OT(ish): modern UI design concepts

[evan]

The one redeeming quality (at least of XP) is that you can easily turn OFF all
that junk.  My whole desktop and "theme" is very minimalist.  That's a big part
of the reason why I also use Opera instead of Internet Explorer; it's much more
customizable in that I can turn all the non-browser crap off.

--- Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> OK, you lot get my whinge for today :-)
> 
> Does anyone else find that modern UIs with lots of pretty grahpics are
> actually getting harder to use? I'm not sure if it's just me or not! 
> 
> Having not used a recent Mac I can't comment there, but Windows and the
> more popular of the Linux desktop environments seem to be suffering the
> same fate in the last few years (and apps for both OS's):
> 
>   Clear and simple icons and buttons have been replaced with complex
> images (and the icons and buttons seem to have grown larger, taking up
> more screen space)
>   
>   Simple window borders have given way to windows with rounded corners,
> or complex colour fades and other things in the title bars.
> 
>   Backgrounds to UI components often seem to be images these days rather
> than plain colour.
> 
>   Colours seem to be chosen without any thought these days (as a
> contrived example, blue buttons with a slightly darker shade blue
> background panel)
> 
> 
> I just wonder if I'm alone in finding modern UI's cluttered with
> unnecessary visual features which distract the user from the task
> they're doing, presumably waste CPU and memory resources, and don't
> actually serve to make the OS/application any easier to use?
> 
> Thoughts welcome - personally just because CPU power and memory is cheap
> I don't think it justifies making a user interface harder to use! In the
> case of interfaces where look is configurable, at least app vendors
> could choose the one that makes the product easier to use rather than
> the one filled with the most graphics...
> 
> Anyway, rant over. Thankyou for tuning in :-)
> 
> cheers,
> 
> Jules
> 
> 


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