a serious effort to explain or sell. Then finally there's an ad for Acrobat Pro which maybe has the AI Summary but do I want to find out? I heard somebody somewhere did manage to try the AI Summary and of course it didn't work.
Like I could be annoyed by rapacious behavior but at least understand that people are motivated to make money for their shareholders. But to annoy everybody when they have Adobe CC subscriptions to lose and no clear path to convert? Where's the profit in that?
And that's totally ordinary. Like Meta solved so many tough problems to create the Meta Quest 3 and supposedly they are leaders in social software but they get the easy things wrong: they keep changing the interface that I'd use to "friend" people in games and make the process so terrible (at least the spammers who try to follow me on Instagram stole pictures of blonde women but nobody has a profile pic or the slightest bit of information to help decide "why would you follow me?") Supposedly Zuck wants to succeed at VR so bad... or is it just "we're #1 why try harder?"
disgruntledphd2 2 hours ago [-]
> "I'm paying $40 to acquire a customer, losing that customer to bad UI comes right out of my shareholder's pocketbook..." and somebody probably does, but a lot of people don't.
Yeah, this is insane. When I worked in marketing analytics I would point this out, and the most common response was that retention was a different team so we don't care about it.
PaulHoule 2 hours ago [-]
That's the usual explanation I hear for this phenomenon. Every team is optimizing for its own OKRs and KPIs but nobody is optimizing for the business.
WillAdams 9 hours ago [-]
One company whose site does get this is McMaster-Carr --- there used to be (maybe still is?) a great post on Quora about how the re-design for the site was realized and the very talented designer/architect who did it, but it's either gone, or I can't find it.
tshaddox 18 hours ago [-]
To be fair, the “younger replacements” have typically grown up surrounded with many more user interfaces than their predecessors, and the same is true for much of the audience they’re designing interfaces for.
Aesthetics aside, some of the specific guidance from the past is simply not as crucial as it used to be when most users were very new to smartphones or personal computers.
socalgal2 17 hours ago [-]
I know this will never happen but it would be wonderful if designers were personally liable for all lost productivity of their changes. Designers move things around in some app or OS and millions of people have to stop their day-to-day work and figure out the new UI. Maybe you can attribute it to how many forests were burnt from the downstream effects of the changes.
Further, it's arguably become worse with touch screens in cars where, while you're driving, you get to discover a designer has moved a widget somewhere else and now your distracted. Self driving cars might solve that but even just walking around using your phone, every UI change is another distraction that might have consequences.
Pxtl 9 hours ago [-]
The web ruined everything. Using a document platform for GUIs meant that every widget was reinvented over and over again until all conventional semantics were lost.
DoneWithAllThat 20 hours ago [-]
FYI it’s Chesterton’s Fence, named after writer G. K. Chesterton.
cosmic_cheese 20 hours ago [-]
Fixed, thanks!
mannanj 16 hours ago [-]
What about AI? Do you think that had no impact here? Certainly I've noticed all knowledge professions gain a sense of urgency, survival like psychosis-style thinking, and deterioration of quality and human thinking.
hn_throwaway_99 20 hours ago [-]
> I think this and many other questionable UI decisions across the industry in recent years is the fallout of the old guard of UI designers having rotated out for younger replacements in the past decade with little transfer of knowledge occurring.
Not sure about that, given that John Gruber specifically lays the blame for a slew of recent shitty Apple design decisions on Alan Dye (cough liquid glass cough), and also the reversal of these shitty design decisions on changes made when Dye jumped ship for Meta. Gruber also says the Apple design team is much happier after Dye's departure.
Dye must be over 50, so I don't count him as a "younger replacement".
publlus_enigma 18 hours ago [-]
Dye comes from fashion and packaging not UI design. In that sense, he is a younger generation of UI designers.
16 hours ago [-]
uejeidud 17 hours ago [-]
[dead]
kevin_thibedeau 18 hours ago [-]
> John Gruber wrote about this reversion back in June, including the fact that Apple’s new Human Interface Guidelines specifically call out Tahoe’s approach to menus as an example of what not to do on macOS.
Apple knew this was bad 20 years ago. They just don't bother to read their own documentation:
Apple Human Interface Guidelines (2008) [1] p. 170:
> If you do include icons in your menus, include them only for menu items for which they add significant value; don’t include them for every menu item. A menu that includes too many icons (or poorly designed ones) can appear cluttered and be hard to read.
I don't love the insinuation that people making mistakes (especially mistakes like failing to read and retain one of probably hundreds of thousands of pieces of UI guidance) is somehow a character flaw. "Apple" isn't a person, and just because it's written down doesn't mean it gets memorized by every individual on every team.
11 minutes ago [-]
xboxnolifes 1 hours ago [-]
Apple isn't a person. It doesn't need to memorize. Its a Apple failing because no process caught it, and because anything coming out of Apple that is bad is a failing by Apple.
twodave 42 minutes ago [-]
“They don’t bother to read their own documentation” to me reads more like an indictment of people’s priorities than criticizing a business practice. It makes it sound like even though the business process says to do X, lazy employees did Y instead. If that wasn’t the intent then the wording could have been more carefully chosen. But it’s just a small gripe :)
trash_cat 8 hours ago [-]
Like the example they used in the blog is terrible. Weekdays wouldn't need any symbols. A cogwheel for settings is a great example.
dspillett 7 hours ago [-]
> A cogwheel for settings is a great example
Though the cog for settings is, like the three-dots commonly used to represent a menu itself, is only recognised as such because it has often been used that way. The first time(s) it was used it would not have been obvious to people. So the rule isn't that a good icon should be obvious. A good icon is either immediately obvious or consistently used.
The common save icon is a good example of this in both cases: to those of us who have been around a while it is obvious because it looks like a floppy disk, to those who never used floppy disks it is obvious because that is what save icons (almost) always are.
paxy 21 hours ago [-]
This Apple devotion is really something else..
Looking at all their design missteps and corrections in recent releases my only takeaway is that they are making it up as they go along just like the rest of us.
bunderbunder 21 hours ago [-]
I think it might be somewhat generational. There was a time when Apple famously put a lot of effort into HCI research and experimentation, and prioritized it above so many other concerns. When Apple chose to do UI differently from everyone else, it was a strong indication that they made the decision based on empirical research and not just making it up as they go along like everyone else. A single menu bar at the top of the screen, for example, was chosen because they found that users could locate and click on them much faster than they could menus at the top of the window. I can’t remember exactly how much but I think it was something like 1/3 - 1/2 as much time.
But that was in a different millennium.
chihuahua 19 hours ago [-]
> But that was in a different millennium.
Exactly. There may have been a reason for the single menu bar back in 1984 when the Mac had a 9-inch screen. But it doesn't work very well on my 43-inch screen where the menu bar may be a few feet away from a small window in the lower right hand corner.
Someone 10 hours ago [-]
> Exactly. There may have been a reason for the single menu bar back in 1984 when the Mac had a 9-inch screen. But it doesn't work very well on my 43-inch screen where the menu bar may be a few feet away from a small window in the lower right hand corner.
That isn’t obvious. With a mouse/trackpad with a good acceleration curve, chances are you can move faster to that menu at the top than to a menu a few cm away because you don’t have to decelerate when approaching the menu bar at the top of the screen.
epihelix 8 hours ago [-]
Last I checked, the mouse was a precision pointing device. It's stood the test of time because I can intuitively and precisely, without thinking, move to and click items anywhere on the screen.
Follow Apple's logic, reductio ad absurdum, and you'd have to put every single GUI element in the corners of the screen, because how else could you manage to quickly select them with a mouse? That OK button in the dialogue? Top right corner of the screen. Cancel? Top left. Quick, easy, and nobody could ever press the wrong button. It'll make it faster!
carlosjobim 6 hours ago [-]
It would be a great improvement if they put the window traffic light buttons in the top left of the menu bar.
chihuahua 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not at all concerned with how easy it is to move the mouse to the menu. It's about looking at a window in one place, and having to look up and to the left by more than a foot to focus on the menu bar.
Resizing windows already requires moving the mouse with single-pixel precision. In comparison, hitting the menu bar is very easy.
bluGill 8 hours ago [-]
It fails on multi monitor systems where the edge might not be limit. And the next monitor up might be hard to read and only useful for indicators.
boonzeet 8 hours ago [-]
As others have mentioned, having a target that the mouse automatically stops at, the screen edge, is far more ergonomic than a thin bar that requires more precision.
Also, these menus are very consistent in appearance, functionality, shortcuts, etc; moreso than my experience with Windows applications.
astafrig 16 hours ago [-]
For people with a normal screen size, having the click targets be of infinite size is still very useful.
chihuahua 15 hours ago [-]
I think the median screen size today is closer to 30" than 9".
Maxion 12 hours ago [-]
No, most people do not user their computer with 30" external screens. Perhaps developers at FAANGs do, but most people are mobile devices, follow by 13" or 15" laptop screens. Older people often use larger font sizes or browser zoom on top of that (or both).
wredcoll 30 minutes ago [-]
Is there any study/survey of how many people even own a monitor?
netrap 3 hours ago [-]
I think it is a great example of developer bias.. I agree with you.
The-Bus 1 hours ago [-]
It's funny trying to use an Office application on just a laptop's screen. You're left with a tiny slice of real estate because menus have gotten so bloated and don't adjust for the screen real estate you have. What's comfortable to work in on a 2x" monitor is not the same at <15".
I've seen this in webpages too. You load a page and think there's an error but the "login" button is surrounded by so much white space that it doesn't show up in the browser until you scroll down.
bigstrat2003 1 hours ago [-]
The single menu bar has never been a good UI choice. A menu per window is far easier to use, IMO.
hughlilly 17 hours ago [-]
Have you tried ⌘-Shift-? and typing the menu option you want to select?
16 hours ago [-]
efortis 20 hours ago [-]
IIRC Bill Atkinson said that it is at the top because it was easier to code. at any rate, it’s true that screen edges and corners are easy to click because their hit region becomes infinite in one or two directions
In this video Bill explains why he moved it. At 28 min he says: "…and if the window is near the bottom, how are you going to show all the choices? Well, I tried moving the menus to the top of the screen."
It's well worth watching that entire video, in which Bill Atkinson dropped many profound mind blowing ideas in his talk to Brad Myers' user interface students on February 4, 2019:
At 1:02:26, a student asked Bill Atkinson what was his biggest joy when making Macintosh, and he replied:
Bill> I was pretty excited when I moved the menus to the top of the screen, and suddenly it just clicked. Like, ok, we have the full width, the full height, there is this kinesthetic reaching over for this place. The pull down menus moving to the top of the screen, I though, yeah, this is doing to work!
Then at 1:03:10, a student asked:
Student> I have a question about HyperCard. What was the impetus for that [Bill smiled and chuckled], and like, how did, or what you build the um, motivation to like do that,
because it was a kind of odd thing at the time...
[Bill beams and reaches off screen to find some papers]
Bill> How many of you guys have done a psychedellic?
[Class laughs, Bill grins] [Brad: no hands!]
Bill> In 1985 I swallowed a teenie fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete workbench outside my home in Los Gatos, California. I gazed up at a hundred billion galaxies, each with a hundred billion stars, and each star a giant thermonuclear fusion reaction as powerful as our sun.
And for the first time in my life I knew deep down inside that we're not alone. I knew that life on Planet Earth is not the only pocket of consciousness in the universe, and likely not the most advanced, but we still have a role to play in the unfolding drama of creation.
It seemed to me that the universe is in a process of coming alive. Consciousness is blossoming and propogating to colonize the universe. And life on Earth is one of many bright spots in the cosmic birth of consciousness.
But the stars are separated by enormous distances of darkness and vacuum, which may hinder communication between them. I lowered my gaze and saw the street lamps below, glowing brightly, each casting a pool of light, but surrounded by darkness before the next lamp. As above, so below.
The street lamps reminded me of bodies of knowledge, gems of discovery and understanding, but separated from each other by distance, and different languages.
Poets, artists, musicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, mathemetitions, and economists, all have separate pools of knowledge that are hindered from sharing and finding the deeper connections.
My vision distorted by thick eyeglasses, I witnessed the curvature of the Earth's horizon, and I felt the pull of gravity towards its center, such that every one of us is standing at the very apex.
Each of us stands at the top of planet Earth, and each of us is a leader or captain of the Blue Marble team.
How could I help? By focusing on the weak link. If I were captain of a soccer team, I'd look for the weak link, and work on it. If the goalie was letting too many through, I would spend extra practice time with him, and the whole team would prosper.
It occurred to me that the weak link for the Blue Marble team is wisdom. Humanity has achieved sufficient technological power to change the course of life and the entire global ecosystem. But we seem to lack the perspective to choose wisely between alternative futures.
But I was young, without much life experience or wisdom myself. Knowledge it seemed to me consists of the "how" connections between pieces of information. The cause and effect relationships. How does this action bring about that result?
Science is a systematic attempt to discover the "how" connections. Wisdom, it seemed to me, was a step further removed. The bigger perspective of the "why" connections between pieces of knowledge. Why, for reasons ethical and aesthetic, should we choose one future over another.
i thought that if we could encourage sharing of ideas, between different areas of knowledge, perhaps more of the bigger picture would emerge, and eventually, more wisdom might develop. Sort of a trickle-up theory of information, leading to knowledge, leading to wisdom.
This was the underlying inspiration for HyperCard: a multimedia authoring environment that empowered non-programmers to share ideas, using new interactive media called HyperCard Stacks.
Each card in a HyperCard stack included graphics, text, interactive buttons, and links that took you to another card or stack. Built-in painting tools, drag-and-drop authoring with a library of pre-fab buttons and fields, and simple event based scripting, made HyperCard flexible and easy to use.
It took a lot of hard work and a dedicated team to complete this mission. Apple shipped HyperCard in August, 1987, and included it free with every Mac, so any user could create and share HyperCard stacks.
Many creative people expressed their ideas and passions, and several million interactive HyperCard stacks were created.
HyperCard was a precursor to the first web browser, except chained to a hard drive before the World Wide Web. Six years later, Mosaic was introduced, influenced by some of the ideas in HyperCard, and indirectly by an inspiring LSD experience.
[Class laughs]
So that's, honest, that's where the idea for HyperCard came from. And uh, and I, I'm not, like, advocating that every software designer should go out and take LSD, but it worked for me.
----
That was a tough act to follow, but the next week I gave a presentation about pie menus and Fitts' Law to Brad's UI class on February 11, 2019:
At 5:20 I mentioned Wiseman's 1969 PIXIE paper, the earliest known implementation of radial menus that ran on a PDP-7 with a 340 vector graphics display and light pen. Since then I've unearthed the paper, two films, and 128 pages of PDP-7 assembly language source code written by Heinz Lemke, which I've since reincarneted with a PDP-7 emulator:
PIXIE SIMELEC (1972) on PDP-7 and 340 Display emulator:
Certain designers may have hated Nielsen, but their users hated them, and they have more users hating them than Nielsen has designers hating him, and users matter much more than designers, so I think he came out way ahead.
Bruce Tognazzini is the OG GUI Guru of 80's user interface design!
Tog not just invented and implemented, but also deeply rationalized and documented a lot of great user interface techniques, like the "mile high menu bar", which partially exploits Fitts' Law (in the "up" direction), but made more sense on the original single small Mac screens. (While pie menus more fully exploit Fitts' law (in "all" directions") and they work great on large screens, giving you even more "leverage".)
>When the Macintosh was new, Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini wrote a column in Apple’s developer magazine on UI. In his column, people wrote in with lots of interesting UI design problems, which he discussed. These columns continue to this day on his web site. They’ve also been collected and embellished in a couple of great books, like Tog on Software Design, which is a lot of fun and a great introduction to UI design. (Tog on Interface was even better, but it’s out of print.)
>Tog invented the concept of the mile high menu bar to explain why the menu bar on the Macintosh, which is always glued to the top of the physical screen, is so much easier to use than menu bars on Windows, which appear inside each application window. When you want to point to the File menu on Windows, you have a target about half an inch wide and a quarter of an inch high to acquire. You must move and position the mouse fairly precisely in both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions.
>But on a Macintosh, you can slam the mouse up to the top of the screen, without regard to how high you slam it, and it will stop at the physical edge of the screen – the correct vertical position for using the menu. So, effectively, you have a target that is still half an inch wide, but a mile high. Now you only need to worry about positioning the cursor horizontally, not vertically, so the task of clicking on a menu item is that much easier.
>Based on this principle, Tog has a pop quiz: what are the five spots on the screen that are easiest to acquire (point to) with the mouse? The answer: all four corners of the screen (where you can literally slam the mouse over there in one fell swoop without any pointing at all), plus, the current position of the mouse, because it’s already there.
>The principle of the mile-high menu bar is fairly well known, but it must not be entirely obvious, because the Windows 95 team missed the point completely with the Start push button, sitting almost in the bottom left corner of the screen, but not exactly. In fact, it’s about 2 pixels away from the bottom and 2 pixels from the left of the screen. So, for the sake of a couple of pixels, Microsoft literally “snatches defeat from the jaws of victory”, Tog writes, and makes it that much harder to acquire the start button. It could have been a mile square, absolutely trivial to hit with the mouse. For the sake of something, I don’t know what, it’s not. God help us.
Another great technique he documented in the original Apple Human Interface Guidelines was the "drag delay" of popping up "pull right" submenus, to mitigate a problem that linear menus have, but pie menus don't. People keep forgetting and re-inventing it in sometimes better, sometimes worse ways, but he invented and implemented it for the original Mac, then most importantly documented it in the first edition of the Apple's 1987 Human Interface Guidelines, and the Mac UI still supports it. It's the kind of thing nobody notices if it works well, that's invisibly built into the toolkit, that nobody appreciates how much thought and nuance went into it, that deserves a lot of user testing and iteration to get right. (Or you could just use pie menus and not have that problem! ;)
I would really like to see an opensource or freely accessible version of HyperCard which does user interface right. Still annoyed by the rug-pull the LiveCode folks did for their opensource version and wish that the OpenXTalk folks would get some traction.
One of the most effective menu implementations ever for me was Altsys Virtuoso on NeXTstep's right-click (to pop-up the main menu at the mouse cursor), drag-down to Modify, then drag right to "Punch" or "Union" (whichever was the top command) --- it was a command I did a lot and it was almost gestural, kind of lke a well-done pie menu.
FWIW, the current Windows Start menu at lower-left, while not drawn to the corner now allows one to click the corner to open it, lower-right is "Show Desktop" and upper right closes the current maximized window --- only upper left is at the mercy of whatever app is currently running.
DonHopkins 5 hours ago [-]
Agreed, I'd love to see that too!
One criticism I have of HyperCard is that it wasn't "HyperCard All The Way Down", in that not all the rest of its dialogs and user interfaces and menus were made out of HyperCard stacks. It wasn't "metacircular", defined in terms of itself.
That's totally forgivable given that HyperCard was the first original iteration, and "merely" getting it finished in time to ship on every Mac desktop was a spectacular achievement. But it doesn't excuse anything that came after it, and it doesn't excuse Apple for dropping it instead of evolving it.
Cyberdog for OpenDoc was another interesting approach to a web browser, built out of components you could embed in documents, but Apple dropped that along with OpenDoc too:
Looking back 30 years, that demo is unintentionally hilarious, and it makes me wonder what HyperCard would have been like if Apple had continued to develop it as much as it deserved.
>You always want to end a report with some pizzazz, and these days, nothing is more pizzazz than Java. So over here I have a Java applet, and I want to put it into Claris Works. [...]
>It's actually a little bit different than that. Rather than just being FreeHand it's actually Shockwave for FreeHand, and what we're running here is the Shockwave for FreeHand Netscape Plugin running inside of an OpenDoc Part that can run any Netscape Plugin. So because it's -- [applause] -- it's a little complicated...
Bottlenecking every event and pixel through the Stone Age nascent NPAPI to see Duke waving at three frames a second was not the flex they thought it was.
>The event handler never gets mouse motion or mouse up events, so I had to track the mouse motion and button release manually by checking the button status in the idle callback.
HyperLook, which was written in PostScript for the NeWS Window System, was deeply inspired by HyperCard, and addressed the "All The Way Down" problem, as well as Atkinson's admitted limitation of being chained to a hard drive instead of networked.
All of HyperLook's property sheets, dialogs, popups, help windows, menus, etc, were defined in terms of itself, editable and replaceable.
The PostScript graphics editor was a component you could use in your own stacks to edit graphics, like a clock's face and hands, and you could copy ("capture") any user interface as editable structured graphics, which made it easy to illustrate the documentation:
Even the user interface editor itself was a replaceable component, so you could plug in different kinds of user interface editors, or remove it completely to deliver a non-editable runtime system (like SimCity).
The other thing that HyperLook added was another layer in the event delegation system: Button => Card => Background => Stack => Client. The client being what we would call a "web server" or "distributed application" now, implementing what we call the "AJAX" architecture now.
I developed SimCity and HyperLook together, each one a forcing function for the other, and I'm taking the same approach now with reincarnating HyperTIES, Ben Shneiderman's pioneering hypertext system from the University of Maryland:
"It is an unworthy design objective to aim for anything less than trying to do to the Macintosh what the Macintosh did to the previous state of the art." -Bill Buxton
The "Natural" Language of Interaction: A Perspective on Non-Verbal Dialogues, INFOR: Canadian Journal of Operations Research and Information Processing, 26(4), 1988, pp. 428–438.
>Before going too much further, it is probably worth making a few comments about my approach and my examples. As will become pretty evident, the Apple Macintosh takes a bit of a beating in what follows. Some readers may view this as evidence of contempt for its design. From my perspective, it is evidence of respect. Let me explain.
>User interface design today is plagued by an unhealthy degree of complacency. We live in a world of copy-cat unimaginative interface products, where major manufacturers put out double-paged colour spreads in Business Week announcing "... our system's user interface is as easy to use as the most easy to use microcomputer [i.e., the Mac]" (or words to that effect). In what other industry can you get away with stating that you're as good as the competition, rather than better? Especially when the competition's product is over 4 years old!
>The best ideas are the most dangerous, since they take hold and are the hardest to change. Hence, the Macintosh is dangerous to the progress of user interfaces precisely because it was so well done! Designers seem to be viewing it as a measure of success rather than as a point of departure. Consequently, it runs the risk of becoming the Cobol of the 90's.
>I criticize the Macintosh precisely because it is held in such high regard. It is one of the few worthy targets. If I can make the point that there are other design options, and that these options appear to have a lot of potential, then I may help wake people up to the fact that it is an unworthy design objective to aim for anything less than trying to do to the Macintosh what the Macintosh did to the previous state-of-the-art.
>Enough of the sermon. Let's leave the pulpit for some concrete examples.
dnlosx 18 hours ago [-]
Now, it feels like they prioritize branding over functionality.
Like "Hey let's use a notch as branding element in iPhone and Mac"
20 hours ago [-]
andai 20 hours ago [-]
> they are making it up as they go along just like the rest of us.
"Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that are no smarter than you. And you can change it. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use." —Steve Jobs
There are a lot of us that aren't making it up as we go. There is plenty of knowledge and experience on how to do these things and Apple used to be the king of it. For some reason they started throwing it all away with Liquid Glass.
kibwen 19 hours ago [-]
Decades before Liquid Glass. They had begun throwing it all away by the time they got rid of scrollbars (and the rest of the industry followed like gormless lemmings).
LtWorf 19 hours ago [-]
Ah yes, I experienced a designer who hid scrollbars, and also decided that the title was NOT part of the page so a scroll action there would not scroll anything.
I remember wasting a couple of hours trying to find where a certain setting had gone.
Of course the setting in question was literally the most important one, and of course it was hidden at the bottom of the page, outside of my non-designer-too-small-screen, after things like picking which colour and which emoji you wanted to use.
youniverse 21 hours ago [-]
Apple is/was regarded as the gods of design and ux. Does anyone know what it takes to get hired there as a designer now? Are the original designers with actual vision still there? I imagine they would need to really be conscious of not hiring average designers who just have a resume of top companies they have worked at but need the type of people steve jobs would have hired himself.
Easier said than done so it's not surprising they have atrophied in their former genius but im curious.
diskzero 14 hours ago [-]
Steve Jobs himself talked about the bozo explosion that occurs when A players stop hiring A players. Was Alan Dye an A player? Certainly not to me. Who was the last Apple UX A player? Bas Ording? Mike Matas? Greg Christie? Imran Chaudri? The DNA is gone and the depletion started the moment Steve died and the infighting began leading to what we have today.
cromka 19 hours ago [-]
The serious downgrade of how dismissing popups worked is what drive me back to Linux (GNOME).
It's not perfect here but having an ergonomic design and replacing it with a substantially worse one is rather unheard of in this world.
happytoexplain 21 hours ago [-]
This is the opposite of logical. Missteps and corrections are a sign of conscientiousness, not "making it up".
If somebody always gets everything right in your opinion, you should be suspicious of your own values, not of the people who don't achieve constant perfection.
david422 1 hours ago [-]
> Missteps and corrections are a sign of conscientiousness, not "making it up".
Or they just skipped the testing and focus groups that should have highlighted that before release.
bitpush 21 hours ago [-]
I think you're trying to find meaning when there's no meaning what so ever.
Large phones were a bad idea because you cant use it with one finger, until iPhone Pro Maxes came out.
Installing apps from the internet is scary because viruses, yet Macs let you do that no questions asked.
Ads are bad and dangerous, until it shows up on Apple Maps.
Apple is just a simple company, existing to make as much money as possible. They make beautiful devices though - but no reason to put them on a pedestal.
OnlineTux 19 hours ago [-]
> Installing apps from the internet is scary because viruses, yet Macs let you do that no questions asked.
Even before Gatekeeper, macOS/OSX File Quarantine prompted you when you went to open a .dmg or .zip you downloaded. These days anything not singed by an Apple Developer certificate refuses to open unless you remove the file attribute.
> Apple is just a simple company, existing to make as much money as possible. They make beautiful devices though - but no reason to put them on a pedestal.
Apple certainly exists to make money, but I don't think they exist solely to do that. They have long had a culture of enabling their users to do things that were previously the purview of big business or specialised fields. They don't sell you just hardware, they give you a whole office suite, audio production tools, development tools etc. all on top of high quality hardware.
With a MacBook and iPhone you can be a filmmaker, take and edit professional-quality photographs, record and produce your own music out of the box.
Maybe they used to be better at it than they are today, but Apple tends to spend more time putting their customers first than their competitors do.
bitpush 17 hours ago [-]
All the things you mentioned are applicable to Adobe (!) as well. Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere.. and not to mention Flash, InDesign etc
Adobe happened to be a shitty company but "enabling their users to do things that were previously purview of big business" isn't unique to Apple at all.
Infact, Apple is the biggest of the biggest companies of them all. Bigger than "professional" companies like Canon, Nikon, RED etc.
Apples advantage is stuff just works, which is more harder than it seems.
bunderbunder 20 hours ago [-]
This reads like the corporate edition of the goomba fallacy.
The individual at Apple who decided to try and keep phones small, for example is probably not the person who decided to make them big. I feel confident saying this because the person who was supposedly the driving force behind keeping them small died in 2011, and they didn't start releasing phones that are too large for comfortable one-handed use until 2014.
JumpCrisscross 18 hours ago [-]
> This Apple devotion
Hypocrisy would require commending Apple for icons everywhere and then celebrating their removal. That is not what happened. If anything has the homogeneity of hypocrisy, it’s this attitude that any commendation must be fanboying (while ignoring said commenters’ past criticism).
readthenotes1 21 hours ago [-]
By recent, you mean since just after the iPhone 3s?
The iPhone 4 was such a letdown...
pornel 21 hours ago [-]
4 still shipped with buttons my mum could recognise.
Apple's design never recovered from the flattening of iOS 7.
yreg 21 hours ago [-]
*3GS
abletonlive 18 hours ago [-]
It's almost as if challenging assumptions, trying new/old/different things, course correcting after you learn is completely normal thing to do.
Your assumptions only work until they don't. It's not like we live in a static situation. What didn't work yesterday might work today
amelius 20 hours ago [-]
It's the Reality Distortion Field.
Best known from The Bible, Steve Jobs, Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler.
glimshe 21 hours ago [-]
And on every misstep and their correction, the same people will be defending them. Like "icons on every option is so much more intuitive", just to argue the exact opposite a couple of years later.
happytoexplain 21 hours ago [-]
Criticisms of the format, "the same people", are virtually always irrational/tribalistic, and based on the "invented enemy" internet trope that happens when interpreting groups of people as being one person. I'd like to leave such common tropes outside of HN.
In other circumstances, I'd be the first to agree, but you'll find people arguing for both sides in the same comment in this very comment section.
angiolillo 19 hours ago [-]
> And on every misstep and their correction, the same people will be defending them.
That doesn't match my experience. Personally I've found Apple fans (not just Gruber and Nielsen but regular Apple users) to be the most vocally critical of their design missteps.
kergonath 19 hours ago [-]
You know, it’s really not what happened. All these people, Gruber, Siracusa, and the usual suspects, were unanimous in their displeasure.
You don’t have to make it up, it was only one year ago. All their blog posts are still visible.
20 hours ago [-]
Andrew_nenakhov 19 hours ago [-]
Humans are very good at distinguishing shapes and colors. Visually distinct icons of various shapes help build muscle memory and quickly find the needed option.
One of the worst trends in icons is this insatiable desire to put different icons into uniform shapes.
For example, this trend resulted in tragic replacement of beautiful varied and distinct Android icons that were introduced in Android 5 to the uglicity we have now.
On iOS, beautiful SFSymbol icons that floated beautifully on flat surfaces since iOS 7.0 were encased in absolutely similar circular 'liquid Glass' blobs. Sad.
duskdozer 11 hours ago [-]
I don't think it helps if they're just random icons. Look at https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions . I went there a few days ago and immediately was distracted by all the random emoji icons scattered everywhere, and none of them provided me any useful information. I swear this is a new thing because it was just that noticeable. I had to put them in my adblock list.
Andrew_nenakhov 10 hours ago [-]
Some very long time ago, in the early 00s, I read some UX study about icons. Ppl there replaced regular icons in app like MS word with random shapes, red square, blue circle, purple triangle, etc, and found out, that after initial learning period people find these icons just as fast as more meaningful ones. Recently, I tried finding that material, but couldn't find it. Still, it matches my experience with icons.
ShinyLeftPad 5 hours ago [-]
It would be interesting research to read and check their methodology if true.
Things are different today though, considering how many pieces of software an average person used in 2001 vs how many today. It's no longer just word and excel, updated once in a few years, so you can learn stuff by heart and not even care what icons they put on what
wpm 16 hours ago [-]
I've never thought SF Symbols were beautiful. They are boring, ugly little bugs, hieroglyph crap that fade to blobs unless you're looking at them at 64x64 and above. Bereft of color, care, or soul, just crappy little vector squiggles. I hate them, and I hate that everyone copied them.
A company 1/100th the size used to design beautiful icons that clearly represented what they meant, and that company was Apple. Now I get SVG slop. SF Symbols can bite me.
mrweasel 12 hours ago [-]
That's also one reason to love those custom made hotchpotch UI. We don't see them to often anymore, but they had just the right functionality, and because the author was anything but a designer, the icons came from where ever, it was big colourful and buttons and icons sat in the same spot for a decade.
kyleee 19 hours ago [-]
And also to constantly redesign the icons. I am effectively icon blind at this point due to the constant churn
paulryanrogers 19 hours ago [-]
I once thought it was a nice refresh every 5+ years. Now it feels excessive changing every single year.
hermitcrab 27 minutes ago [-]
This seemed like a dumb idea when it came out, making the menus look much more cluttered. I'm glad I didn't waste time adding loads of tiny icons to my application menus.
Apple seems to be dropping the ball on UI recently. Their glass UI also felt like a triumph of eye candy over usability.
netsharc 21 hours ago [-]
The conclusion is too forgiving...
> They designed it, shipped it, lived with it for a year, then publicly changed their guidance on it. To me, that’s a lot more persuasive than simply saying, “Apple doesn’t do this.”
> Choosing not to do something you’ve never done is one thing.
> Choosing not to do something you’ve done is experience.
A more persuasive sales pitch for me to consider Apple products would be if the company had judgement not to ship such a hot mess of a sloppy product in the first place...
happytoexplain 21 hours ago [-]
In any other context I would agree with you, but in software, the point the author is making is quite true.
MS would include superfluous icons because they observe it in other software and can't think for themselves, or they would omit superfluous icons because it never occurred to them in the first place.
Everything Apple does is carefully considered, good and bad.
I take the latter every time, because I understand how bad things are in software. I know it's unrealistic to be as choosy as I want to be.
Wowfunhappy 21 hours ago [-]
Apple's own design guidelines originally said not to do the thing they did (and which they are now once again saying not to do).
Couldn't Apple have just, like, talked to the people who originally wrote the guidelines? Why do they need to re-invent the wheel? Will Apple forget again in another 15 years and need to re-run the experiment, taking us all along as test subjects?
OnlineTux 19 hours ago [-]
Why do you assume they didn't talk to those people?
Decisions should be revisited when it makes sense to do so.
stonogo 14 hours ago [-]
And given the rapidity with which that decision was thrown in the trash and abandoned, we have no reason to assume it made sense to revisit it in the first place.
troupo 10 hours ago [-]
Yet Apple "designers" have been following the rest of the industry for more than a decade now and didn't revisit any decisions, but just threw them in the trash not understanding them
socalgal2 17 hours ago [-]
> Everything Apple does is carefully considered, good and bad.
No evidence this is true. It's basically PR / urban legend. It's not like the people at Apple are magic angels. They're the same people that worked at Meta or Google or MS last year or the year before that
GMoromisato 21 hours ago [-]
Microsoft has (and had) some amazing designers. They came up with Metro, which was the forerunner of the flat design that everyone loves/hates now.
chihuahua 19 hours ago [-]
Isn't that like saying "Georgia is full of amazing people. For example, Stalin and Beria."
Or is that how you meant it?
isolatedsystem 18 hours ago [-]
Metro design being amazing, refreshing, beautiful and delightful is a hill I will die on.
It was Microsoft who had the courage (and, admittedly, need) to come up with a bold new design language. They said, you know what, most people are digital natives these days, let's not infantalise them with fake paper notepads and fake leather textures for their digital calendar. Instead, let's make text itself the highlight, the star, and strip out all the rest.
They had a User Story thingy where their ideal users were busy people wanting to exist in the real world. MS wanted that the ideal user takes the phone out of his pocket, glances at it and instantly recives the information he seeks, and quickly puts it back in his pocket to move on with his life.
Hence Live Tiles. Hence the first widgets. Hence their lovely and ill-fated People app where you could go to one place and handle your Facebook feed and your LinkedIn feed etc. Hence the discarding of endless unicorn rainbow vomit of icons. Nah. Here's a simple text interface in black background for AMOLED battery life. The phone is not an extension of personality. It is a tool. Use it. Put it away.
Lumia phones ran amazingly well on nothing specs because they didn't try to be too complicated with graphical stuff. Battery life was always god-tier. And, though I've never been able to confirm it, around the time of Lumia 710, the MS touch keyboard actually let you type letters in the wrong order and would correct them for you. For example: "atcually". I remember at that time that Android wouldn't. It would only handle near-misses: "axtually".
I fucking loved Windows Phone. Rest in peace.
sirwhinesalot 7 hours ago [-]
I remember most people being quite positive about Metro on the phone. Maybe not about Windows Phone itself for various reasons, but the actual design I remember most people being at worst ambivalent about it.
Windows 8 Metro, on the other hand, was almost universally hated and with very good reason. And Apple has been doing the same exact mistake for awhile, slowly porting designs meant for a phone (and far worse designs than Metro at that, iOS 7 was terrible as was everything since) to laptops/desktops.
publlus_enigma 18 hours ago [-]
I really liked Windows Phone, too.
However they lost it when they tried to port that same design to Windows 8, resulting in an unpleasant collision of multiple inconsistent design paradigms.
readthenotes1 21 hours ago [-]
When you say carefully considered, you're going with the the Aristotelian process that led him to argue that feathers fall slower than rock.
It would have been a very easy thing to test the people outside there bubble.
epihelix 8 hours ago [-]
> > They designed it, shipped it, lived with it for a year, then publicly changed their guidance on it.
> > Choosing not to do something you’ve never done is one thing.
> > Choosing not to do something you’ve done is experience.
Gods, this sounds so LLM :(
Lord-Jobo 3 hours ago [-]
LLMs have a very strong voice, and that voice is “corporate hype press release”. So even fully human generated corporate crap sounds exactly like it. They both suck ass so they both deserve lambasting regardless.
sssilver 21 hours ago [-]
> A more persuasive sales pitch for me to consider Apple products would be if the company had judgement not to ship such a hot mess of a sloppy product in the first place...
When I read a sentence like this, I have to remind myself that this is Apple products we're talking about.
What other company do you feel surpasses Apple in terms of "judgement not to ship such a hot mess of a sloppy product in the first place"?
Is there any consumer electronics company today that ships products that are in any way less of a slop than Apple?
ludwigschubert 20 hours ago [-]
Your “today” does a lot of work. Many frustrated people are comparing 2020s Apple with 2010 Apple, thus the complaints.
Alan Dye really did a number on that company and set back UI design by one or two decades, favoring graphic design over human interface design.
not_a_bot_4sho 42 minutes ago [-]
This author gives too much credit to Apple. They're not a paragon of perfect design. For example, liquid. Or the austere iOS 'metro' abomination years.
That said, I'm glad the menu item icons are gone too.
sunaookami 7 hours ago [-]
Slightly related but what really grinds my gears in modern UI design is: Monochrome icons where you don't know what it's doing. I'm feeling like an old man that doesn't know how to use a computer when I'm hovering over the icons to hope for a tooltip (that is often forgotten) that explains what it does and hope it's not a destructive one when clicking it. This somehow got worse over the years with every program inventing its own icons and meanings.
noduerme 14 hours ago [-]
I've followed and agreed with this OP's critique for awhile.. it's also a justifiable and entertaining take. As a UI designer for 30 years, I have a sympathetic but slightly different view.
I grew up in the 80s with DOS software, when dropdown menus were new and our IBM PC didn't even have a mouse. Since the design idea emerged of using an icon in a menu, which I'd probably locate to the Apple menu on the 128k Mac, my whole life I've seen this push/pull between phases of design and various fads that have emphasized either information density or some kind of simplified graphic/hieroglyphic gloss of the language and intent.
The gloss that works, imho, isn't precisely what has iconic meaning, as the OP postulates. It's what the user becomes familiar with. There's a subtle difference there. An arbitrary icon can be made to mean something over time. But that has to be an intentional process, and it should be tied to a larger theory of the branding and iconography of the company. Otherwise, it's probably worse than useless, even if it does literally signify the action.
Lately, in the last 10 years, I've found myself doing hybrids. I treat icons in selection modes as something like an emoji. If an icon is so universally understandable that no text is necessary, I might prefer it. Otherwise, it would be included only if I need to draw a user's attention to something more than the other items. For example, an extra icon next to a pending issue waiting for approval.
When available too, I'd much rather show a keyboard shortcut than an icon. That's useful information for most users, instead of decoration.
People who don't design for a living often think decoration is design, or vice versa. Decoration is antithetical to good design. And good design is never decorative. If it's not either informational, or what I'd call "aspirationally informational", in that it's training the user to recognize a meaningful design artifact, then it should go. Decorations belong in illustration and background art, to tie the piece together. Not in UI.
I think the main thing is to consider these design choices. Does the icon help someone identify and navigate to something they need to do more quickly? No one is perfectly correct, making that call. It's one of those things where asking the question and thinking about it is 90% of the effort.
quibono 21 hours ago [-]
1. Read the post
2. Click on the hamburger menu in the top right
3. ???
doginasuit 19 hours ago [-]
The author isn't against icons in menus, they are against icons in every menu by default.
Icons can genuinely help convey meaning/understanding. They can also be clutter. It comes down to how you use them.
OnlineTux 19 hours ago [-]
My inbox folders/labels used to be just text, and I'd have to read them to find the one I wanted to look at. I started adding emoji to the label names and suddenly I could scan the list far quicker to get to what I was looking for.
Granted, I had done this rather than the vendor deciding what icon fit - so I guess my brain had created neural pathways linking the image and the word.
Personally I think there's probably enough screen real estate to have both an icon and text in a menu entry, but menu search is generally more useful for anything not already an icon on the application's toolbar.
tkdb 21 hours ago [-]
Honest mistake.
Those, those are ~thoughtful~ icons and not at all default.
DrBazza 11 hours ago [-]
All we need now is for Apple to reverse its choice to add the curved left-side sidebar (e.g. Safari), that when it pops out the window itself changes and the sidebar envelops/encloses the window's close/min/max buttons.
I click close at least once a day and close the window and not the sidebar that popped out. Windows, KDE, and Gnome don't do this.
4 hours ago [-]
VyseofArcadia 17 hours ago [-]
There's a sort of unthinking maximalism in corporate culture. I'm sure Tahoe's menus are the product of a conversation that looks roughly like:
"Hey our metrics show that menu items with icons are interacted with more often."
"Oh we should put icons on every menu item and get our usage numbers up."
"I agree, bigger numbers are more impressive and will get us promotions or bonuses."
Mikhail_Edoshin 13 hours ago [-]
A more effective use of a cow would be to milk it more and feed less.
wpm 16 hours ago [-]
KPI-driven development. I hope whoever got that bonus sent their kids to a good college on it.
centuryfall 3 hours ago [-]
Is there a reason why the menu on that website also has an icon for every item?
Waterluvian 18 hours ago [-]
The only time I think you ever need an icon beside text is if the exact same feature is found elsewhere as an icon only. And even then ask yourself if it can be avoided.
Mikhail_Edoshin 11 hours ago [-]
Exactly that. Pictograms are never a decoration.
Kuraj 21 hours ago [-]
I love KDE but they could take some notes from this!
cosmic_cheese 21 hours ago [-]
Yeah I appreciate their approach which optimizes for information density a lot more than competing desktops, but it could certainly feel cleaner while doing so.
I think mid-00s commercial OSes are a good target in this regard. OS X 10.2-10.9 and Windows XP-7 had a pretty good level of density while also feeling relatively clean and would be good to take some cues from.
freecodeio 21 hours ago [-]
I use KDE and you made me right click everywhere and I can't find a menu without icons lol
Kuraj 20 hours ago [-]
Yeah with KDE it's all or nothing, either every menu item has an icon or you can turn off all of them.
This goes against the original argument which is that icons should only be used for universal idioms that can be recognized by the icon _only_. Otherwise it's just noise
20 hours ago [-]
freecodeio 20 hours ago [-]
where do you disable them?
Kuraj 20 hours ago [-]
System Settings > Application Style > Configure Icons and Toolbars
devilsdata 20 hours ago [-]
Yeah I'd love to prefer KDE, but GNOME is closer to what I'm used to (Mac OS). Pity it's not that good and written in JS.
I've been hoping Cosmic DE improves enough to be usable.
cromka 19 hours ago [-]
It doesn't matter that it's JS, they have their own, performant interpreter for it and it's a limited subset of JS. And that's just one layer, the rest is actual compiled code, increasingly Rust.
I was skeptical, too, but it allows for some serious visual tweaking beyond what KDE allows without rewriting code.
IgnaciusMonk 20 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Grombobulous 5 hours ago [-]
The negative impact of this change was blown way out of proportion.
It wasn’t a good change but some folks definitely took it too seriously.
vor_ 20 hours ago [-]
I can't stand that keyboard shortcuts for menu items are the same color as the disabled menu item color. It's mixing two meanings for the same color in the same UI element. Despite this being the style for years, I still have a split-second interpretation of non-interactivity every time I see it.
roboror 3 hours ago [-]
It's 2026 and I still can't hide favicons in Chrome's bookmark bar.
fps-hero 6 hours ago [-]
I think anyone who has had to make a dense UI work on mobile has felt the allure of using icons as a substitute for text. It’s practically encouraged by the material guidelines.
You will spend weeks/months (sigh, years) agonising over the six icons you can lay horizontally over a bottom toolbar in a mobile layout, only to sit down and guide a user a user through your UI and realise how monumental stupid and unfriendly your UI is.
I was guiding my boss through some features “ok, just click the view you want in the bottom toolbar”, “um? Which button do I click for a forward view?”. This is someone who knew our product capabilities inside out and helped debug users on a daily basis. I felt even stupider having to geometrically describe the details of the icon, realising how stupid of a UX this was, just to continue with the demo.
I scrapped the entire thing for a textual status toolbar that when you click brings up a drawer with every option in plain English. The only icons were a tickbox next to the currently selected item in a drop down menu. News flash, turns out people can read, and much faster than they can interpret abstract icons.
The next time I did a demo, not only did I feel the immense relief not having to sweat over “describing what icon to click”, didn’t have to worry about flicking through icon catalogs to find the “perfect, vaguely connected icon to the idea I’m trying to convey”.
Turns out VIM was right all along, model UI is king. Don’t get me wrong, 20 years of mobile UI has beaten some visual language into is, but it is no substitute for actual language.
8 hours ago [-]
eviks 13 hours ago [-]
> But now, I think I have an argument that’s even stronger than before!
Not really, you've just gone from one empty argument to another.
> Choosing not to do something you’ve done is experience.
They already had the experience because they used icons before. They had experience adding icons and not adding them to a bunch of menus.
The way out is to use substantive arguments that don't depend on the shaky grounds of someone's authority
insin 19 hours ago [-]
What are the odds the next version of macOS reverts most of what happened in Tahoe? After having it forced on my work MacBook, I will not willingly install that trash UI on any device I own.
publlus_enigma 18 hours ago [-]
In asked myself that same question when Microsoft introduced Metro into Windows 8. Having been a Windows user at that point, it is the change that drove me to Mac OS X.
Fifteen years later, I am still waiting for them to undo the damage that was done.
justsomehnguy 7 hours ago [-]
It's awlays amusing hearing people bitch about Metro UI. It wasn't good, sure, but it was a product of the time.
And when people cried what 'oh noes i cant find a needed program in that awful fullscreen start menu uwu' I just show my Vista Start Menu list which took 4 FullHD screen heights on the small font settings.
And as people in the nearby comments say the problem here is what there is a lot of newcomers who just do shit - by mere lack of knowledge or worse by being KPI driven. Just like the last update of Mozilla Firefox which added ellipsised tabs. Like... for what? On the desktop?
tensor 15 hours ago [-]
The latest version has already removed most of the worst of the changes, if you set your settings right.
wpm 16 hours ago [-]
They won't. They doubled down on Liquid Glass and its here to stay. Go take a look at their Apple Music rebrand. They honestly think it looks good! They really think they're cooking with their "we moved some acrylic blocks around our studio and thought real hard about it, aren't we great!" bullshit. It's so ugly.
nercht12 19 hours ago [-]
Does anyone have a list of guidelines for good UI design that they would recommend?
As I have to design UI myself, I'd be quite interested. Personally, I do favor a mix in my UI: icons for obvious-or-frequently-used stuff (like Save, Undo, Help, Sort A-Z, etc, all of which usually have standard icons (except for Save now)) and plain text for things that can't be expressed by icon (like "Refactor XYZ").
WillAdams 16 hours ago [-]
My favourite book on this is _Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication Oriented Techniques_ by Kevin E. Mullet and Darrell Sano
and the high water mark of my graphical UI experience was when I used an NCR-3125 running Go Corp.'s PenPoint as a portable/note-taking/sketching device and a NeXT Cube w/ a Wacom ArtZ as my desktop.
trashface 17 hours ago [-]
I'm just an unwashed linux user but I kind of like the icons for the days of the week, they seem funny and appropriate for each day.
I’m on Tahoe and there are some menus in Apple applications without icons. I don’t know they have slowly been removing icons or it was always like that
ripharamberip 20 hours ago [-]
I don't quite understand. Icons by default obviously is stupid. But meaningful icons for actions such as copy and paste seems like a very good idea to me.
Personally I think there are not enough icons in MacOS right click menus for example. For me an icon makes it much easier to find the action I want to hse
This is just silly. Nobody is adding icons to Mon, Tue, Wed. Yeah maybe with LLMs it is even easier to fill up empty icon: optional<string> values without thinking. But extreme of not using icons is even worse than meaningless icons that you can at least get used to differentiating.
This would benefit from icons at least on new tab, mute, pin, search, split etc
drewbeck 7 hours ago [-]
IMO icons here would be a crutch to half-fix the problem. That list is a scattered buffet of operations and it needs structure way more than it needs icons.
d3vmax 7 hours ago [-]
Unlike the author here, there are people in the world who use google products that don't know how to read/write.
There are people with down syndrome as well for whom icons are much easier.
latexr 10 hours ago [-]
> As the old saying goes, it takes a big man corporation to admit when they’re wrong.
Except they didn’t admit it. Watch the WWDC keynote, I don’t recall them admitting any wrongness with Tahoe or Golden Gate, instead they said the design is “even more refined” or some bullshit like that.
latexr 2 hours ago [-]
> Tahoe or Golden Gate
I meant “Tahoe or Liquid Glass”, of course. Golden Gate was what was being announced.
emadabdulrahim 20 hours ago [-]
One of my pet peeves is deleting an item is "Move to Trash". With no trash icon, I want labels to front-load the key word so the menu/list is scannable.
dchest 21 hours ago [-]
My favorite thing about this is a checkbox in Xcode's Interface Builder (or whatever it's called now) for menu items image — "Only for macOS 26".
kingforaday 19 hours ago [-]
> "putting an icon in every menu item by default which shipped with macOS Tahoe — but now it’s gone in Golden Gate"
They needed to make room for Siri.
farmin 20 hours ago [-]
The windows 11 right click menu should revert as well. It’s like a menu over a menu. You need 2 clicks to get to what you need.
galad87 12 hours ago [-]
Windows 11 contextual menu takes 2 second to open on a recent PC. Windows surely goes out of its way to make contextual menu a pain to use.
__natty__ 20 hours ago [-]
IMO Windows 7 was peak user experience.
farmin 11 hours ago [-]
Windows 2000-2003
publlus_enigma 18 hours ago [-]
Particularly with the Windows Classic theme!
duskdozer 11 hours ago [-]
I really hate the new trend to "clean up" UI everywhere which has the effect of not using screen space and forcing you to perform more actions in submenus.
farmin 11 hours ago [-]
Exactly. You learn very quickly where things are. It just slows everyone down and makes me get lost sometimes cause muscle memory from <win8 still persists.
peterburkimsher 15 hours ago [-]
Suppose you've remotely accessed a Windows computer with no icons in the menu.
You've figured out how to access the Start menu, and figured out where the Power menu is through the icon, but now have a choice between 關機 and 重新開機.
Which one is shut down, which is reboot?
You have one chance, otherwise it requires an embarrassing trip to the server farm.
That specific case led me to make the following table of Windows strings in other languages:
Although icons in every menu is too cluttered, please don't remove them entirely. At the very least, keep an icon on every menu item that needs to be clicked until the Language setting menu. Oh, and please don't translate the languages in the menu: the user needs to be able to read their own language button.
BurningFrog 19 hours ago [-]
When the Mac UI took over (some of) the world, many thought it was because of the icons, so they put icons all over their UIs.
That was of course not at all what made the MacOS so usable. The real principles were explained in detail in Apples UI guidelines. But hardly anyone read those, so the icons have been with us for 30 years.
atoav 11 hours ago [-]
Icons are okay, if they add value within the surrounding context. In a menu with many options the value of icons is diminished if every menu option icon gets an icon or the menu options are of a kind where icons don't make any sense culturally (weekdays).
Icons within menus should IMO be used to highlight special options that are often used or options that users have memorized by the icon as well, e.g. download, share, etc.
In the end the highest art is to group the options in a logical way, have them in the right place and remain readable.
flohofwoe 12 hours ago [-]
It's just another turn of the wheel of reincarnation. In ten years or so, another generation of UI designers will go through the same stupid trial-and-error cycle instead of doing some miminal research what was tried before but didn't work.
shevy-java 10 hours ago [-]
Hmmm.
The icons were distracting for weekdays, but I like icons in the top-menu
usually. IMO the user should be able to decide on these things at all times.
minimaxa 20 hours ago [-]
You first? Lol
Art vs. minimalism in design
Icons are today's form of hieroglyphs for communication?
Home
Trending
Hacker News Hits
Archive
Stats
Tags
Links
pugfugly 19 hours ago [-]
Whoever thought hieroglyphics were a good replacement for text should be drawn and quartered.
mrheosuper 16 hours ago [-]
I think icon in every menu is fine. The problem is choosing the wrong icon. The icon could just be text, you know, Like [TU]:Tuesday.
English is not my native language, so i was having a very hard time to learn how to use computer, with icon, my 8 Years old brain can kind of infer what is its meaning.
inventor7777 19 hours ago [-]
Ironically, I kind of liked the icons in the menus.
But at the end of the day, it was like Liquid Glass itself - looks sick in presentations, but in real life, it looks pretty awful.
gloosx 12 hours ago [-]
Great news! Now just waiting for "No more liquid glass in every menu by default" and I would consider migrating from Sequoia
The lack of transfer I don't think is out of unwillingness from the old guard, but rather due to the greenhorns throwing everything that came before their time out without questioning the reasoning behind any of it (Chesterton’s Fence) and assuming that whatever they came up with was superior and better fit for the modern era ("those old principles can't possibly hold, we have touch screens now!").
It's also been made worse by UI design roles having been taken by those with backgrounds in unrelated design disciplines, as well as sites like Dribbble which reward pretty mockups over working products. This leads to overemphasis on the visual aspect of the UI and not enough on its functional and usability aspects.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Apple’s UI/UX teams are staffed with people who have never heard of Don Norman, Bruce Tognazzini, Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Susan Kare, Larry Tesler, and other pioneering figures who contributed to Apple’s legendary 1980s and 1990s software.
It’s a lack of onboarding and knowledge transfer, combined with an Eternal September of thousands new CS grads being constantly produced annually, who are sadly not being taught enough history of computing at their universities.
My dream as a CS professor is to help rectify this, at least amongst my students.
This isn’t even to knock either: UI artists are essential to making a UI understandable and enjoyable. But people think the skill sets are the same, and they aren’t.
Disclaimer: am a UX Designer.
The real title for this discipline is “interaction designer”, as that stems from HCI research, which itself was an extension of systems design. There is a clear lineage. Also: user experience absolutely is an aesthetic field, but again because the title is vague in practice so is its education. The thinking is that “UX” designers have a set of skills about design that are scientific, but there’s virtually nothing about human interaction that’s scientifically provable. Like you don’t do A/B testing and move a button’s position from a delta result based off of Fitt’s law or Gestalt theory (I don’t think I’ve ever met a UX designer who knows about gestalt theory). You just observe results and move the goalposts accordingly. And again apropos aesthetics: user testing just never works with wireframes, the closer you are to the final result the better the feedback.
The need to science-wash this ultimately volatile process comes from the need to assure clients that their investment in an emerging market (digital platforms from the 80s onwards) has provably positive results.
It was a bit of "let's not forget this element of application development".
- Steve Jobs
Please tell your fellow designers to stop injecting their lifestyle into their UI/UX design. Even in the OP, a simple monday-sunday list of days, the designer has inserted their lifestyle. Friday is popcorn, Saturday is a party popper, and Sunday is for sleeping off the hangover. That might seem innocuous but is a tiny microaggression felt by all those who do not work 9-5 M-F jobs. Or those who have places to be on Sundays other than in bed. Better yet, just avoid all UI/UX designs that reflect a particular schedule or lifestyle.
[img] img.bildhost.com/file/bildhostcom/2026/10/22/Rastergrafik_26.png
But thanks that you made it a topic, thought it was about the .php and the (spoken in german) "Klirr!" everybody noticed the sound, but nerds-term about the webpage he was building ment "CLEAR" ...crowded room, everyones laughing around...so OT to ask one of those "elderly computerpeople"...CSS... never mind... (-:
In decades past, books and journals served as the primary mechanism for capturing and transferring CS and Software Engineering knowledge. Older knowledge was curated and remained easily accessible.
When I studied CS and engineering in the early 2000s, I learned a lot about the history and evolution of the field simply by browsing old books on the shelves of the university library. Thousands of them. I read back to the 60s and 70s, and I felt it really helped me have a broader perspective and evolution of the field.
That same university library has now transitioned to mostly online materials. The physical collection has been drastically pruned based on what is currently relevant and in demand.
The online collections don't have the same historical depth. And websites and online repositories come and go - think of the vast troves of knowledge that once existed on Usenet that have been lost to obscurity.
I also think the joy of browsing through topics you didn't know existed as given way to search-driven retrieval.
In our efforts to use computers to document what we know about computers, we have lost all that was good about not using computers for information management.
But also, it’s hard to convey the full experience of actually using old software as a tool (or toy)—trying to maintain your company records in Lotus 1-2-3 or looking up something in Microsoft Encarta knowing that if you couldn’t answer your question you’d need to go to the library, or even trying to solve a puzzle in a game with no reference materials.
I’m sure this is true of other technology: You can learn to ride a horse or read about how telephones and telegrams worked, but can you really capture the experience of riding from NYC to Philadelphia in 1840 or trying to convey an urgent business message the same way in 1920?
I don’t know if this means I am jaded, burnt out, overly cynical or what, but the thought of working at Apple, Google, Facebook or any other big tech company is anathema to me.
Steve Lemay worked with a bunch of us, including a very curmudgeonly Don Norman, but just look at what happened to Apple UX while he was there. Yes, he is now running the team and the small improvements may be a direct influence of his, but he sure was steam rolled by others the last twenty years.
Alan Kay (of Alan Kay fame)
Are they being taught any of significance? In school I only remember a blurb about Newton here or a blurb about Pascal there. Briefest of mentions about Unix at the start of a C class.
All the rest I had to dig up myself, from the Mythical Man Month to Edwin Black's book. Believe it was the Joel on Software blog who got me interested in those type of books, never knew they existed in school.
I have been trying to kindly forward what I have learnt and experienced over these years to new people we start to work with, and I have been called a wrinkly boomer who doesn't understand modern times more than enough times.
Of course they have come full-circle on some of the things they were disagreeing, but sometimes people have to crash and burn before understanding something.
I have no hard feelings for these people, but kindness goes a long way even if you don't agree on everything.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8841428
Alan Kay also said this about his famous "Point of View is worth 80 IQ points" aphorism, which I think poignantly explains why React costs a net of 160 IQ points compared to Svelte:
>I have been keeping to "80" IQ points in the saying (thus avoiding inflation). However very few people have noticed there is no sign bit in the aphorism, and that it works just as well for "poor perspectives being worth negative 80 IQ points" (and I think we could claim inflation of stupidity in many bad directions these days ...).
On 16 Oct 2026, Don Hopkins wrote to Owen Densmore, David Rosenthal, and Alan Kay:
Somebody took your filesystem-as-objects patent idea to the logical extreme!
https://danieltemkin.com/esolangs/folders
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50114342
-Don
On 16 Oct 2026, Alan Kay wrote:
There's a patent for this idea?
I fear there is some really old prior art for several parts of it.
Best cheers
Alan
On 16 Oct 2026, Don Hopkins wrote:
Yes, it's Sun's US 5,187,786: "Method and apparatus for implementing a class hierarchy of objects in a hierarchical file system." Owen and David filed it in 1991, it was granted in 1993, and it expired in 2011, so anyone can use it now, including people writing esolangs about folders.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US5187786A/en
You're right about the prior art, and the idea came straight from your side of the family tree. Tom Stambaugh helped Owen work out how to adapt Smalltalk patterns to it, scribbling on napkins at a poolside table at the old Hyatt Palo Alto. In the patent, directories are classes and instances, PATH files encode the inheritance chain, and you send a message from the shell with something like "SEND aF001 methodA args".
It's the same trick Owen used for the NeWS object system in PostScript. Classes were dictionaries, and sending a message pushed the object's class chain onto the dictionary stack, so ordinary PostScript name lookup did the method lookup for free. NeWS 1.0 had single inheritance through a parent dictionary. TNT added ordered parent lists and multiple inheritance. The patent does the same thing with the shell path playing the dictionary stack: walk the directories, and the first match wins.
Owen's 1986 Monterey paper on object-oriented PostScript:
https://donhopkins.com/home/monterey86.pdf
The NeWS Book, chapter 6:
https://donhopkins.com/home/The_NeWS_Book_1989.pdf
I've been running with it in MOOLLM, which leans more toward Self than Smalltalk. A directory is an object, its files are slots, and a "parents:" list delegates to other directories, in order, first match wins. It's prototypes rather than classes, and the LLM does the message dispatch by reading the directory. The filesystem is the object graph, so it's inspectable, diffable, and versioned in git for free:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/kernel/DIRECTO...
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/file-sy...
The lineage from Smalltalk and Self through NeWS, TNT, the patent, HyperLook, and The Sims to MOOLLM is written up here:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/object...
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/postsc...
Owen and David can correct my history, since they're on the thread.
-Don
On 16 Oct 2026, Alan Kay wrote:
Hi Don
I should have said "prior art before Smalltalk" ...
Best cheers
Alan
On 16 Oct 2026, Don Hopkins wrote:
In a way, the patent is just pure prior art, plus perspective, which is worth a certain number of IQ points I've been told. ;)
Which pre-Smalltalk ancestors were you thinking of? Sketchpad's masters and instances, Simula's classes, and Multics search rules walking a hierarchy of directories all seem like pieces of it.
-Don
On 16 Oct 2026, Alan Kay wrote:
Hi Don
I have been keeping to "80" IQ points in the saying (thus avoiding inflation). However very few people have noticed there is no sign bit in the aphorism, and that it works just as well for "poor perspectives being worth negative 80 IQ points" (and I think we could claim inflation of stupidity in many bad directions these days ...).
I don't like to claim priority for any ideas (including my own). Bob Barton liked a great saying of Goethe's: "We should all share in the excitement of Discovery without vain attempts to claim Priority" and I imprinted on that in grad school.
So, without claiming priority, I would point to Engelbart's NLS for unifying the structure of the file system with the basic hierarchical structuring of their content (and this included how code was represented, written, and read). A few years later I used a different kind of unification in the FLEX machine that Ed Cheadle and I did in the mid-60s to have "every large thing" be an instantiable process, including things that were more "file-like".
This is just FYI, partly because of the above Goethe quote, partly because the FLEX project was done within the aerospace conglomerate LTV, and was proprietary. My thesis advisor Dave Evans had to go to considerable work to get permission for me to do my degree write ups on a tiny subset. The later Smalltalk was a "cold restart" on these ideas (and LTG was not a problem by then).
And -- for Smalltalk -- the notion to make "everything large and small" an object was a quick way to get going on the comparatively speedy Alto, and Dan Ingalls (and his Smalltalk group) were able to do most of the SW engineering to make Smalltalk act semantically as though everything was an object.
Best cheers
Alan
When I was getting my design degree, a large majority of what you learned was how to give and take a critique. It was central to everything you did. You were also taught things like "It's not your idea, it's an idea" that allowed you to critically think about solutions to problems without falling in love with your own designs.
This was fostered at the companies I worked for in the late 90's/early 2000's. We would have intense debates about designs, play devil's advocate (sometimes against our own designs!) in order to leave the room with the best ideas and solutions to problems. It was collaborative, energetic, peer reviewed, and we produced great designs for users.
This is not taught anymore. Critiques aren't given in school so as not to offend anyone. Much of UX Design has also transitioned to boot camps vs college design degrees which focus on pumping out students who can manipulate Figma, not students who understand the process and techniques of real design.
As such, professionally it's very hard to have real debates about design without someone getting offended or fighting for solutions that are sub par because it's "their" idea they can't let go of. The critical thinking and detail that used to go into design has been replaced with vibes.
And don't get me started on the fact that many students coming into the workforce simply don't have the design chops in the first place.
(1) Clickable elements no longer visually signifying that they're clickable. Words aren't underlined or written in a special font, sometimes the profile avatar is the clickable link to the profile but sometimes the name is, etc.
(2) No more clean, compact directory trees. We used to have high-contrast compact UI design to look through nested ontologies. Now it's rounded-edges card-based, often without trace lines, and barely ever compact. RIP
Even plain old tables with sortable rearrangeable columns, a staple of all of the traditional desktop UI frameworks, are increasingly falling by the wayside in favor of mobile-style single-column lists with cells consisting of stacks of labels.
Hell your average developer probably doesn't either anymore
I want to search, in a search bar, for the next video. This should not take three interactions.
YouTube is fine designing a UX where I am one click away from pulling up an AI-generated list of questions I may have about the video, though.
Why did the label on my Fig Newtons get redesigned? It's not because it lacked in usability. It's because the company knows that customers respond to visual updates. If something looks the same year after year, lots of people will see it as old and tired. A redesign makes it feel modern and fresh. At least to enough people that it matters.
I had the same experience on a recent trip to The UPS Store. The color scheme was all different from the previous time I shipped a package. I commented to the clerk that they'd redecorated. He said they do it pretty often.
Software has a visual aspect to it, and the same forces are in effect. Part of a UI designer's job is to be on that treadmill. That's probably not what the job should be, but the people who pay their salary want it to be.
No idea why UPS keeps redesigning other than signal "we still up to date with trends", its not like its rebranding going to make me want to ship anything that I don't already need to (and will ship with USPS unless its overnight in which case I will go with FedEx).
Interfaces get redesigned, in opinion, either because: a) just because (bad) b) certain things worked the way it worked only because it had to fit existing design and eventually old design just couldn't fit new feature(s) (can be good or bad, depending on execution)
Tantacrul is my favourite (and, actually, only) example of this. His work with MuseScore, with Audacity, his videos about them, and his takedowns of Sybellius etc. all opened my eyes to the world of designers who do things with hard-nosed analytical thinking, user studies, good principles, and make something useful. Even his little digressions about Paint3D and Ubuntu's Mobile OS are illustrative.
It's no help at all that people expect Apple to be fashionable, like if you read a review of an "operating system" in Arstechnica you'd think it's all about little details on the scrollbar, not about filesystems and microkernels and namespaces and stuff.
you mean "actually methodically studying users is boring and requires competence"
these people only care about making pretty pictures, they dont care about the actual effort to deliver a good product.
i remember the studies used to design windows 95
nothing modern ux amateurs do can compare to the oldschool HCI professionals
With a maximized or suitably positioned window, pushing the mouse all the way to the right of the screen activates the scroll bar. To the top right activates the close button.
Small things, but they become annoyances when they are missing.
Bad Dye Job:
https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46191194
In their defense, it's not like good UI has ever dominated very many spaces. It is very hard to come up with a concept of good UI concepts from a natural meandering through the shattered landscape of UI paradigms anyone computer literate ends up subjected to. And then it's even harder to convince a manager that it's worth so much as a moment's thought about such things. Not impossible. But not easy.
It's funny (depressing) to me that there is now "web app" design language and a "native app" design language, and most new desktop apps are following the web because they are built in html and CSS.
Accessibility has been left in the dustbin as well. You go to all these sites extolling these beautiful, innovative sites and they're completely useless with a keyboard or screen reader.
Also, holy hell, this obsession with huge swathes of negative space is a disaster for anyone who needs to zoom the page for readability. I'm here to see content, not an homage to the backrooms.
The move toward fullstack developers, too. When everybody is a jack of all trades, nobody is a master of anything. Least of all UI design, which isn't worth thinking too much about because it's the least likely potential subject of pushback during code review.
Windows 95 significantly overhauled the desktop GUI metaphor, in a way that is still the skeletal structure of desktops today.
Its U/I design since Windows 3.11 came about because of agile, not in spite of it. https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
> We recognized that we needed much more opportunity to create a design, try it out with users (perhaps comparing it to other designs), make changes, and gather more user feedback. Our desire to abandon the waterfall model and opt for iterative design fortunately followed similar efforts in other areas of the company, so we had concrete examples of its benefits and feasibility.
You're right that you can't go start to finish on a design in a single 2-week sprint. But that's why you have a repeating series of sprints, you're not supposed to go from start to finish in a single sprint.
The Windows 95 team always had a shippable OS to demo internally to devs, QA, beta testers and users invited by the UX designers for usability testing. Just because you demo something to the product owner does not require that you then release the result immediately to end users. Decouple development from deployment and from release and you'll find agile methods can work just fine.
Agile manifesto coined a term for things that already existed. It didn’t create it from scratch, nor did it claim to. But W95 did employ methods we would call agile methods today.
That’s not the part I intended to criticize; it was the modern tendency to discard iterative design and instead just treat sprints a series of immutable milestones with fixed deadlines, except the scope is fixed in a just-in-time manner. But it’s on me for not stating that more clearly.
This goes against the pattern that's most often observed in the past decade of every product hand-rolling its UI from scratch, though.
For Apple, and specific to Apple, when they fired Scott Forstall, there is no one to protect the software UI guys. The 2012 reshuffle in the name of "collaboration" by Tim Cook saw Design team taking over everything design, including Software. 2013 saw iOS 7 and then they spend 3 years to walk back a lot of iOS 7 UI changes. In 2016 many of their old UI leads "retired". Having no old guards to defend their turf, giving Alan Dye more rooms for power grab.
Since then, if not earlier, despite the whole UI becoming more android and cluster mess, there have been little to zero major UI changes other than new skin.
And like Apple's software, that is 10 years of resume driven development where they just want to ship features after features.
Not just limited to UI decisions; many tech decisions were made the same way. I've said more than once, WRT to npm, that there were no adults in the room when they "designed" it, and npm is not the only tech stack that I look at and have the same thought.
We came from CLI with white text on black. Now dark mode is all the rage for the last couple of years.
I know OLED and all but interfaces feel just like fashion now, to hell with affordances and improving how things actually work let's just make things pretty for that micro dopamine drip and change it up just for the sake of it because jazz hands looks new makes $$
I’ve spent countless hours facilitating usability tests and then building the software in response to them.
I 100% agree with the “dribblization” of usability engineering.
More so, I think the term “design” has become overloaded. A graphic designer who wants to actually get paid and eat goes into UX. But where does their joy come from? From the visual, not the usability.
This year I got hired at Nielsen Norman Group, helping train designers to understand the theories of the human mind and applying them to UI.
I am finding the range of knowledge and background amongst designers is massive, precisely because of the imprecision of the word “designer”.
If we called it “applied cognitive and behavioral psychology” we would get closer to the results we want and perhaps a smidge more respect for its necessity in the age of slop UI.
Yup, I have a psychology degree and we had courses in HCI. I ended up skipping them because the lecturer (who was great, and his notes were phenomenal) was just telling project management war stories, and I'd spent the few years previous in construction listening to the same stories in a different domain.
Now, 20 years later, I'm the one telling those stories.
Around the time Facebook figured out what it's business model was platforms suppressed virality and people got used to the idea that you have to pay for traffic. You'd think that people would think "I'm paying $40 to acquire a customer, losing that customer to bad UI comes right out of my shareholder's pocketbook..." and somebody probably does, but a lot of people don't. Like zero interest rates and some people are just made of money and some people in business are lazy and, if their business is profitable, won't pursue cost reductions unless competition makes it life or death. Or something.
So I am appalled at so much bad software marketing that makes me think "is there anyone left who's had to tune up a marketing funnel?"
Like you see 200+ bug reports on Adobe's tracker about how Acrobat displays a total of 8 distracting UI elements to promote AI summaries the instant you open a document. And you can't clear them. And that's enough to make people see red.
But if you actually click on one of these stupid links you see a series of ads for things that are not AI features and that they don't make a serious effort to explain or sell. Then finally there's an ad for Acrobat Pro which maybe has the AI Summary but do I want to find out? I heard somebody somewhere did manage to try the AI Summary and of course it didn't work.
Like I could be annoyed by rapacious behavior but at least understand that people are motivated to make money for their shareholders. But to annoy everybody when they have Adobe CC subscriptions to lose and no clear path to convert? Where's the profit in that?
And that's totally ordinary. Like Meta solved so many tough problems to create the Meta Quest 3 and supposedly they are leaders in social software but they get the easy things wrong: they keep changing the interface that I'd use to "friend" people in games and make the process so terrible (at least the spammers who try to follow me on Instagram stole pictures of blonde women but nobody has a profile pic or the slightest bit of information to help decide "why would you follow me?") Supposedly Zuck wants to succeed at VR so bad... or is it just "we're #1 why try harder?"
Yeah, this is insane. When I worked in marketing analytics I would point this out, and the most common response was that retention was a different team so we don't care about it.
Aesthetics aside, some of the specific guidance from the past is simply not as crucial as it used to be when most users were very new to smartphones or personal computers.
Further, it's arguably become worse with touch screens in cars where, while you're driving, you get to discover a designer has moved a widget somewhere else and now your distracted. Self driving cars might solve that but even just walking around using your phone, every UI change is another distraction that might have consequences.
Not sure about that, given that John Gruber specifically lays the blame for a slew of recent shitty Apple design decisions on Alan Dye (cough liquid glass cough), and also the reversal of these shitty design decisions on changes made when Dye jumped ship for Meta. Gruber also says the Apple design team is much happier after Dye's departure.
Dye must be over 50, so I don't count him as a "younger replacement".
Apple knew this was bad 20 years ago. They just don't bother to read their own documentation:
Apple Human Interface Guidelines (2008) [1] p. 170:
> If you do include icons in your menus, include them only for menu items for which they add significant value; don’t include them for every menu item. A menu that includes too many icons (or poorly designed ones) can appear cluttered and be hard to read.
[1] https://acko.net/files/zoomer/apple-hig-2008.pdf
Though the cog for settings is, like the three-dots commonly used to represent a menu itself, is only recognised as such because it has often been used that way. The first time(s) it was used it would not have been obvious to people. So the rule isn't that a good icon should be obvious. A good icon is either immediately obvious or consistently used.
The common save icon is a good example of this in both cases: to those of us who have been around a while it is obvious because it looks like a floppy disk, to those who never used floppy disks it is obvious because that is what save icons (almost) always are.
Looking at all their design missteps and corrections in recent releases my only takeaway is that they are making it up as they go along just like the rest of us.
But that was in a different millennium.
Exactly. There may have been a reason for the single menu bar back in 1984 when the Mac had a 9-inch screen. But it doesn't work very well on my 43-inch screen where the menu bar may be a few feet away from a small window in the lower right hand corner.
That isn’t obvious. With a mouse/trackpad with a good acceleration curve, chances are you can move faster to that menu at the top than to a menu a few cm away because you don’t have to decelerate when approaching the menu bar at the top of the screen.
Follow Apple's logic, reductio ad absurdum, and you'd have to put every single GUI element in the corners of the screen, because how else could you manage to quickly select them with a mouse? That OK button in the dialogue? Top right corner of the screen. Cancel? Top left. Quick, easy, and nobody could ever press the wrong button. It'll make it faster!
Resizing windows already requires moving the mouse with single-pixel precision. In comparison, hitting the menu bar is very easy.
Also, these menus are very consistent in appearance, functionality, shortcuts, etc; moreso than my experience with Windows applications.
I've seen this in webpages too. You load a page and think there's an error but the "login" button is surrounded by so much white space that it doesn't show up in the browser until you scroll down.
https://milos.fyi/blog/fitts-law-why-the-menu-bar-is-at-the-...
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/Bill-Atk...
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/Bill-Atk...
At 1:02:26, a student asked Bill Atkinson what was his biggest joy when making Macintosh, and he replied:
Bill> I was pretty excited when I moved the menus to the top of the screen, and suddenly it just clicked. Like, ok, we have the full width, the full height, there is this kinesthetic reaching over for this place. The pull down menus moving to the top of the screen, I though, yeah, this is doing to work!
Then at 1:03:10, a student asked:
Student> I have a question about HyperCard. What was the impetus for that [Bill smiled and chuckled], and like, how did, or what you build the um, motivation to like do that, because it was a kind of odd thing at the time...
[Bill beams and reaches off screen to find some papers]
Bill> How many of you guys have done a psychedellic?
[Class laughs, Bill grins] [Brad: no hands!]
Bill> In 1985 I swallowed a teenie fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete workbench outside my home in Los Gatos, California. I gazed up at a hundred billion galaxies, each with a hundred billion stars, and each star a giant thermonuclear fusion reaction as powerful as our sun.
And for the first time in my life I knew deep down inside that we're not alone. I knew that life on Planet Earth is not the only pocket of consciousness in the universe, and likely not the most advanced, but we still have a role to play in the unfolding drama of creation.
It seemed to me that the universe is in a process of coming alive. Consciousness is blossoming and propogating to colonize the universe. And life on Earth is one of many bright spots in the cosmic birth of consciousness.
But the stars are separated by enormous distances of darkness and vacuum, which may hinder communication between them. I lowered my gaze and saw the street lamps below, glowing brightly, each casting a pool of light, but surrounded by darkness before the next lamp. As above, so below.
The street lamps reminded me of bodies of knowledge, gems of discovery and understanding, but separated from each other by distance, and different languages.
Poets, artists, musicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, mathemetitions, and economists, all have separate pools of knowledge that are hindered from sharing and finding the deeper connections.
My vision distorted by thick eyeglasses, I witnessed the curvature of the Earth's horizon, and I felt the pull of gravity towards its center, such that every one of us is standing at the very apex.
Each of us stands at the top of planet Earth, and each of us is a leader or captain of the Blue Marble team.
How could I help? By focusing on the weak link. If I were captain of a soccer team, I'd look for the weak link, and work on it. If the goalie was letting too many through, I would spend extra practice time with him, and the whole team would prosper.
It occurred to me that the weak link for the Blue Marble team is wisdom. Humanity has achieved sufficient technological power to change the course of life and the entire global ecosystem. But we seem to lack the perspective to choose wisely between alternative futures.
But I was young, without much life experience or wisdom myself. Knowledge it seemed to me consists of the "how" connections between pieces of information. The cause and effect relationships. How does this action bring about that result?
Science is a systematic attempt to discover the "how" connections. Wisdom, it seemed to me, was a step further removed. The bigger perspective of the "why" connections between pieces of knowledge. Why, for reasons ethical and aesthetic, should we choose one future over another.
i thought that if we could encourage sharing of ideas, between different areas of knowledge, perhaps more of the bigger picture would emerge, and eventually, more wisdom might develop. Sort of a trickle-up theory of information, leading to knowledge, leading to wisdom.
This was the underlying inspiration for HyperCard: a multimedia authoring environment that empowered non-programmers to share ideas, using new interactive media called HyperCard Stacks.
Each card in a HyperCard stack included graphics, text, interactive buttons, and links that took you to another card or stack. Built-in painting tools, drag-and-drop authoring with a library of pre-fab buttons and fields, and simple event based scripting, made HyperCard flexible and easy to use.
It took a lot of hard work and a dedicated team to complete this mission. Apple shipped HyperCard in August, 1987, and included it free with every Mac, so any user could create and share HyperCard stacks.
Many creative people expressed their ideas and passions, and several million interactive HyperCard stacks were created.
HyperCard was a precursor to the first web browser, except chained to a hard drive before the World Wide Web. Six years later, Mosaic was introduced, influenced by some of the ideas in HyperCard, and indirectly by an inspiring LSD experience.
[Class laughs]
So that's, honest, that's where the idea for HyperCard came from. And uh, and I, I'm not, like, advocating that every software designer should go out and take LSD, but it worked for me.
----
That was a tough act to follow, but the next week I gave a presentation about pie menus and Fitts' Law to Brad's UI class on February 11, 2019:
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/Don-Hopk...
At 5:20 I mentioned Wiseman's 1969 PIXIE paper, the earliest known implementation of radial menus that ran on a PDP-7 with a 340 vector graphics display and light pen. Since then I've unearthed the paper, two films, and 128 pages of PDP-7 assembly language source code written by Heinz Lemke, which I've since reincarneted with a PDP-7 emulator:
PIXIE SIMELEC (1972) on PDP-7 and 340 Display emulator:
https://hyperties.org/cabinet/symelec/
Flight of the PIXIE - Yuja Wang:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI
PIXIE and FORTH on PDP-7 Cabinet Emulator with Type 340 Vector Graphics Display:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo8kdY-5i6c
As an homage to Bill's HyperCard story, at 37:11 I trolled Brad and his recently-shocked students by asking the class:
Don> One thing I wanted to ask the class: Have any of you ever used ...[dramatic pregnant pause]... HyperCard?
Then I told my own story of how in 1987 HyperCard blew my mind and changed my world.
More on the "Mile High Menu Bar":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44125835
Certain designers may have hated Nielsen, but their users hated them, and they have more users hating them than Nielsen has designers hating him, and users matter much more than designers, so I think he came out way ahead.
Bruce Tognazzini is the OG GUI Guru of 80's user interface design!
https://asktog.com/atc/about-bruce-tognazzini/
Tog not just invented and implemented, but also deeply rationalized and documented a lot of great user interface techniques, like the "mile high menu bar", which partially exploits Fitts' Law (in the "up" direction), but made more sense on the original single small Mac screens. (While pie menus more fully exploit Fitts' law (in "all" directions") and they work great on large screens, giving you even more "leverage".)
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/27/designing-for-peop...
>When the Macintosh was new, Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini wrote a column in Apple’s developer magazine on UI. In his column, people wrote in with lots of interesting UI design problems, which he discussed. These columns continue to this day on his web site. They’ve also been collected and embellished in a couple of great books, like Tog on Software Design, which is a lot of fun and a great introduction to UI design. (Tog on Interface was even better, but it’s out of print.)
>Tog invented the concept of the mile high menu bar to explain why the menu bar on the Macintosh, which is always glued to the top of the physical screen, is so much easier to use than menu bars on Windows, which appear inside each application window. When you want to point to the File menu on Windows, you have a target about half an inch wide and a quarter of an inch high to acquire. You must move and position the mouse fairly precisely in both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions.
>But on a Macintosh, you can slam the mouse up to the top of the screen, without regard to how high you slam it, and it will stop at the physical edge of the screen – the correct vertical position for using the menu. So, effectively, you have a target that is still half an inch wide, but a mile high. Now you only need to worry about positioning the cursor horizontally, not vertically, so the task of clicking on a menu item is that much easier.
>Based on this principle, Tog has a pop quiz: what are the five spots on the screen that are easiest to acquire (point to) with the mouse? The answer: all four corners of the screen (where you can literally slam the mouse over there in one fell swoop without any pointing at all), plus, the current position of the mouse, because it’s already there.
>The principle of the mile-high menu bar is fairly well known, but it must not be entirely obvious, because the Windows 95 team missed the point completely with the Start push button, sitting almost in the bottom left corner of the screen, but not exactly. In fact, it’s about 2 pixels away from the bottom and 2 pixels from the left of the screen. So, for the sake of a couple of pixels, Microsoft literally “snatches defeat from the jaws of victory”, Tog writes, and makes it that much harder to acquire the start button. It could have been a mile square, absolutely trivial to hit with the mouse. For the sake of something, I don’t know what, it’s not. God help us.
Another great technique he documented in the original Apple Human Interface Guidelines was the "drag delay" of popping up "pull right" submenus, to mitigate a problem that linear menus have, but pie menus don't. People keep forgetting and re-inventing it in sometimes better, sometimes worse ways, but he invented and implemented it for the original Mac, then most importantly documented it in the first edition of the Apple's 1987 Human Interface Guidelines, and the Mac UI still supports it. It's the kind of thing nobody notices if it works well, that's invisibly built into the toolkit, that nobody appreciates how much thought and nuance went into it, that deserves a lot of user testing and iteration to get right. (Or you could just use pie menus and not have that problem! ;)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39210672
[...]
One of the most effective menu implementations ever for me was Altsys Virtuoso on NeXTstep's right-click (to pop-up the main menu at the mouse cursor), drag-down to Modify, then drag right to "Punch" or "Union" (whichever was the top command) --- it was a command I did a lot and it was almost gestural, kind of lke a well-done pie menu.
FWIW, the current Windows Start menu at lower-left, while not drawn to the corner now allows one to click the corner to open it, lower-right is "Show Desktop" and upper right closes the current maximized window --- only upper left is at the mercy of whatever app is currently running.
One criticism I have of HyperCard is that it wasn't "HyperCard All The Way Down", in that not all the rest of its dialogs and user interfaces and menus were made out of HyperCard stacks. It wasn't "metacircular", defined in terms of itself.
That's totally forgivable given that HyperCard was the first original iteration, and "merely" getting it finished in time to ship on every Mac desktop was a spectacular achievement. But it doesn't excuse anything that came after it, and it doesn't excuse Apple for dropping it instead of evolving it.
Cyberdog for OpenDoc was another interesting approach to a web browser, built out of components you could embed in documents, but Apple dropped that along with OpenDoc too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdog
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc
WWDC 1996 Cyberdog demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhiUncy5qW0
Looking back 30 years, that demo is unintentionally hilarious, and it makes me wonder what HyperCard would have been like if Apple had continued to develop it as much as it deserved.
>You always want to end a report with some pizzazz, and these days, nothing is more pizzazz than Java. So over here I have a Java applet, and I want to put it into Claris Works. [...]
>It's actually a little bit different than that. Rather than just being FreeHand it's actually Shockwave for FreeHand, and what we're running here is the Shockwave for FreeHand Netscape Plugin running inside of an OpenDoc Part that can run any Netscape Plugin. So because it's -- [applause] -- it's a little complicated...
Bottlenecking every event and pixel through the Stone Age nascent NPAPI to see Duke waving at three frames a second was not the flex they thought it was.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPAPI
I know because I was writing NPAPI plug-ins at Kaleida Labs at the time, and wrote up the problems I found with the NetScape 2.0b3 Plug-in SDK:
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/netscape/Netscape-Plugin...
>The event handler never gets mouse motion or mouse up events, so I had to track the mouse motion and button release manually by checking the button status in the idle callback.
More about NPAPI's history:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44661955
At least Sun's HotJava modular extensible web browser picked a lane, and didn't put that many layers between you and your Calvins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotJava
Steve Jobs explained both eloquently and dramatically why he murdered OpenDoc:
“Focusing is about saying no.” -Steve Jobs, WWDC ‘97
As sad as it was, Steve Jobs was right to “put a bullet in OpenDoc’s head”.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/focusing-is-about-saying-no-st...
HyperLook, which was written in PostScript for the NeWS Window System, was deeply inspired by HyperCard, and addressed the "All The Way Down" problem, as well as Atkinson's admitted limitation of being chained to a hard drive instead of networked.
All of HyperLook's property sheets, dialogs, popups, help windows, menus, etc, were defined in terms of itself, editable and replaceable.
The PostScript graphics editor was a component you could use in your own stacks to edit graphics, like a clock's face and hands, and you could copy ("capture") any user interface as editable structured graphics, which made it easy to illustrate the documentation:
https://donhopkins.com/home/ties/scans/HyperLookManual.pdf
https://donhopkins.com/home/HyperLookSimCityManual.pdf
Even the user interface editor itself was a replaceable component, so you could plug in different kinds of user interface editors, or remove it completely to deliver a non-editable runtime system (like SimCity).
The other thing that HyperLook added was another layer in the event delegation system: Button => Card => Background => Stack => Client. The client being what we would call a "web server" or "distributed application" now, implementing what we call the "AJAX" architecture now.
HyperLook (nee HyperNews (nee GoodNews)):
https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-go...
I developed SimCity and HyperLook together, each one a forcing function for the other, and I'm taking the same approach now with reincarnating HyperTIES, Ben Shneiderman's pioneering hypertext system from the University of Maryland:
https://github.com/SimHacker/Hyperties/blob/main/docs/README...
I recently wrote this about cloning Photoshop, quoting Alan Kay about old ideas that hang on, and Bill Buxton about unworthy design objectives.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50052665
Cloning Photoshop is such an underwhelmingly unoriginal and unambitious design goal, like photocopying a Roy Lichtenstein painting, or cloning MS-DOS.
Treating Photoshop's interface as the destination squanders the opportunity to rethink how people create images.
"Things seem to hang on in computing just because they work a little bit." -Alan Kay
From a personal email about MVC and Morphic, published here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8841428
"It is an unworthy design objective to aim for anything less than trying to do to the Macintosh what the Macintosh did to the previous state of the art." -Bill Buxton
The "Natural" Language of Interaction: A Perspective on Non-Verbal Dialogues, INFOR: Canadian Journal of Operations Research and Information Processing, 26(4), 1988, pp. 428–438.
https://www.billbuxton.com/natural.html
>THE MACINTOSH AS VICTIM
>Before going too much further, it is probably worth making a few comments about my approach and my examples. As will become pretty evident, the Apple Macintosh takes a bit of a beating in what follows. Some readers may view this as evidence of contempt for its design. From my perspective, it is evidence of respect. Let me explain.
>User interface design today is plagued by an unhealthy degree of complacency. We live in a world of copy-cat unimaginative interface products, where major manufacturers put out double-paged colour spreads in Business Week announcing "... our system's user interface is as easy to use as the most easy to use microcomputer [i.e., the Mac]" (or words to that effect). In what other industry can you get away with stating that you're as good as the competition, rather than better? Especially when the competition's product is over 4 years old!
>The best ideas are the most dangerous, since they take hold and are the hardest to change. Hence, the Macintosh is dangerous to the progress of user interfaces precisely because it was so well done! Designers seem to be viewing it as a measure of success rather than as a point of departure. Consequently, it runs the risk of becoming the Cobol of the 90's.
>I criticize the Macintosh precisely because it is held in such high regard. It is one of the few worthy targets. If I can make the point that there are other design options, and that these options appear to have a lot of potential, then I may help wake people up to the fact that it is an unworthy design objective to aim for anything less than trying to do to the Macintosh what the Macintosh did to the previous state-of-the-art.
>Enough of the sermon. Let's leave the pulpit for some concrete examples.
"Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that are no smarter than you. And you can change it. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use." —Steve Jobs
Full clip slightly longer, worth watching.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=kYfNvmF0Bqw
I remember wasting a couple of hours trying to find where a certain setting had gone.
Of course the setting in question was literally the most important one, and of course it was hidden at the bottom of the page, outside of my non-designer-too-small-screen, after things like picking which colour and which emoji you wanted to use.
Easier said than done so it's not surprising they have atrophied in their former genius but im curious.
It's not perfect here but having an ergonomic design and replacing it with a substantially worse one is rather unheard of in this world.
If somebody always gets everything right in your opinion, you should be suspicious of your own values, not of the people who don't achieve constant perfection.
Or they just skipped the testing and focus groups that should have highlighted that before release.
Large phones were a bad idea because you cant use it with one finger, until iPhone Pro Maxes came out.
Installing apps from the internet is scary because viruses, yet Macs let you do that no questions asked.
Ads are bad and dangerous, until it shows up on Apple Maps.
Apple is just a simple company, existing to make as much money as possible. They make beautiful devices though - but no reason to put them on a pedestal.
Even before Gatekeeper, macOS/OSX File Quarantine prompted you when you went to open a .dmg or .zip you downloaded. These days anything not singed by an Apple Developer certificate refuses to open unless you remove the file attribute.
> Apple is just a simple company, existing to make as much money as possible. They make beautiful devices though - but no reason to put them on a pedestal.
Apple certainly exists to make money, but I don't think they exist solely to do that. They have long had a culture of enabling their users to do things that were previously the purview of big business or specialised fields. They don't sell you just hardware, they give you a whole office suite, audio production tools, development tools etc. all on top of high quality hardware.
With a MacBook and iPhone you can be a filmmaker, take and edit professional-quality photographs, record and produce your own music out of the box.
Maybe they used to be better at it than they are today, but Apple tends to spend more time putting their customers first than their competitors do.
Adobe happened to be a shitty company but "enabling their users to do things that were previously purview of big business" isn't unique to Apple at all.
Infact, Apple is the biggest of the biggest companies of them all. Bigger than "professional" companies like Canon, Nikon, RED etc.
Apples advantage is stuff just works, which is more harder than it seems.
The individual at Apple who decided to try and keep phones small, for example is probably not the person who decided to make them big. I feel confident saying this because the person who was supposedly the driving force behind keeping them small died in 2011, and they didn't start releasing phones that are too large for comfortable one-handed use until 2014.
Hypocrisy would require commending Apple for icons everywhere and then celebrating their removal. That is not what happened. If anything has the homogeneity of hypocrisy, it’s this attitude that any commendation must be fanboying (while ignoring said commenters’ past criticism).
The iPhone 4 was such a letdown...
Apple's design never recovered from the flattening of iOS 7.
Your assumptions only work until they don't. It's not like we live in a static situation. What didn't work yesterday might work today
Best known from The Bible, Steve Jobs, Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler.
That doesn't match my experience. Personally I've found Apple fans (not just Gruber and Nielsen but regular Apple users) to be the most vocally critical of their design missteps.
You don’t have to make it up, it was only one year ago. All their blog posts are still visible.
One of the worst trends in icons is this insatiable desire to put different icons into uniform shapes.
For example, this trend resulted in tragic replacement of beautiful varied and distinct Android icons that were introduced in Android 5 to the uglicity we have now.
On iOS, beautiful SFSymbol icons that floated beautifully on flat surfaces since iOS 7.0 were encased in absolutely similar circular 'liquid Glass' blobs. Sad.
Things are different today though, considering how many pieces of software an average person used in 2001 vs how many today. It's no longer just word and excel, updated once in a few years, so you can learn stuff by heart and not even care what icons they put on what
A company 1/100th the size used to design beautiful icons that clearly represented what they meant, and that company was Apple. Now I get SVG slop. SF Symbols can bite me.
Apple seems to be dropping the ball on UI recently. Their glass UI also felt like a triumph of eye candy over usability.
> They designed it, shipped it, lived with it for a year, then publicly changed their guidance on it. To me, that’s a lot more persuasive than simply saying, “Apple doesn’t do this.”
> Choosing not to do something you’ve never done is one thing.
> Choosing not to do something you’ve done is experience.
A more persuasive sales pitch for me to consider Apple products would be if the company had judgement not to ship such a hot mess of a sloppy product in the first place...
MS would include superfluous icons because they observe it in other software and can't think for themselves, or they would omit superfluous icons because it never occurred to them in the first place.
Everything Apple does is carefully considered, good and bad.
I take the latter every time, because I understand how bad things are in software. I know it's unrealistic to be as choosy as I want to be.
Couldn't Apple have just, like, talked to the people who originally wrote the guidelines? Why do they need to re-invent the wheel? Will Apple forget again in another 15 years and need to re-run the experiment, taking us all along as test subjects?
Decisions should be revisited when it makes sense to do so.
No evidence this is true. It's basically PR / urban legend. It's not like the people at Apple are magic angels. They're the same people that worked at Meta or Google or MS last year or the year before that
Or is that how you meant it?
It was Microsoft who had the courage (and, admittedly, need) to come up with a bold new design language. They said, you know what, most people are digital natives these days, let's not infantalise them with fake paper notepads and fake leather textures for their digital calendar. Instead, let's make text itself the highlight, the star, and strip out all the rest.
They had a User Story thingy where their ideal users were busy people wanting to exist in the real world. MS wanted that the ideal user takes the phone out of his pocket, glances at it and instantly recives the information he seeks, and quickly puts it back in his pocket to move on with his life.
Hence Live Tiles. Hence the first widgets. Hence their lovely and ill-fated People app where you could go to one place and handle your Facebook feed and your LinkedIn feed etc. Hence the discarding of endless unicorn rainbow vomit of icons. Nah. Here's a simple text interface in black background for AMOLED battery life. The phone is not an extension of personality. It is a tool. Use it. Put it away.
Lumia phones ran amazingly well on nothing specs because they didn't try to be too complicated with graphical stuff. Battery life was always god-tier. And, though I've never been able to confirm it, around the time of Lumia 710, the MS touch keyboard actually let you type letters in the wrong order and would correct them for you. For example: "atcually". I remember at that time that Android wouldn't. It would only handle near-misses: "axtually".
I fucking loved Windows Phone. Rest in peace.
Windows 8 Metro, on the other hand, was almost universally hated and with very good reason. And Apple has been doing the same exact mistake for awhile, slowly porting designs meant for a phone (and far worse designs than Metro at that, iOS 7 was terrible as was everything since) to laptops/desktops.
However they lost it when they tried to port that same design to Windows 8, resulting in an unpleasant collision of multiple inconsistent design paradigms.
It would have been a very easy thing to test the people outside there bubble.
> > Choosing not to do something you’ve never done is one thing.
> > Choosing not to do something you’ve done is experience.
Gods, this sounds so LLM :(
When I read a sentence like this, I have to remind myself that this is Apple products we're talking about.
What other company do you feel surpasses Apple in terms of "judgement not to ship such a hot mess of a sloppy product in the first place"?
Is there any consumer electronics company today that ships products that are in any way less of a slop than Apple?
Alan Dye really did a number on that company and set back UI design by one or two decades, favoring graphic design over human interface design.
That said, I'm glad the menu item icons are gone too.
I grew up in the 80s with DOS software, when dropdown menus were new and our IBM PC didn't even have a mouse. Since the design idea emerged of using an icon in a menu, which I'd probably locate to the Apple menu on the 128k Mac, my whole life I've seen this push/pull between phases of design and various fads that have emphasized either information density or some kind of simplified graphic/hieroglyphic gloss of the language and intent.
The gloss that works, imho, isn't precisely what has iconic meaning, as the OP postulates. It's what the user becomes familiar with. There's a subtle difference there. An arbitrary icon can be made to mean something over time. But that has to be an intentional process, and it should be tied to a larger theory of the branding and iconography of the company. Otherwise, it's probably worse than useless, even if it does literally signify the action.
Lately, in the last 10 years, I've found myself doing hybrids. I treat icons in selection modes as something like an emoji. If an icon is so universally understandable that no text is necessary, I might prefer it. Otherwise, it would be included only if I need to draw a user's attention to something more than the other items. For example, an extra icon next to a pending issue waiting for approval.
When available too, I'd much rather show a keyboard shortcut than an icon. That's useful information for most users, instead of decoration.
People who don't design for a living often think decoration is design, or vice versa. Decoration is antithetical to good design. And good design is never decorative. If it's not either informational, or what I'd call "aspirationally informational", in that it's training the user to recognize a meaningful design artifact, then it should go. Decorations belong in illustration and background art, to tie the piece together. Not in UI.
I think the main thing is to consider these design choices. Does the icon help someone identify and navigate to something they need to do more quickly? No one is perfectly correct, making that call. It's one of those things where asking the question and thinking about it is 90% of the effort.
2. Click on the hamburger menu in the top right
3. ???
Icons can genuinely help convey meaning/understanding. They can also be clutter. It comes down to how you use them.
Granted, I had done this rather than the vendor deciding what icon fit - so I guess my brain had created neural pathways linking the image and the word.
Personally I think there's probably enough screen real estate to have both an icon and text in a menu entry, but menu search is generally more useful for anything not already an icon on the application's toolbar.
Those, those are ~thoughtful~ icons and not at all default.
I click close at least once a day and close the window and not the sidebar that popped out. Windows, KDE, and Gnome don't do this.
"Hey our metrics show that menu items with icons are interacted with more often."
"Oh we should put icons on every menu item and get our usage numbers up."
"I agree, bigger numbers are more impressive and will get us promotions or bonuses."
I think mid-00s commercial OSes are a good target in this regard. OS X 10.2-10.9 and Windows XP-7 had a pretty good level of density while also feeling relatively clean and would be good to take some cues from.
This goes against the original argument which is that icons should only be used for universal idioms that can be recognized by the icon _only_. Otherwise it's just noise
I've been hoping Cosmic DE improves enough to be usable.
I was skeptical, too, but it allows for some serious visual tweaking beyond what KDE allows without rewriting code.
It wasn’t a good change but some folks definitely took it too seriously.
You will spend weeks/months (sigh, years) agonising over the six icons you can lay horizontally over a bottom toolbar in a mobile layout, only to sit down and guide a user a user through your UI and realise how monumental stupid and unfriendly your UI is.
I was guiding my boss through some features “ok, just click the view you want in the bottom toolbar”, “um? Which button do I click for a forward view?”. This is someone who knew our product capabilities inside out and helped debug users on a daily basis. I felt even stupider having to geometrically describe the details of the icon, realising how stupid of a UX this was, just to continue with the demo.
I scrapped the entire thing for a textual status toolbar that when you click brings up a drawer with every option in plain English. The only icons were a tickbox next to the currently selected item in a drop down menu. News flash, turns out people can read, and much faster than they can interpret abstract icons.
The next time I did a demo, not only did I feel the immense relief not having to sweat over “describing what icon to click”, didn’t have to worry about flicking through icon catalogs to find the “perfect, vaguely connected icon to the idea I’m trying to convey”.
Turns out VIM was right all along, model UI is king. Don’t get me wrong, 20 years of mobile UI has beaten some visual language into is, but it is no substitute for actual language.
Not really, you've just gone from one empty argument to another.
> Choosing not to do something you’ve done is experience.
They already had the experience because they used icons before. They had experience adding icons and not adding them to a bunch of menus.
The way out is to use substantive arguments that don't depend on the shaky grounds of someone's authority
Fifteen years later, I am still waiting for them to undo the damage that was done.
And when people cried what 'oh noes i cant find a needed program in that awful fullscreen start menu uwu' I just show my Vista Start Menu list which took 4 FullHD screen heights on the small font settings.
And as people in the nearby comments say the problem here is what there is a lot of newcomers who just do shit - by mere lack of knowledge or worse by being KPI driven. Just like the last update of Mozilla Firefox which added ellipsised tabs. Like... for what? On the desktop?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/344729.Designing_Visual_...
and the high water mark of my graphical UI experience was when I used an NCR-3125 running Go Corp.'s PenPoint as a portable/note-taking/sketching device and a NeXT Cube w/ a Wacom ArtZ as my desktop.
https://archive.ph/nhkUY
Make it an option, everybody happy
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/icons-in-menus/
A related post linked to by the previous post:
https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/
The what
Next to the floppy
The what
The hamburger!!
Are you high?
Here's an example from Chrome on macos:
https://i.imgur.com/I3d8YdA.png
This would benefit from icons at least on new tab, mute, pin, search, split etc
There are people with down syndrome as well for whom icons are much easier.
Except they didn’t admit it. Watch the WWDC keynote, I don’t recall them admitting any wrongness with Tahoe or Golden Gate, instead they said the design is “even more refined” or some bullshit like that.
I meant “Tahoe or Liquid Glass”, of course. Golden Gate was what was being announced.
They needed to make room for Siri.
You've figured out how to access the Start menu, and figured out where the Power menu is through the icon, but now have a choice between 關機 and 重新開機.
Which one is shut down, which is reboot?
You have one chance, otherwise it requires an embarrassing trip to the server farm.
That specific case led me to make the following table of Windows strings in other languages:
https://peterburk.github.io/i2018n/windowsStringsTable/index...
Although icons in every menu is too cluttered, please don't remove them entirely. At the very least, keep an icon on every menu item that needs to be clicked until the Language setting menu. Oh, and please don't translate the languages in the menu: the user needs to be able to read their own language button.
That was of course not at all what made the MacOS so usable. The real principles were explained in detail in Apples UI guidelines. But hardly anyone read those, so the icons have been with us for 30 years.
Icons within menus should IMO be used to highlight special options that are often used or options that users have memorized by the icon as well, e.g. download, share, etc.
In the end the highest art is to group the options in a logical way, have them in the right place and remain readable.
The icons were distracting for weekdays, but I like icons in the top-menu usually. IMO the user should be able to decide on these things at all times.
Art vs. minimalism in design
Icons are today's form of hieroglyphs for communication?
Home Trending Hacker News Hits Archive Stats Tags Links
English is not my native language, so i was having a very hard time to learn how to use computer, with icon, my 8 Years old brain can kind of infer what is its meaning.
But at the end of the day, it was like Liquid Glass itself - looks sick in presentations, but in real life, it looks pretty awful.