Reply to post: Re: previous versions

Re: previous versions

"And style changes, and we keep up with the change (does your iPhone look exactly like it did a decade ago, plastic rear, small screen with the camera separate and on top, and all)?"

A modern iPhone might not look physically *identical* to the original, but there's more than enough similarity between what was and what is to enable someone who'd only ever used one to be in with a damn good chance of using the other without much difficulty. And physical changes aside, if you consider the OS itself, just how much has that actually changed in terms of the UI it presents to the user? It might have undergone massive changes behind the scenes, but the UI has remained strikingly consistent over the years.

"Our tastes constantly change and, if only in the graphic design sense, we keep up or be called "outdated""

Here's the thing that a growing number of graphic designers seem to fail to understand thees days. A UI is NOT a static work of art to be admired from a polite distance, or even a way of conveying information in a read-only manner. It's a dynamic thing that users expect to be able to interact with in order to control and monitor the underlying system, and functionality is therefore key.

If that means having to forego the latest trends in graphic design, then tough shit, you swallow your designer pride and ego and make the UI work, because making sure the UI is useable is THE thing that truly matters here. If you can also make it look good in the process then that's a bonus, but the moment style is allowed to override substance in the UI design process is the point at which it all starts to go badly wrong and you end up with UIs that are so unuseable out of the box that you have to spend time customising them, assuming you're even given the option of doing so,

And that latter point is key here - it's one thing for companies to come out with modern UI concepts as the default out of the box look for their products, but it's quite another if they make that the ONLY way in which users can interact with that version of the product, forcing us to adapt to THEIR idea of what the UI should look like rather than simply givng us the choice of tweaking it so that it looks more like what WE want.

So we're not demanding that everyone is forced to abandon the modern look and use something that makes people go "oh, welcome to the 1990's!!", we'd just prefer not to be forced into using that look ourselves.

And yes, our tastes might change, but a) we're all still individuals with our own personal taste preferences, and b) we don't always ditch the stuff we used to like just because something new comes along to take our fancy - sometimes our tastes merely expand to encompass new things without pushing aside the things we've loved all along.

But whatever our tastes may be, they're still beholden to our physical capabilities, which take rather longer to evolve. Looking at some aspects of modern UI design, you'd be forgiven for thinking that some designers now believe the Mk.1 eyeball has evolved to the point where it can detect the difference between one block of pixels set to white, and another block of pixels also set to white...