Why did UI’s turn from practical to form over function?

E.g. Office 2003 vs Microsoft 365

Office 2003

It’s easy to remember where everything is with a toolbar and menu bar, which allows access to any option in one click and hold move.

Microsoft 365

Seriously? Big ribbon and massive padding wasting space, as well as the ribbon being clunky to use.

Why did this happen?

  • @[email protected]English
    7•3 months ago

    No wait, let me go with your example ….

    You believe a laptop window is useful because you can run a browser with 11 headlines visible

    My first work “computer” was a vt100 terminal: black and white, 80 characters wide (on the newer models), by 24 rows. I could and did have a reader that could display as many as 20 headlines on a single screen, and I could scroll and drill down much faster. Sure the UI was shit, but it had the functionality to do the task.

    Don’t get me wrong, I fully appreciate the usability and power of a modern graphical UI and would never go back. However the point is designers focus too much on eye candy and “doing it because they can” over actual functionality. Can you understand my frustration that a modern 1900x1200 screen with millions of colors is really no more functional than a 40 year old black and white character based terminal. I get that designers want to show off their UI, but I want the UI to get out of my way and let me do more stuff. I want there to be more focus on compactness and efficiency. I want at least some attention paid to using resources wisely

    • @[email protected]English
      5•3 months ago

      *12 headlines, on a window that doesn’t even take up my whole screen, at 125% scaling, with a bookmark bar taking up space, and on a site rich with thumbnails.

      And fine. I’ll set it to standard 100% scaling, at a size where I can still comfortably work:

      19 headlines, and some nice related thumbnails, a site header with plenty of links, 2 small file manager windows open, and a terminal window open.

      None of this is even taking into consideration things in modern UX design like virtual desktops you can instantly switch between - something non-existent long ago.

      Please do continue to tell me about how “unusable” laptops are.