Your next user interface: Big and flat?
I never thought I’d be saying this, but I miss Windows 3.0. I don’t miss its bugginess - I miss its flatness.
Longtime Mac users miss the “snappiness” of pre-Platinum Mac OS releases, too, though not their crashiness. Back in those days, a lot of the UI was hardcoded in the Mac ROM, which accounted for a lot of the system’s illusion of speed and responsiveness - the “feel” of the Mac that made so many users die-hard fans.
Today, most desktop UIs feature pseudo-photorealistic interfaces that pretend that there is a light source, shadows, highlights. There are buttons that look pushable, bevelled edges on windows apparently carved of brushed metal or shiny plastic. Does all that help the user, or does it get in the way?
It’s an important question to answer; with Vista and Leopard all but here, the paradigms of Aqua and Aero — a desktop world of drop shadows, tabs, Spaces, translucency effects, animations, cube transitions, 3D window stacks and other gewgaws — are now the “establishment” view of how you are supposed to interact and view information on a PC.
Of course, the wheels never stop turning. Just as small-W windows replaced blinking cursors and green-screen text interfaces, single-purpose web applications offer radical simplicity. And even on the desktop, the utility of the multiple-window, multiple-palette application may be close to an end. With interfaces often taking over the whole screen, are we moving away from the idea of “windows,” altogether?
More after the jump.
From a personal perspective, I think flatness is slowly winning out.
I’m looking at Mac OS Tiger as I write this - with its stoplight buttons and blue-plastic scrollbars, the slight glassy bulge in the main menubar, the liquid-droplet look of word balloons in iChat, the brushed metal window frames, the slight gradients absolutely everywhere. And I’m starting to hate it. My eyes hit it and slide off; it’s getting in the way of perceiving information.
I’m not a fan of Windows XP either because it does that same look in an even less subtle way; the screenshots of Aero that I’ve seen resemble a Gnome theme kit designed by someone who plays Doom a lot…
Now look at that screenshot of clunky old Windows 3.0 up there. By comparison, Doesn’t it look clean, simple, friendly and inviting? Doesn’t it look a lot easier to control?
I’ve been playing around with Ableton Live, recording software that has its own interface - one that I think many apps would do well to emulate. It operates nearly entirely in its own single window that takes over the screen; it eschews glossy 3D-ness for a radical flatness - rotary knobs are represented by a circle with a line-pointer in it, for instance.
Panes for tutorials, rollover help, file browsers and more can all be shown or hidden at will, compared to the myriad toolbars, palettes, and button-rows of other programs. Its responsiveness is unsurprisingly very good. No gradients; no shiny; it just works.
Why does it work? It obeys a lot of UI rules - Tufte and Fitts and all that stuff. Important things are appropriately large and central, lesser things are small and off to the side, or hidden if desired. Nothing gets in the way of just getting in and doing stuff. It’s un-modal to a great degree, lending it the feel of a real tool rather than a central bureaucracy that demands the proper papers first.
Are there lessons we can learn, there? I’m not saying we have to throw away all our eye candy; but maybe we can learn to use it in a way that really enhances usability, instead of just marketability.
For instance, if we could have the UI speed and responsiveness of OS 8 combined with all the under-the-hood power that OS X delivers - what would that look like?
September 20, 2006 12:42 PM
Comments
Hi Sadia!
oh no. we don’t want to go back to beige. trust me. what is interesting is that Apple’s hardware design seems at odds with the visuals in the OS. Their computers have become so simplified that they ‘are’ the display (new iMacs).
and ultimately, are any computers easier for a non-computer users to learn, today, versus 20 years ago, even with visual metaphors?
but that’s another post for another day.
wrote AJ Kandy on September 23, 2006 12:28 PM
Can’t say I miss Win 3.0 exactly, but yeah, there’s no function behind all that excessive form with newer OSs. I think Apple over-shot the mark with the sexy-ing up of those little beige boxes ‘puters used to be…
wrote Me: The Sequel on September 23, 2006 12:20 PM