That post you linked was the epitome of what I just now called “fad-driven, science-averse” design. She actually wrote this:
We didn’t want to have any straight lines in the logo. Straight lines don’t exist in the human form and are extremely rare in nature, so the human touch in the logo is that all the lines and forms all have at least a slight curve.
That’s basically ignoring everything we know about actual human vision, in order to satisfy some pseudo-mystical artistic whim, but presenting it as though it were the result of data analysis.
Oh, her whole project was so humorous to anyone who has the most basic design sense. My favorite statement in her whole post was this:
Because it was such an engineer’s way of looking at the world, and it’s Design 101 that how you see things as being symmetrical or balanced doesn’t always line up with what the ruler says.
This modern trend of “simplifying” UI makes me crazy. Don’t do things for me - AND don’t hide the things from me that you think I don’t need to see! And don’t change the screen while I’m doing things because you want to change what I’m looking at, in response to me trying to do something! Just put the stuff in categories and sub-categories in a useful way. That’s all I want and all I will ever need.
Also, when some old-style guis put everything in one menu, so you’re supposed to navigate through layer and layer … and try again … and again … to reach that one item.
But you’re slandering engineers a little… I mean, sure, most of us are artistically challenged - that’s why we typically go for the “form following function” thing, it’s the best chance we’ve got to make our work aesthetically pleasing. Purely functional form often has a certain refined elegance. Nonetheless, any half-decent engineer knows what entasis is!
I use Clearly, and in the past have used Readability. They’re very good – they just wipe out all the UI in an article and just give you the text. (That link is for Chrome, but I expect the same thing exists in Firefox).
They may be trying to imitate Apple’s understated design-- so understated that a user may not realize that a page is available in “reader” mode, and will therefore suffer through the ads.
(It’s sort of a “fuck Web2.0, I just want to read the text”, icon. the bbs, for instance, is not usable in this form.)
I don’t blame engineers for this, actually. I think there’s a trend among UX designers and/or their clients for flashy, “mobile-friendly” UI designs that look really simple when nothing is happening. The problem is using the goddamn designs to do a single thing that’s different than that default nearly buttonless screen.
I just don’t want to have to figure out something every time I do something, you know? It’s amazing to me that so many companies are falling for this design trend and think it’s a good idea.
My recent favorite “designers in a bubble” experience was discovering that Windows Phone is incapable of setting a repeating audible notification for voicemail or texts in case you don’t hear it the 1st time. The crappiest $10 flip phone could do this, Windows Phone just can’t, and won’t let apps do it either. “what, you mean you don’t look at your phone every 5 minutes to see the led signal? How is that possible?”. Yes, I actually don’t look at my phone constantly, something apparently inconceivable to MS coders. Other than that I liked the interface! Got rid of the phone.
The original macintosh had a menubar, and was, in many respects “modeless”; alert boxes being a departure from this goal. If you didn’t know what your program could do, you could always read the menus, which were there right up at the very top. None of this “right click” for a a surprise menu nonsense. If you were still stuck, you could consult the 300 page spiral bound manual.
Now, the old trick of familiarizing yourself with the available commands doesn’t work, because things depend on context, If you aren’t in the right context, things disappear. They aren’t greyed out. They just aren’t there, and so users don’t know that they should embark on a quest for the right context, because there’s no hint in the superclean interface that it would be the right thing to do.
Sorry, but I doubt the designers specified that the Windows Phone API deny apps access to the alerts. I can download many different Android apps to manage alerts & notifications. Isn’t this open-ness & flexibility the whole point of smartphones?
Unless it is the Fruit, where you can cripple just about anything and get a swarm of apologists claiming that your inability to do $whatever_you_want_now is there for your own good and you’re just too short-sighted to understand.
Windows phones suck but at least they don’t have their unpaid PR army.
I’m fairly certain that such a feature doesn’t exist natively in Android either.
A standard user complaint is “They didn’t include THIS feature that I need so bad!” without questioning what fraction of the user base has ever wanted that feature.
The answer to this is not to ignore your users of course, it’s to design your system as to be so open that anyone can make the new feature for the few who want it. A quick search of the Android store finds such an app.
Unfortunately, iOS and Windows Phones are more locked down, so if the original designers didn’t think of the feature, it can’t be added. (I think iOS has always had it, and believe this was added to Windows 7.5 and removed in Windows 8.)
I think it’s hard to argue that a repeating audio notification, a feature of cellphones dating far back before smartphones appeared, even a standard feature of tape answering machines, is too obscure to bother with.
