Let me take you back to 25 May, 1999.
One look at QuickTime 4.0 Player and one must wonder whether Apple, arguably the most zealous defender of consistency in user interface design, has abandoned its twenty-year effort to champion interface standards. As with IBM’s RealThings, it would seem that appearance has taken precedence to the basic principles of graphical interface design. In an effort to achieve what some consider to be a more modern appearance, Apple has removed the very interface clues and subtleties that allowed us to learn how to use GUI in the first place. Window borders, title bars, window management controls, meaningful control labels, state indicators, focus indicators, default control indicators, and discernible keyboard access mechanisms are all gone. According to IBM’s RealThings, and apparently to Apple, such items and the meaningful information they provide are merely “visual noise and clutter”. While the graphical designer may be pleased with the result, the user is left in a state of confusion: unable to determine which objects are controls, which are available at any point in the interaction, how they are activated, where they may be located, and how basic functions can be performed.
Looking back, QuickTime 4.0 Player really signaled the end of proper GUI design at Apple. Up until that point, Apple had refined what became known as Platinum to a T – it was a beautifully consistent, logical, easy to use, and pleasant to look at UI. After introducing the world to ‘brushed metal’, Apple slowly slid downhill – and they’ve never been able to recover.
Fascinating to look back and read articles such as these, almost 20 years later.
It’s interesting to look back and realise that only was skeuomorphic design bad for all the reasons that article covers, it also doesn’t age. How many portable devices do you own now that use a thumbwheel to change the audio volume?
Thom is right though that this UI marked the beginning of the end. It’s when the graphic designers took over from actual HCI designers, and we’re all the worse for it.
‘Ol Fart here.
Trouble is I _liked_ a modicum of skeuomorphic design.
It just made things easier.
Quite a few of the “elegant” new flat semi-monochrome designs are so opaque that they make learning to use even a relatively simple app difficult.
Gawd help you if you are visually impaired in some way.
Hunting around for some of the less often used controls wastes so much time that you might as well drop down to the shell and invoke a script like
– TurnVolDown /3
Mac
No argument there.
Flat design and skeuomorphism are ends of a scale in the same way that capitalism and communism are… and, like capitalism and communism, you’ll have problems if you try to go too far to either extreme.
In the case of flat design, it was always a design meant for print, because you have to compromise on it to provide intuitive cues for how things can be interacted with.
I generally go for UIs with the aesthetic that produced Qt’s Plastique theme and GTK+’s Clearlooks theme.
https://doc.qt.io/archives/qt-4.8/gallery-plastique.html
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Clearlooks_2.20….
Edited 2018-10-22 18:56 UTC
I love Plastique!
(especially, for some reason, associated with it KDE window borders/titlebar https://www.maketecheasier.com/assets/uploads/2011/12/kde4-to-kde3-k… )
There was a time when every application wanting to be perceived as “cool” felt the need to come with an interface unlike everything else. And we, users, played along. Then the same happened with websites.
Now, hopefully we grew and understand the importance of consistence, intuitiveness and predictability.
The web deserves a lot of blame here, overloading content with controls.
Media players for some reason went this “cool interface” route, and it is fashion that dictates you have to invent new looks simply because people get bored with anything, even if it is a good design to start with. But that’s a lot of product design anyway, where an electric shaver has to have all the styling just to make it stand out.
What I don’t forgive Apple for is when they do stupid things. In Mail.app, the button to hide/unhide a mailbox list, is itself hidden. Utterly amazing.
As a non-Apple user, I could probably count on my fingers the times I actually opened QuickTime on Windows, it was slow, unintuitive, aggressive and unfriendly. But, if I remember right, you had to have it installed for other players to be able to play the rare .mov file. Good thing we now have plenty of players based on libavcodec.
For me, the intolerance to non-standard UIs started shortly after moving my desktop to Linux, so a bit over 15 years ago.
I never thought i’d here “Intolerance to non-standard UI’s” and “Moving my desktop to linux” together in the same sentence
Why not? No matter how bad Apple made things open source software will always be the front runner in non-standard and non-uniform UI design.
Name me one mainstream OS, one, that has a consistent and intuitive design language and UI.
Come on, i’m waiting
I’d say Chrome, but I don’t use it enough to really judge.
Also, I hate “flat” design, so by extension, Material makes my teeth itch.
I find amazing the extend that people reach to complain about the L&F of some software. To me that UI is absolutely fine. It gets the job done. You simply need to adjust your self for a while to the design language of the developer. That is OK and that would be true of whatever design language. Personally I enjoy everything for what it is.
No, it isn’t. Even slightly.
Edited 2018-10-18 16:14 UTC
Isn’t that really just the UI-design version of victim blaming?
We expect standard interface characteristics with the various physical objects in our life, like cars, appliances, power tools, etc., so why should we give software developers a special exemption to make objets d’art out of the tools we expect to use to accomplish tasks, just because they’re digital?
Edited 2018-10-19 00:14 UTC
But you DON’T get standard interfaces from real life objects either.
Take cars, sure some functions, like the steering wheel, you can recognize, but lots of other functions differ. Even the number and shape of the pedals. When you then move on to trying to operate things like changing gears, turning on the light, turning on the car itself, parking brake, etc etc you can’t just expect to jump from one car to the next.
Last washing machine we bought i had to actually consult the manual to figure out what program to use because it didn’t look like anything i was used to.
Sure both my power drills have a trigger button and a chuck, but all the other interface parts are completely different.
A lot of the complaints people have about software interface can be boilt down to simple whining about style. Others are more legit. What i remember the most about the old Quicktime was how hard it actually was to figure out how to operate that round volume thingy. People have whined a lot about it over the years, but really, most of the time it just played the video that you asked it to.
For some the old Platinum UI was the best UI ever, and for some of us it was one of the worst. I remember it as being very ugly, lots of actions being weird and unintuitive, and the whole damn thing being slow and having issues like don’t touch it while burning a CD or it will fail, years after that became a non-issue on Windows.
Looking at those screenshots of Quicktime 4.0 and looking at Mac OS 9 screenshots from the same year, i would say that Quicktime still looks pretty modern, where Mac OS 9 looks old. And yes, i am mostly whining about style
I understand what you are saying. I have no idea jumping from the controls on my dishwasher to the XBox interface.
But this was Apple…Apple of the late 90s. They pushed their published Human Interface Guidelines *hard*. They held up the consistency of the MacOS UI and the apps as one of the core tenets of why MacOS was better and easier to learn than Windows. They sold the entire Mac ethos on HIG and uniformity. And then they released QT4 and many people felt betrayed. They started to see the HIG for the snake oil it ultimately turned out to be.
I think we’ll have to agree to disagree there. While Mac OS 9 does look dated, there’s something about the UI design that makes it disproportionately enticing when I’m in a retro-computing mood. (Heck, anything from MacOS 7 through MacOS 9 has that sort of effect to varying degrees.)
Quicktime 4, on the other hand, reminds me of everything I work to rid myself of in applications. constraints on window dimensions purely for theming reasons, inconsistent theming that draws attention when the content should be front and center stage, widgets designed for how they look rather than how you interact with them, inconsistent or missing cues regarding what elements can be interacted with (Windows 8’s biggest sin, in my opinion), etc.
My complaints about QT 4.0 weren’t about the look and feel of the player– The buttons were there, and clickable.
The Windows version of the app, however, was terrible. AND it insisted that it, and only it, was allowed to open a TIFF file. Worse, it was required by that bloated, resource hungry monstrosity known as “iTunes for Windows”.
I really miss the days of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines and other UI standards. Remember when HCI was a thing, and people did research about how to make UIs better?
Touch screens, flat UIs and fad-chasing “UX designers” have ruined interfaces for computers, the web, and mobile devices.
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