Few years back everyone was complaining Apple was copying Microsoft by going all in on flat UIs.
While at MS I did run into the ever present problem of many designers only using MacOS so their designs would basically say "do what MacOS does!"[1] which entailed a lot of work by developers to change the default Windows UI widget behaviors to look like MacOS. Thankfully when I got one of those requests across my desk I was able to point and shout at MS's design language rules and say no. :/
[1] I don't think it was on purpose, I just think many designers have never used anything else and they didn't even realize other UIs exist outside of MacOS and iPhones. These problems started popping up when MS loosened up on their rules about only using MS products for development, it was a needed change but ugh, UX designers and their MacBooks...
Not having buttons be obviously clickable/touchable is a bug, not a feature, as is having UI elements blend in with each other.
I personally use WindowBlinds to make my Windows 10 UI look like Windows 2000. I love having a taskbar that has 3D buttons. I like not having multiple windows from a single program getting grouped together.
Windows 2000 (or Windows XP with the Classic theme enabled) was the best UI Windows ever had. It's been downhill ever since.
I agree, but I’ve always wondered if flat UIs had a performance advantage. Like, if your GPU just rendered a bunch of rectangles of a single color instead of having to mask rounded corners or draw borders around things, could the UI run with less resources? Maybe it’s conspiratorial but it helps me sleep at night as a remember not finding buttons during the day…
Considering we had 3D controls in the Windows 3.1 era when some people were still running on 25 Mhz 80386 CPUs and 4 MB of RAM, I'm not too worried about the performance impact.
While at MS I did run into the ever present problem of many designers only using MacOS so their designs would basically say "do what MacOS does!"[1] which entailed a lot of work by developers to change the default Windows UI widget behaviors to look like MacOS. Thankfully when I got one of those requests across my desk I was able to point and shout at MS's design language rules and say no. :/
[1] I don't think it was on purpose, I just think many designers have never used anything else and they didn't even realize other UIs exist outside of MacOS and iPhones. These problems started popping up when MS loosened up on their rules about only using MS products for development, it was a needed change but ugh, UX designers and their MacBooks...