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The Mobile App Design Tail Wags the Desktop Software Design Dog
CowboyRobot writes "The metaphors and conventions of mobile apps on phones and tablets are now driving the design of desktop software. For example, dialog boxes in typical desktop software used to be complex, requiring lots of interaction. But these are now typically much simpler with far fewer options in a single pane. Drop-down menus are evolving, too. The former style of multiple cascading menus is being replaced. Drop-downs today have a smaller range of options (due to mobile screens being so small and the need to have the entries big enough that a finger touch can select it), and they never use the cascading menu. In Web-based apps, the mobile metaphors are finding greater traction as well. One need only look at the new Google Mail (GMail) interface and see how it's changed over the last year to view the effects of this new direction: All icons are monochrome, the number of buttons is very limited, and there's a More button that keeps the additional options off the main screen."
The dumbing down of computers continues. What else is new?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I think this is a classic example of 'those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it', but on a surprisingly rapid cycle.
So first people start realizing that the way menus and such are handled on the desktop did not work well in the touch screen or mobile space, so designers learned that lesson and developed more appropriate layouts.
Now we have a new batch of designers that is making the same mistake, taking the mobile layouts and trying to use them on a desktop where they do not make much sense.
Though really, it is probably just the old 'I learned to do X in environment Y and now I want to do X everywhere because Y rocked!' thing.
You only have to look at Windows 8 to see this trend.
Rather than doing the sane thing and making different views/OSes for phones, tablets, laptops with small screens and full-sized computers, we've come to where we try a "one size fits all" method that doesn't work. It used to be that we had desktop-style OSes, sites and applications on smaller devices, now we have it backwards.
Seriously, I've got a 24 inch screen, I don't need huge boxes for my applications like I might need on my tablet.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Been using Windows 8 on my "old" PC since the first public release and as they kept releasing new beta versions I kept expecting the Modern GUI to be cleaned up, apps given better interface, more functionality, the store to be somewhat usable at some point (its still garbage in the released version), etc, but alas the RC came and not a whole lot changed.
To me the UI feels 1/2 done, like they plopped a mobile UI on mouse and keyboard driven UI and called it a day. Given the tons of code in Windows you think they could add in a few if/else blocks to check which platform you are on and adjust the UI a bit to the platform. The Vista/Win8 comparisons are rather apt, IMO.
I am seriously worried about the future of desktop computers. If the economies of scale shift too drastically, the hobbyist computer and computer gamer will be out of luck. While I think the current shift towards mobile is making computers more approachable to more people, for those of use that use computer for work rather than play, it's detrimental.
Mark Anthony Collins
UX designers and experts have been clamouring for simplification for years, but clients refused to change until everyone started asking "why doesn't this work on my phone/tablet".
Perfect example:
Cascading drop menus that require click+hold, or click+hover to keep open. These are almost impossible to keep open multiple levels deep with anything other than a keyboard or mouse. Touchpads, thinkpad nipples, trackballs, all require precise movements, and even a mouse is less than ideal. But we tolerate it because that's what we're used to. Since click+hold, or click+hover doesn't make sense on a touch device, people are finally beginning to accept UX recommendations that it's not a good menu behavior to use.
Depth of functionality != Complexity. Watch this video for more understanding. It describes video game design, but the same idea applies to any user interface.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Honestly I pity the world my kids would grow up in.
Seriously? You can walk into a store and buy a "phone" running Linux for under $200. It gets several hours of battery life, and has a better processor and more memory and storage than anything available on the desktop 15 years ago. The screen is on par with desktop standards of the same timeframe. If you handed me one in 1980, I would have believed you were a time traveler or an alien.
I can buy a $35 computer that far exceeds anything that a $3000 computer could do when I was a kid into computers in the 80s. The $35 computer is completely open, unlike anything from the 80s. Just like those computers, you can hook it up to your TV - but now your TV is a 55 inch 1080-line monster instead of a 20 inch 192-line lead and glass behemoth.
I have 5TB of redundant storage sitting in the basement - 15 years ago Microsoft was so proud of the ability to index a single TB that they launched Terraserver just to show off.
There will always be proprietary stuff out there, but I see no reason to pity my kids.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Open source was never about "clean code". Remember, Linux (the kernel) was regarded as an "obsolete design" by academia from the start. It was a quick hack that people liked and started to develop, there was no grand plan behind it (except for "copying" Unix, which itself had no coherent design).
:)
Open source in its purest form is a patchwork of solutions that make sense locally, but may badly fit each other (or be redundant) in the big picture view - and this is natural. The wider world as we know it heavily relies upon redundancy and diversity.
Now, regarding your suggestion that money might have destroyed the originally technically sound open source approach. Dare I say, money is more likely to improve the situation than worsen it. Money is the ultimate metric by which we can measure whether some approach has practical merits. Without the monetary feedback, we are likely to be trapped in the infinite loop of designing "the right things" which will never be "right" in the real world. Things may get messy at times when we are stuck in the local minima of existing solutions, but in the long run I believe that money will sort it out... because better technology allows - ceteris paribus - to make more money
Coding etudes
If you handed me one in 1980, I would have believed you were a time traveler or an alien.
And you would have been right about the first thing.
I don't know the GP about the second thing, though.
The IBM BIOS was published, providing detailed API information. Software was provided as source by both DEC and IBM. Unix (BSD and AT&T) was also supplied as source.
Software was not closed until Bill Gates closed it.
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