I want UI designers to be unoriginal. I wish they were less original. I don't like learning new visual languages every 5 years; I want intuitive interfaces, which mostly means familiar interfaces.
I never thought trendy modern GUI design would get so bad that looking at screenshots of programs running on Windows 98 would feel instantly and overwhelmingly relaxing, like settling into a warm bath, as if parts of my brain being taxed for no reason could finally just chill. Yet, here we are.
One of the arguments by Designers is that they make the UI more approachable - they don't realize that they are biased by their personal aesthetic taste, their friends like the same type of flat sleek modern UI designs, and they like going to minimal galleries, subscribe to itsnotthat and read the colossal blog.
This is a cultural imposition, not something a professional would do. Yet, we have modern designers injecting their personal taste of modernism into UIs, in this case, Github developers are not the average Joe - they are familiar with complexity, highly dense information screens (code!) and don't need any of this non-sense.
Non-designers I've met actually have a better more grounded and functional approach to design, which is what I think design is. Yet the general opinion amongst designers is that the engineers are like Milton from Office Space - they don't understand fashion, current trends and aesthetics.
True story: my dad is confused by basically all technology and all modern user interfaces. The one site he finds usable without assistance? Craigslist.
On the contrary, my parents were never able to use texting on old mobile phones or even 2013-era smartphones. but now they easily are able to do video-calls, voice-calls on today's smartphones and apps.
They are also able to make payments using code scanning and normal transfer through the ease to use interface.
And this is in Myanmar, where we barely had internet for public use 10 years ago.
Craigslist is the epitome of simplicity. It may not be pretty, but it does what it is supposed to and nothing more.
This practice should be applied universally throughout our lives in every field, perhaps except Art where creativity is revered and the avant-garde prevail.
You wouldn't re-write a whole app without a very solid engineering reason.
But site after site re-does their UI without any stated reason.
For companies I've worked for we did new UI designs because they thought it would increase sales, even though it threw out all the sales optimizations we made in the last design. So, it was always a negative for sales.
It's just a big waste of money that upsets users. I understand tiny startups having CEOs that do it out of ignorance. But large organizations should know better.
My theory is that, at these big companies with large, established products, they're just looking for stuff for designers to do.
I mean, you do need designers for whenever you add new features, and you want really great ones for that. But those really great designers want to do something, and there just aren't enough new features to keep them busy.
I mean, I don't dislike the aesthetics of the change, but yeah, I just wonder, "Why?" I agree with the few (what I think are relatively minor) specific issues that have been pointed out where utility has decreased, and I'm finding it difficult to point to any particular change and say, "Yes, this is better than before."
Yep, I think that’s (at least partially) true, even if it’s not explicitly acknowledged in the company. Same with Google and their endless new projects: what else would all those smart engineers do? Support existing projects? Yeah, let’s see how many of them won’t leave to build new things in some startup in a few months. It’s a balancing act on the part of any company employing creative people, I imagine.
I agree, but there's levels to it though. A redesign almost never means learning new visual languages, whatever that means. Low-level elements like hyperlinks will always be presented as underlined text, buttons as boxes with centered text, and so on. Then there's low-level structures such as sidebars, tabs, collapsible menus, etc. which again rarely change and that's a good thing. I wouldn't call it unoriginal but conventional.
A "proper" redesign then becomes finding the right and intuitive structure for the right type of content. Changing the appearance of the same content in the same structure is more of a reskin, which is what we see most of the time. And yes, sadly in the last years the trend has been: low contrast body text against an obligatory bright color for elements/illustrations/icons, rounded corners, and padding everywhere.
