No More Icons in Every Menu by Default (blog.jim-nielsen.com)

The two things that pain me the most are:

(1) Clickable elements no longer visually signifying that they're clickable. Words aren't underlined or written in a special font, sometimes the profile avatar is the clickable link to the profile but sometimes the name is, etc.

(2) No more clean, compact directory trees. We used to have high-contrast compact UI design to look through nested ontologies. Now it's rounded-edges card-based, often without trace lines, and barely ever compact. RIP

>> This leads to overemphasis on the visual aspect of the UI and not enough on its functional and usability aspects.

Accessibility has been left in the dustbin as well. You go to all these sites extolling these beautiful, innovative sites and they're completely useless with a keyboard or screen reader.

We let the wrong sort of designers do the design. The designers that simultaneously made changes under the guise of "UX" just sort of made it up as they went along without any basis in reality. That's how we got stuck with the hamburger menu.

FYI it’s Chesterton’s Fence, named after writer G. K. Chesterton.

This is the opposite of logical. Missteps and corrections are a sign of conscientiousness, not "making it up".

If somebody always gets everything right in your opinion, you should be suspicious of your own values, not of the people who don't achieve constant perfection.

By recent, you mean since just after the iPhone 3s?

The iPhone 4 was such a letdown...

And on every misstep and their correction, the same people will be defending them. Like "icons on every option is so much more intuitive", just to argue the exact opposite a couple of years later.

I think it might be somewhat generational. There was a time when Apple famously put a lot of effort into HCI research and experimentation, and prioritized it above so many other concerns. When Apple chose to do UI differently from everyone else, it was a strong indication that they made the decision based on empirical research and not just making it up as they go along like everyone else. A single menu bar at the top of the screen, for example, was chosen because they found that users could locate and click on them much faster than they could menus at the top of the window. I can’t remember exactly how much but I think it was something like 1/3 - 1/2 as much time.

But that was in a different millennium.

There are a lot of us that aren't making it up as we go. There is plenty of knowledge and experience on how to do these things and Apple used to be the king of it. For some reason they started throwing it all away with Liquid Glass.

Apple is/was regarded as the gods of design and ux. Does anyone know what it takes to get hired there as a designer now? Are the original designers with actual vision still there? I imagine they would need to really be conscious of not hiring average designers who just have a resume of top companies they have worked at but need the type of people steve jobs would have hired himself.

Easier said than done so it's not surprising they have atrophied in their former genius but im curious.

In any other context I would agree with you, but in software, the point the author is making is quite true.

MS would include superfluous icons because they observe it in other software and can't think for themselves, or they would omit superfluous icons because it never occurred to them in the first place.

Everything Apple does is carefully considered, good and bad.

I take the latter every time, because I understand how bad things are in software. I know it's unrealistic to be as choosy as I want to be.

> A more persuasive sales pitch for me to consider Apple products would be if the company had judgement not to ship such a hot mess of a sloppy product in the first place...

When I read a sentence like this, I have to remind myself that this is Apple products we're talking about.

What other company do you feel surpasses Apple in terms of "judgement not to ship such a hot mess of a sloppy product in the first place"?

Is there any consumer electronics company today that ships products that are in any way less of a slop than Apple?

Honest mistake.

Those, those are ~thoughtful~ icons and not at all default.

Yeah I appreciate their approach which optimizes for data density a lot more than competing desktops, but it could certainly feel cleaner while doing so.

I think mid-00s commercial OSes are a good target in this regard. OS X 10.2-10.9 and Windows XP-7 had a pretty good level of density while also feeling relatively clean and would be good to take some cues from.

I use KDE and you made me right click everywhere and I can't find a menu without icons lol