alt Hacker NewsI feel like wishing for UI innovation is using the Monkey's paw. My web experience feels far too innovative and not enough consistent. I go to the Internet to read and do business not explore the labyrinth of concepts UI designers feel I should want. Take me back to standards, shortcuts, and consistency.
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I wish for browser ui innovation.
The labyrinth of ways to interact with the temporal path between pages is a cluster. History, bookmark, tab, window,, tab groups.
There are many different reasons to have a tab, bookmark, or history entry. They dont all mean the same thing. Even something as simple as comparison shopping could have a completely different workflow of sorting and bucketing the results, including marking items as leading candidate, candidate, no, no but. Contextualizing why I am leaving something open vs closing it is information ONLY stored in my head, that would be useful to have stored elsewhere.
Think about when you use the back button vs the close tab button. What does the difference between those two concepts mean to you? When do you choose to open a new tab vs click? There is much to be explored and innovated. People have tried radical redesigns, havent seen anything stick , yet.
Kinda yeah, kinda no. Big-thinking drastic UI experiences are usually shit. But small, thoughtful touches made with care can still make a big difference between a website that just delivers the data you need and one that's pleasant to interact with.
There's a similar amateurs-do-too-much effect with typography and design. I studied typography for four semesters in college, as well as creative writing. The best lessons I learned were:
In writing, show, don't tell.
In typography, use the type to clarify the text - the typography itself should be transparent and only lead to greater immersion, never take the reader out of the text.
Good UI follows those same principles. Good UX is the UI you don't notice.
It definitely feels like it is gone. Of course I'm largely talking about the applications that I use, e.g. MS Word which is still using the searchless 1980s character map and has a crazy esoteric add-on installation process. It's hilariously bad when we consider the half-screen UI which obscures a considerable amount of the ribbon.
The UX is also awful.
But I think this is a compounding problem that spans generations of applications. Consider the page convention — a great deal of the writing content we typically publish, at a societal level, will be digital-only so why are we still defaulting to paper document formats? Why is it so fucking hard to set a picture in?
And it's that kind of ossification and familiar demand that reinforces the continuum that we see, I think. And when a company does get creative and sees some breakthrough success it is constrained to nascency before it gets swallowed by conglomerate interests and strangled.
And Google's alternative ecosystem has all of these parallels. It's crazy to see these monolithic companies floundering like this. That's what I don't understand.
Yes! I don't want a car with an "innovative" way of steering. I don't want a huge amount of creativity to go into how my light switches work. I don't want shoes that "reinvent" walking for me (whatever the marketing tagline might say).
Some stuff has been solved. A massive number of annoyances in my daily life are due to people un-solving problems with more or less standardized solutions due to perverse economic incentives.