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Ask Slashdot: A Point of Contention - Modern User Interfaces
Reader Artem Tashkinov writes: Here are the staples of the modern user interface (in varying degree apply to modern web/and most operating systems such as Windows 10, iOS and even Android):
- Too much white space, huge margins, too little information
- Text is indistinguishable from controls
- Text in full-CAPS
- Certain controls cannot be easily understood (like on/off states for check boxes or elements like tabs)
- Everything presented in shades of gray or using a severely and artificially limited palette
- Often awful fonts suitable only for HiDPI devices (Windows 10 modern apps are a prime example)
- Cannot be controlled by keyboard
- Very little customizability if any
How would Slashdotters explain the proliferation and existance of such unusable user interfaces and design choices? And also, do you agree?
How would Slashdotters explain the proliferation and existance of such unusable user interfaces and design choices?
Phones and tablets.
On web pages, at least, the excessive white space is an obnoxious side-effect of current "responsive design" practices.
#DeleteChrome
Fashion over function.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
One of my biggest beefs is with those apps whose windows can't be resized, and you're forced to scroll all over the place -horizontally as well as vertically- in a window barely the size of a post-it note.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
I agree, I cannot stand this push to flat GUIs. Give me a button that looks like a button, that way I know I can push it.
heh, captch: condemns
New generations always rebel against the ways of the previous generation. It's human nature.
During the Renaissance we had visually brilliant works of art created. Later generations shunned this and decided that a canvas painted a solid color had just as much merit. Which is "right"? Neither. They just are.
And so it goes for UI design. From my perspective, we had a very consistent standard for UIs for a good 20 or so years. This was in part driven by technological limitations, but it worked well. The barriers are gone now, anything can be done. Therefore anything will be done. I've actually worked with people who are "UX Specialists" and completely disagreed with what they thought was intuitive. I also regularly have to look up how to do things on modern gadgets because they don't include manuals anymore and they most certainly are NOT intuitive. To me. I'm probably just old. And so is the submitter. :-)
I'd extrapolate this to modern software in general. It seems acceptable now to leave things broken, unsupported and undocumented so that six months after purchase or download things no longer work and can't be fixed. I appreciate things become more complex over time but the number of boneheaded things I see on a day-to-day basis is extraordinary.
Oh. And get off my lawn...
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity
I fear that many of the issues listed in TFS are the result of decisions made when the OS UI conventions are defined. Then, apps follow these conventions without regard to what what it means for their product.
That is not to say that the original conventions are always bad, they were designed for a certain feature set to provide for defined functionality - the problem comes when they are applied, without thought in third party applications. The decision to follow the OS conventions are either made by executives who feel the application needs to be a "seamless" part of the system (and Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc. spent millions on the UI conventions so let's just copy their work) or by designers that don't know any better or are just trying to get their product out quickly.
I have never seen a great set of tests for UI developers to self-evaluate the end product. We've all been there when after working with a product for a while, everything you've done seems to make sense and you develop mental shortcuts that allow you to fly through the UI.
The only real solution is, as part of the development process, set aside time for third party user testing with feedback sessions. I've been through a number of them, they're humbling, surprising and educating - then there's the fun part where you need to take the results and tell your boss(es) that they're wrong.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Its arrogant designers who think they know better than the generation before, want to be seen to be different and "edgy" and "new" and so chuck out all the lessons learned and fuck things up royally. So we end up with an OS in 2017 that looks more primitive than Win3.0.
Part of the huge white-space and big button modern trend comes from the advent of touch screens. Remember Windows 8 and how it practically forced users into touch with gestures and "charm zones"?
I appreciate some of these new features. For example, in Siebel's database Open UI, buttons and selection targets are now easier to hit. The downside is less information in the same screen space. (Also, the new interface does not require IE and ActiveX, a positive but not related to the UI's functionality).
I suspect that the concept that touch would completely replace dedicated controls went a little far. Honda's bringing back the volume knob. I expect some of these design elements to be, ahem, "dialed back" as time passes.
Hate:
White text on a bight yellow background, on Galaxy Note 3 Android.
Where the fuck have the icons gone? Windows.
Why can't I cut an paste information from your dialog.
Why are things still not resolution independent. Adobe, and most music production applications.
Don't think you need files and folders? Think again, and the includes you Firefox mobile bookmarks.
The creator of "material design" need to be shot. There's a difference between not being limited by the physical world, and needlessly disconnect us from what we have already learned.
In the battle between KDE, Gnome, and Unity, Cinnamon won.
Love:
Rounded corners rule!
Shadows show us what's on top!
Maxims:
Just because Apple did it, doesn't make it right. Remember, they had a bad year last year.
People need to work, more than you need to masturbate over your own art work.
Most serious file management takes place in two windows.
Clean means that you are too lazy to update the functionality in your program, so you are leaving useful stuff off.
Those who think that the command line and a GUI cannot coexist have never seen a 3D CAD or design program.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
You're right about people's motor and vision skills are not what they used to be, but I find that primarily to be because it's not the same people.
Things have been dumbed down for about a decade now, and young users expect things to be simplified, not having experience with anything else.
40-70 year olds have computer experience, and handle cascading menus, middle mouse buttons and overlapping windows just fine - it's the young generation that requires a single application on the screen with simplified controls. And not too many words they have to read.
tl;dr: It's dumbing down for a dumber generation.
Text with such low contrast that it is unreadable in all but the best of lighting conditions
The problem is that there's a glut of "UX" designers convinced that if someone else has successful, and you copy the superficial hallmarks of their design, you'll be successful too. Take Facebook's "infinitely scrolling" page design for example - suddenly you have every damn app and website using an infinitely scrolling layout, even things like weather apps where the information is finite and is best presented using another paradigm such as tabs. Combine this with the prevailing attitude that if less is more, then even less must be even more, and you get the current mess we're in now.
This is not only the case with the current "flat" design epidemic ("Apple went flat and look at how successful they are! If we go flat we'll look modern and we'll be successful too!") but in many other elements that have been taken to an extreme at the cost of usability and accessibility:
- The use of razor thin fonts
- White text on monochrome, pastel backgrounds
- The loss of critical UI elements like scroll bars and button outlines, because apparently they just clutter things up
- The use of "hamburger" mystery meat menus
- Loss of status bars (which attempted to at least give some idea of percentage completion of a task) in favor of things like dots that twirl, spin, and dance in circles
... and every idiot in the world thinks he's an artist.
People associate lots of white space with "modern" and "clean", but in fact the key is to use white space intelligently to help guide the user's attention. The question isn't whether you have a lot or a little, the question is how much mental work does it take for a user to accomplish his task?
It's easy to ape interfaces that work well, but that's cargo-cult design. Design should be as much evidence-driven as it is fashion-driven. First (design) principles are only a starting point.
Recently I was using a smart TV app and when the content I requested took too long to buffer I decided to quit the app. I was presented with a dialog warning me that I was leaving the app, and asking me whether I wanted to "cancel" or "continue". This gave me a moment's pause, because I didn't want to "continue" waiting for the content to load. However as a developer myself I understood the programmer's mindset: "cancel" and "continue" referred to the event the dialog was responding to: a request to exit the app.
This division of responsibilities is backwards: the user shouldn't have to get into the mind of the designer, the designer needs to get into the mind of the user. And that's hard. UI guidelines help, but there's no substitute for watching actual users struggle with your design. Any time you find something that makes them pause, even for a moment, you should file that bump down. That'd catch problems like confusion between text and controls, or inscrutable state widgets.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If you notice throughout software history, developers have *always* copied each others styles, in ways no different than a fashionista would. In the 90s it was pseudo-3d buttons because people wanted buttons that looked like buttons. (Personally, I *still* do.) When the WWW got popular, people started making *everything* to look like hyperlinks. Thank god that didn't last long.
But now... I just don't even know what to say. Style has completely overrode any semblance of usability. Google started the 3 parallels bars=menu thing, and now everyone is doing it. 2D flat everything is now all the rage wherever you look, and people think they're being cool if they use obscure icons for things that may or may not have a passing resemblance to the function they're trying to perform. Intuitively has basically been thrown out the window.
Case in point: Whoever came up with the UI for snapshot should be tarred, feathered, shot, multiple times. While I eventually figured out how to use it, it took *effort* to figure it out because it made about as much sense as Trump walking into a soup kitchen.
I can only hope that sanity will return soon.
Developers traditionally make efficient, functional, ugly interfaces. They did this by using standardized UI controls. They were largely constrained. Today, without those constraints, those same developers make inefficient, semi-functional, pretty interfaces. And with the focus on form over function, they are pushed in this direction by management. (Thanks Apple, for telling me that I want to get rid of all the jacks in my laptop so that it can be be 0.00001 inches thinner.)
A good UX person -- not the kind of BS "UX" that I see lambasted here -- but a real one -- can improve the look and feel of an application, optimize the workflow, and make it pretty too. I work with a UX engineer who uses statistics on the average hand size of our target demographic, and can quote the average size and resolution of the displays they are using. On touch-screen apps, our UX team optimizes for right handedness, and organized the screen so your hand doesn't cover the things you are looking at and so you make minimal movements. A few years ago we even created a mock-up, and had actual users go through a workflow and timed them, counted number of clicks, etc. This is good UX. It's human factors engineering + graphic design.
A sad anecdote: A few years ago I had the pain of designing a UI with a bunch of managers. It was a screen to add/edit/delete users who had access to an account. I drew-up a typical text box with a list, and then an add/edit/delete button at the bottom. You could fit 50 users on a typical screen, quite readably. They HATED it. Their design fit about 10 users on the screen. Big margins all around. Each row had a separate add, edit, and delete button, a large single-color icon of a person. All the icons were the same, so they communicated nothing. The text was so large that long names needed an ellipsis to fit. The add/edit/delete buttons were tiny icons without text. It was pretty, wasteful, and slow. They loved it.
On another project, which was an industrial machine, they wanted icon buttons. Their previous version used 16-color EGA graphics so it needed an update. So I used actual 3D renderings of the parts as icons. Initially everyone loved it because it was clear what the icons did. 3 years later, it laughed-at because it is too "realistic." So on the next project they replaced the realistic icons with single-color conceptual representational icons. Unless you were on the project, you had no idea what the icon meant. The customers came-up with names for the icons: the "one-eyed cat" let you search. The "disney castle" was to load a tray into the device. The "laser broom" was the barcode scanner. This interface is loved by development because it is so pretty, and is the new standard moving forward. The customers (and training department) complain that unless someone uses the device regularly, they forget if they should start the workflow by clicking the "one-eyed cat" or the "laser broom."
At with the next project, they are using text under the icons again, so users know what they are.
Caveat: I am not a designer, but I do program some programming for various Apps/Websites as a side job(but focus on more behind the scenes stuff in my day job).
I do not understand all the design decisions, especially the proliferation of interfaces with generic icons that could be mistook for Ikea instructions. It is frustrating when you run into an icon that could be interpreted as "light phone on fire" or "turbo mode" but you really don't know for sure which it is. Do you try it???
That being said, if I create an app or website that has nice instructions on it, the end user's first impression is to hate it. They say it does not look modern enough. However, it is intuitive to use and they can figure it out quickly. On the other hand, if I create an Apple/Material design type app, customers love it and accept it immediately. Of course, the UI is impossible for their customers, but hey, at least the company that requested the app likes it.
I think a lot of this stems from the Instagram/Pinterest world we live in. Everyone wants to be blown away by the beauty of the app when they casually glance at it. Of course, that beauty greatly limits the possibilities to make an app intuitive and easy to use.
As a developer, I find that I try to balance these things. But as someone who generally likes to get paid for my work, I will often say screw it, and give the "artsy focused" people what they want because they are the ones that sign the checks. The quicker I make them happy, the sooner I can get paid and move on to the next gig.
Some of this is web design (I use the word "design" very loosely) and some is application design:
o the "designer" mindset has gifted us with extreme low contrast backdrops and fonts - STOP THAT
o bloody pop-up/over dialogs that were not asked for are constantly used - THIS IS HOW TO MAKE ME GO AWAY
o menus drop without being requested because mouse went over them - WAIT FOR A BLOODY CLICK!
o Videos autoplay just because I've arrived, or because the mouse pointer went over them. Ever think *I* might want to control what damned noise comes out of my computer, or what data I want to stream on my phone? You should. Because while I'm desperately trying to figure out how to shut up / stop your video abortion, I am hating on you and everything you represent, and vowing to NEVER come back to your site, which I promptly implement via my hosts file because you SUCK.
o Do NOT change the web or application UI: NEVER make a modal UI. Present a consistent interface that can be learned and incorporated into muscle memory. Enable/disable elements as appropriate. IOW, if a document isn't NEW or Loaded, Save should be disabled - not GONE. This is so everything in the interface remains where it was. We want to work, not read your damn interface over and over and over and over just to see where we're at.
o Make ALL keyboard commands configurable. In some apps, some of the things I do most often have no shortcuts and no way to add one. How annoying. How stupid.
I swear, there are days when I'd like to hunt down these so-called "designers" and yell at them until my voice gave out.
All of the above is effete nonsense that designers engage in an attempt (which is actually abject failure) to justify their title; stop all that, and just do it right. Don't even try to be "fancy" unless you're writing a game.
Also, if you say "UX", I just want you to know you've made me work to suppress an urge to slap your face. Hard.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
You're right about people's motor and vision skills are not what they used to be, but I find that primarily to be because it's not the same people. Things have been dumbed down for about a decade now, and young users expect things to be simplified, not having experience with anything else.
40-70 year olds have computer experience, and handle cascading menus, middle mouse buttons and overlapping windows just fine - it's the young generation that requires a single application on the screen with simplified controls. And not too many words they have to read.
tl;dr: It's dumbing down for a dumber generation.
I never thought of this before, but now I will have a hard time not thinking of it! That was damned insightful!
There is no reason that the user can't be offered a large quantity of differences in the shell. It is basically just a theme. Forcing a new UI on billions (literally!) of users is insane.
When the bring out a new model of car they don't mess with the pedals and steering wheel because that would be stupid. About as stupid as changing an ingrained UI just to make it "NEW!!!" Almost as bad as the use of the "white it out and spread it out" interface in Windows is that so many websites are now "updating" their look to this new user vicious standard so they can be "NEW" too.
For me, the #1 modern UI sin, which wasn't included in the list here -- Non-discoverable interfaces. Interfaces based on some "gesture" which is never explained, and for which one cannot find an explanation (unless you already know the gesture to get there, if it exists). Pinch-zoom, hover in a magic corner, drag from edge, press screen for short vs. long time, invisible menu bars, etc., etc. In the 1984-2010 era I could follow the words in the menus and discover new features in any piece of software (and so could anyone, assuming they weren't illiterate). The last few years have brought my first experiences with software that I just couldn't begin to figure out how to do anything with.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Have a little grace. I use dozens of programs and web sites every day. Very few of them are so important to me that I'm willing to invest a lot of time learning the site or program's quirks and tools.
The solution isn't to make the interfaces simpler, but to standardize them. Make them compatible in function to what users are familiar with.
Interfaces have existed for long enough that time has proven what's effective and what's being used. Presumptions that you know better than the UI designers of yore vetted by time and choices will likely lead to dead ends like Gnome 3.
Don't put the steering wheel under the seat and replace the gas pedal with auto-acceleration even if it's more aesthetically pleasing.
My biggest complaint is the constant attempt to "abstract" simple concepts such as directories. For example "My Libraries" abstracted over top the easy to comprehend directory file system is an abomination. Ask the average user how to go to a directory hanging off the user directory (c:/user/$user) and they don't know how. You click on "my documents" but there is no clear way to go up one level of hierarchy or even understand where "My Libraries" really resides. Of course this was even worse in the "my documents and settings" days. People readily understand a hierarchical directory and file system. Why do they attempt to further abstract directories and files is beyond me. This is why Gates could not find the "downloads" directory in the anti-trust trial - where the hell is it? Even he didn't know! Gnome3 makes the same mistake IMHO.
I was with you until the very last point. Lack of customizability is a good thing. It creates standardisation. It means when people pick up a device of same or similar model to their own they know how to use it without any guess work. It makes support and training easier, though admittedly at the expense of finely tuned specific tasks.
"Mobile first" is partly to blame, but lazy/cheap teams are more so.
Take a look at what's popular in trendy web app design today: flat everything, big rectangular colour blocks, lines and rounded corners, text. Look at the boxy, side-by-side layouts, almost invariably collapsing into increasingly linear formats for narrower screens until it's just a single column.
Now look at what you can do easily and portably with CSS. In particular, look at what you can achieve by just slapping Bootstrap or the like on your site, without spending much time or money considering the design and layout, and certainly without hiring any sort of designer or, $DEITY forbid, a digital artist to create custom graphics that fit the style of your product/service and build any sort of distinctive branding.
There was, at the time, some justification for this in that downloading lots of large images on the mobile networks of a few years ago really could significantly slow down loading a page, with resulting poor user experience and app/site performance. But for most of us, our target markets are on faster networks today, and CDNs are much more developed now as well. And certainly you don't get any allowance for this if your site includes megabytes of JS frameworks, ad content, or auto-playing hero video.
Likewise, there is some justification for minimal UI chrome on small screen devices where every pixel is precious, but you don't get any allowance for this if you replace a simple hairline with half an inch of whitespace because your visual style is so generic and unguided that the user can't actually tell how the UI works otherwise.
Frankly, Microsoft, Google and Apple are amateurs when it comes to nerfing design by being flat and bland. Web developers have been moving in this direction for at least as long as smartphones and tablets have been around, and people with actual UI design skills have been criticising them and pointing out the obvious and horrible usability flaws for just as long.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The automobile has gone through quite a few control redesigns which are continuing. If you jumped into a Model T (maybe only early ones), you'd find it hard to figure out. Besides the controls that have been automated away, choke and ignition advance, the parking brake was operated by your left hand, along with ignition advance, throttle by right hand and gears by the pedals along with the brake being the right pedal.
The steering wheel started out as a tiller and as late as 1899 was introduced in America as a wheel. Since various controls have migrated to the wheel or right beside. The turn signal operated by your left hand, which has acquired more and more functionality such as operating the lights, wipers, high beam. On the right, there was the gear shifter for quite a while before mostly migrating to the floor. And all the various controls that can be found on a modern steering wheel. Even my old truck has the cruise control buttons on the wheel. The shifter pattern has also changed at times. Had an early 5 speed where reverse was where 1st usually is.
Speaking of my 25 year old truck, while most of the pedals are standard, on the left there's the parking brake release and the hi-lo headlight dimmer button on the floor. Turn signal only operates the turn signals with a knob on the dash that you pull to turn on the lights and turn to dim the dash lights and turn on the interior light. The wiper switch is besides it, turn one way for normal wiper operation, further for high speed, turn the other way for intermittent operation, push for squirting cleaner (still have to turn the wipers on manually).
Another set of controls that seemed somewhat standardized for a long time and now are in flux are the climate controls and radio/sound system where automakers keep screwing around with stupid touch controls. Stupid due to breaking the paradigm that the driver should be able to operate everything by feel while watching the road.
It took close to 50 years to standardize just the pedals on the car UI, while the modern computer UI is at the most 30 yrs old. Hopefully in another 100 yrs, things will have mostly settled down, but as the automobile has shown, new tech such as touch screens, still puts basic interface into flux, often with stupid design decisions such as trading easy to feel buttons for hard to use, changeable, touch screen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
How wonderful, I'm not alone in despising these modern interfaces targeted towards tiny, touch screens, with an aim to suck a user into staring at a screen all day with eternal sliding, etc. Amazing how the site, "Web Pages That Suck" is still relevant, with things like mystery meat navigation, contrast, figuring out the site in less than 4 seconds. Apparently it got so bad he had to take a break, but the author is now back. I would like to see his site as required reading for the graphic designers pushing this stuff out.
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.co...
"You'll get my clunky desktop interface when you pry it out of my cold, dead, hands."
I used to be an adult but then I grew up.
Our screens are way bigger than they were back in the old days, so we have plenty of room for things like menus and toolbars. Yet the trend in modern UI design is to make things magical and non-discoverable.
Just yesterday I helped my father with a problem: the menus and toolbar from Thunderbird were gone. I was on the phone with him for a while. The task was to find the one magic part of the Thunderbird window where he could right-click and find the context menu with the checkboxes for hiding/displaying the main menu and toolbar. Thank goodness I have him running MATE so every window has a title bar... "find the blue bar at the top that says 'Inbox - Mozilla Thunderbird' Now right-click in the dark grey area underneat that, to the right of the tab that says 'Inbox'..." "It didn't work" I'll spare you the back-and-forth, he had multiple tabs and was clicking in a tab to the right of "Inbox". Once I got him over to the correct magic spot, he found the context menu and restored his menu and toolbar. (The stupid hamburger menu is part of the toolbar, and hides with the toolbar... which means it's possible to hide all the menus! And my dad somehow did so by accident!)
The original UI spec for the Macintosh required menus all the time for every app, and the menus had to be in the same place. And I learned very quickly that I could browse the menu, find the command I wanted, and the keyboard shortcut was documented right there in the menu. Hidden menus are far too magical, and if you are going to have them, the very least you should do is to make every context menu have the ability to unhide them, rather than requiring the mouse pointer to be hovering over a particular magical few pixels of your screen.
I also remember the 45 minutes it took to help my dad un-mute YouTube videos. First I had him use the MATE sound preferences dialog to test his speakers, which just took a couple of minutes. Then I had to walk him through moving the mouse pointer over the YouTube video window to make the controls un-hide... (he wasn't full-screen, why do the controls hide when there is plenty of screen real estate available?) Then he had to move the mouse pointer to touch the audio control (and a slider pops out when you get it right) and click to un-mute... and when it's un-muted it says "MUTE". Because when it's un-muted the button becomes the "MUTE" button, and when it's muted the same button becomes the "Un-mute" button. The old-school solution would be a checkbox labelled "MUTE" that's checked when it's muted; the newer way would be a GUI toggle that slides left for un-mute and slides right for mute. There's plenty of screen real estate for either of these.
I know, I know, on mobile devices these magical hiding tricks are not so pointless because screens are smaller. But desktops are not mobile devices and trying to treat them the same is a bad idea.
My dad is not stupid and I don't want to sound like I'm making fun of him. I'm just annoyed over the modern trend in UI design where everything is so magical that it's tricky and weird.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
But the car is a single-purpose device. The computer is not. Every application does something else. Saying that all should have the same controls is like saying that a dishwasher and a car should both have steering wheels. I'm not really sure that standardization is meaningfully possible, except perhaps for one thing - voice interface (and even there, different software components would still have different vocabularies and accepted syntactic structures, which means basically the same thing as having different controls).
Ezekiel 23:20
As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, or in this case 73 words.
And touch controls are stupid because knobs and buttons allow you to rest your hand on them while you use them. This means your hand does not leave the control when you hit a bump in the road. With touch controls, you have to keep your hand floating in front of the screen, where every bump and jiggle causes it to shake around relative to the screen. It's actually worse than just having to take your eyes off the road to use them. You also have to concentrate on keeping your hand aligned with the screen while the car bumps along.
Whoa, you expect Millennials to be able to work the choke, ignition advance, clutch, and gear shifter on the car at the same time. These are the same people who have trouble walking and chewing gum while looking at their iPhone. Why do you think their UI design is going to be any better?
Its amazing how perfect Windows 95 was UI-wise. Its been downhill since. They got the UI right and then they decided that for the sake of being new, they had to break what was working well. You cant do much better than the taskbar/desktop model with the object oriented icons and drag and drop popularized by OS/2 and picked up by win95.
Whatever. I find the CUA keys for copying and posting more memorable than the Microsoft ones. And I feel bad when they are not implement.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Designers chase trends n cool instead of doing serious study of user workflows. They need to go further. Work with product managers n users to create better workflows that exist. SW developers too resist changes to ui elements and lack sensitivity to render intended design faithfully
I want to amen this: "The currently focused app is not sufficiently highlighted." This abomination started with MsOffice 2010 or so.
For the record, Winaero Tweaker (http://winaero.com/comment.php?comment.news.1836) helps you fix this. It isn't perfect, and there may be apps that resist it, but it can go a long ways towards improving this problem (and a few others).
I actually really like most of Material Design. I often have to design HMI displays (user interfaces for industrial automation). There are good reasons for much of the design:
* colours should be limited and subdued for user interface elements so as to focus attention on content. Bright colours and animation are intended to call attention to important information.
* textures, gradients, transparency and drop shadow effects for the sake of visual flare cause visual confusion and eyestrain. Important elements get lost in the clutter otherwise
* ability to customize is often good but there can be too much of a good thing. If there are 100 "themes" or "skins" and all controls can be moved around by the user on a whim it severely detracts from usability. There is no consistency with the system and it makes it very difficult to train a group of operators when they all can mess with the UI. Also all the code that goes into extreme customzing is bloat.
* Skeuomorphic Design has no business in UI Design. If it was ever a good idea then MS Windows would have fully embraced Microsoft Bob to this day. Making controls look like photorealistic pictures of real life objects just causes frustration unless they behave exactly as the real object does, and are usually more cumbersome than what can be done on a computing device. Skeuomorphism is especially bad when it badly emulates something that is bad to begin with. Using a Blaupunkt stereo from the 1990s is a miserable experience in real life. Who was the idiot who thought we should have an audio player skin that imitates that crap?!
Good riddance to Bob, to Fisher Price gummi Windows XP and glassy Vista and 7. If you have to sit in front of that kind of garbage continuously for 12 hours a day as an operator in a power plant or refinery or whatever it is refreshing to see this "modern" trend. There are some teething pains as designers evolve, such as obscuring too many options or the wrong ones, lacking visual cues as to what is a control and font choices that are form over function as examples, but I for one am very glad designers are "growing up" and dropping the useless toys.
Page based navigation is so much better.
I agree that if you must use the mouse, the UI has failed. But this has been true for a lot longer that modern UIs have been around.
The way that modern UIs tend to implement keyboard shortcuts has a serious discoverability problem, though. It used to be that you could pop open a menu and see what the keyboard shortcuts are. That's becoming impossible, forcing you to leave the application to google or open a help page (if you're lucky) to learn what the shortcuts are.
And how come no one, and I mean *no one*, is working on a project where the computer bends itself to the user's expectations and not the other way around?
Hear, hear!
I'm old enough to remember when one of the design ideals centered around the notion that the computer should learn how you work and accommodate that, not the other way around. I wonder where we as an industry lost that plot?