
Why I dislike Modern UI - mysticmode
http://nirm.al/post/why-i-dislike-modern-ui.html
======
victornomad
I dont know how this type of blog posts get into HN.

One guy ranting saying "I dont like this, period" without any elaborated
answer fits into the same clickbaiting crap that we get elsewhere...

~~~
donquichotte
From TFA: "When I see these modern interfaces and all these
animations/transitions, I get sudden emotions which seems good, but that fades
away quickly and after that it turns out all too noisy. There is no serenity
in it."

He's getting sudden emotions? What does this even mean? And do I really need
"serenity" in a GUI?

For me, the real problem with GUIs is that it's not easy to repeat or automate
a task.

~~~
gagege
The sudden emotion is "hey, that was neato" but that feeling doesn't last and
often doesn't serve the content at all.

------
petercooper
_Computers are meant to be automating certain things in this world, so that
you could concentrate on the important things in your life. It is not meant to
be a life force of one 's life._

I also dislike animated, time wasting UIs, but _because_ computers _are_ one
of the most important things in my life and I want to spend more time on the
cooler things they can do :-)

------
ChefDenominator
Indeed.

For going on 20 years, I've been waiting for the adults to be in charge of
UI/UX.

------
meagher
I think this make tons of sense. It seems like some designers or people that
make interfaces try to ~show off~ to users with cool UIs, crazy animations,
etc.

------
jackyinger
This resonates with me (though is terse on proposed solutions). As an example
of a very effective UI, I use vim with multiple buffers, ctrl-p and ctags in a
largish c/c++ project. It lets me fly around the code effortlessly. My
colleagues are pointing and clicking through tabs in sublime text. Sure
sublime is probably faster to learn, but it certainly has a lower upper bound
on performance.

I would love to see the keyboard used more in modern interfaces, the discrete
nature of keys can make for a crisp experience compared with the finely
quantized continuous space that is the domain of the mouse. Think of problems
like hunting for the right place to grab and divide a window border, key
combinations could get you the same result without the hunt.

------
princeb
"give me cli or give me death"

------
crispyambulance
I think his blog is very much "modern UI."

The styling is well-considered, deliberate and does the job nicely. UNLIKE the
naked HTML/no-css that some people here PRETEND to admire.

Webpages should be pleasing to the eyes. Pulling this off requires a sense of
taste and significant work (although not necessary by the content author).

------
feiss
I kinda agree, but I'm not sure the problem are animations or effects, but
where is the focus and the priority of the design, and the management and
reduction of information and visual noise.

Reminds me this old post of mine from 5 years ago:
[http://www.feiss.be/blog/post/157](http://www.feiss.be/blog/post/157)

------
arunc
I can understand why a super productive i3wm is good for developers. It just
keeps the focus on the task.

My mom still uses Lubuntu on my 2006 laptop with 1 GB RAM, when Gnome and KDE
require at least 2+ GB.

------
mtw
What are examples of "Modern UI"?? I think of Mac OS X, my Garmin watch or the
Leica M10 UI. They are modern but I do think their UI would still be good in
40 years

~~~
mysticmode
I used macOS and I'm not sure of others. I'm not totally against animations on
Modern UI. But I think it is used heavily in certain places like twitter for
example. The profile parallax transition and other animations is kinda laggy
when I'm on the low-end processing machines. Also Airbnb's new design and
Apple's product pages are heavy if I'm on a slow network. Animation/transition
are mostly used to cover the slow network latency. Also most people think that
it is fancy to use animations rather than solving a problem. I think design
should be consistent across devices and networks, showing a different design
for users on a slow internet connection is kinda ugly.

------
trevoristall
Complaining is easy. If you don't like how modern UI's work, do something
about it instead of making more noise.

------
ricokatayama
a huge part of this "modern UI" wants to be invisible, and not fancy at all.
Transitions, transparency, animations are techniques and methods to make a
digital thing become more humanized.

------
cryptarch
I like this post because it validates my opinions!

IMO this is the pinnacle of web design:
[https://stallman.org/](https://stallman.org/)

~~~
jrimbault
With 5 lines of CSS added it would be. Currently it's not.

When I read something from Stallman I always take the time to either download
the html and convert to pdf or manually add some CSS for font size, line
length and centering justifying.

~~~
cryptarch
I use my own default CSS, so it's pretty nice to read for me. It's sad that
most browsers have crappy default CSS.

It really shines in text-mode browsers, though.

------
barnaclejive
You lost me at "Computers are meant to be automating certain things in this
world".

