Why did UI’s turn from practical to form over function?

E.g. Office 2003 vs Microsoft 365

Office 2003

It’s easy to remember where everything is with a toolbar and menu bar, which allows access to any option in one click and hold move.

Microsoft 365

Seriously? Big ribbon and massive padding wasting space, as well as the ribbon being clunky to use.

Why did this happen?

  • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    You are among the first people I’ve seen online who hasn’t circlejerked about literally any level of padding/spacing being too much padding.

    People on Reddit/Lemmy always talk about how unusably shit any modern design is, and how UX/UI from 20+ years ago was so much better.

    Yet do people use ancient copies of the software that broadly still performs the tasks people need of them? No.

    Do they theme their system to look like the oh-so-superior Win98? No.

    Don’t get me wrong, sometimes I see a design change I dislike. But as a general rule, UI has definitely got better over the years.

    And don’t get me wrong, part of me feels great nostalgia at seeing old UX’s, because it reminds me of the “good old days” when I bought my first computer in 1999. It’s fun to Go back and use systems from back then. And at first you think AAAAA this is so cool, I remember all this, this looks neat, but after that nostalgia wears off you think *“thank god modern UIs aren’t inconsistent, cramped and cluttered like this”

    Nostalgia goggles are a powerful thing.

    • cmhe@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      People spend lots of money to buy big screens, only for apps/websites to use a fraction of it.

      I cannot control how every application or website I have to use looks, but where I can, I try to find solutions.

      When I am occasionally on reddit, I use old.reddit. I use addons for youtube, to remove unecessary stuff, or open videos directly in mpv.

      I use reader mode to make many sites easier to navigate.

      Mastodon and Lemmy have a much better design than Twitter or new Reddit.

      On the one windows machine I still have, I use the classic shell, to replace the start menu with something more usable.

      I use Libreoffice, and many other Software with sane functional UI.

      I don’t want to use old software, because the older software gets, the more hostile the environment becomes for it.

      A lot of UI decisions on the Internet seem driven by the need to create empty spaces to put advertising into, and with adblocker it looks just bad.