OT(ish): modern UI design concepts

From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk_at_yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Thu Sep 23 14:23:01 2004

OK, you lot get my whinge for today :-)

Does anyone else find that modern UIs with lots of pretty grahpics are
actually getting harder to use? I'm not sure if it's just me or not!

Having not used a recent Mac I can't comment there, but Windows and the
more popular of the Linux desktop environments seem to be suffering the
same fate in the last few years (and apps for both OS's):

  Clear and simple icons and buttons have been replaced with complex
images (and the icons and buttons seem to have grown larger, taking up
more screen space)
  
  Simple window borders have given way to windows with rounded corners,
or complex colour fades and other things in the title bars.

  Backgrounds to UI components often seem to be images these days rather
than plain colour.

  Colours seem to be chosen without any thought these days (as a
contrived example, blue buttons with a slightly darker shade blue
background panel)


I just wonder if I'm alone in finding modern UI's cluttered with
unnecessary visual features which distract the user from the task
they're doing, presumably waste CPU and memory resources, and don't
actually serve to make the OS/application any easier to use?

Thoughts welcome - personally just because CPU power and memory is cheap
I don't think it justifies making a user interface harder to use! In the
case of interfaces where look is configurable, at least app vendors
could choose the one that makes the product easier to use rather than
the one filled with the most graphics...

Anyway, rant over. Thankyou for tuning in :-)

cheers,

Jules
Received on Thu Sep 23 2004 - 14:23:01 BST