The problem here is that for some bizarre reason, most designers try to come up with a single solution that fits both mice and touchscreens. That should never happen. And that especially should never happen with something that is supposed to run on platforms where touchscreens are a gimmick — which they are on all those Windows laptops.

And, I mean, phones and tablets don't even run the OSes that desktop Firefox runs on. This particular redesign thus makes zero sense.

Why is 'material design' itself important? It's an arbitrary standard cast by Google, and in the opinion of many of us, it's ugly-as-hell. Same with large fonts and generous margins!

Plain HTML+CSS is hard to do?

Google has gone to an exceptional effort to make things not work like they do by default. That it's even more effort to now get basic UX back shows just how misguided the entire team is.

I really dislike this recent trend we can see in Gnome, Unity, and Google even, but one would be blind to not see the reason behind: They all try to solve the touch issue. Desktops were designed for the mouse, and this do not translate well on touch screens.

One could argue there is a gap that cannot be bridged, but we should not complain that some people are trying to bridge the gap and create an interface that is working well on both screen+keyboard+mouse and touchscreens.

Accessibility at Google suffers in the same way as most UX-related things suffer at Google. Namely, the fact that everything is constantly reinvented from scratch, rather than there being one unified way to do it. As a screen reader user, I can say that in some Google products, there can be instances of what, on the surface, should be exactly the same component, but was apparently developed in multiple different ways. This leads to the constant need to work out how accessible each instance is (and e.g. what keyboard support it has), even though I dealt with the same UI pattern minutes ago.

If I had to guess, they think the amount of people who would actually use something that falls outside of the standard desktop/mobile/tablet presets is very low and not worth the amount of extra effort it would take to implement.

In other words, this is one of those things the boss says they want but realistically it's way down the list of real world priorities and if nobody does it, nobody gets in trouble for not doing it, so it wasn't actually important in the first place. Whereas if something's wrong on the desktop or mobile designs, they'll hear about it and hear about it quickly, so they know that IS important.

Or just changing the underlying software. Especially insidious things like inserting new functionality that the user never wanted. Like clicking on the text entry part of a chatbox and instead of getting a blinking cursor to begin typing, getting a User agreement dialog and an "I accept button". Utterly infuriating change.

Most people don’t want to browse the web with a keyboard.

Traffic to many websites primarily comes from mobile devices with touchscreens.

It has nothing to do with being “cool”. Terminal interfaces are great for those of us who spend a lot of time attached to the keyboard, but most people don’t operate like that.

The soft keys Atkinson describes are quite a bit different than the UI of the Touch Bar.

For many softwares, Touch Bar elements change shape, size, and color as well as text.

For example, in QuickTime Player opening a video shows a play button, a timeline/scrubber, and panel for brightness, volume, and Siri. Tapping the brightness button hides all the other elements and expands the brightness button into a slider with a dismissal "x". Tapping the "x" restores the controls to their original state. There is little (no) possibility of touching a button whose text label has changed in this case.

Other apps, like Mail, which do have changing text labels are dynamic enough that most (?) users would not be likely to tap a button by mistake due to a changing label.

In summary, Touch Bar elements are much more varied than what Atkinson describes with the Lisa prototype. The two don't present comparable usability models, so criticizing the Touch Bar based on how soft keys worked on the Lisa prototype doesn't really make sense.

I suspect that the problem is that for established products, like gmail, "easy to use" just means "the exact way it is now": user familiarity trumping every other metric.

And I suspect there is only so many times a HCI design team can say "we ran a study and we should do nothing" before they are deemed useless. Eventually things have to be changed to preserve jobs and since the only metrics of "good design" in HCI, currently, are "ease of use" and "looks good" it usually results in something that "looks" easier than the old one through hiding (or removing) features and padding the shit out of everything.

It's worse than that. Lots of people involved in the creation of software don't just follow the trends, they have internalized the idea a UI exposing any complexity is inherently bad. That if something can't be easily expressed in the interaction language currently fashionable in mobile, then it must be a misfeature.

A distant but perhaps illustratively analogous example can be seen in non-nerdy teens and young adults. Take one that does class writing assignments in a google doc on their phone (they're not hard to find, you can even find some that try to do CAD on mobile devices). Try suggesting that if they learned to properly touch type on a real keyboard they'd find the whole process easier and faster. Then tell them apple's bluetooth keyboard can pair to iPhones. Compare the reactions.

tl;dr: In the TV show Metalocalypse the characters derisively called acoustic guitars "grandpa's guitars." That's the UX world in a nutshell.

It's not as easy as that. Showing validation while people are editing can be even worse, especially for less-technically able users or people using assistive technology.

Having an announcement tell you your password isn't sufficiently complex when you're typing in the second letter might not be bad for us, but how does that work for a screen reader?

If that happens, that's an OS that is unacceptable to me. It's bad enough that physical buttons were eliminated in favor of the soft buttons. That bothers me to this day, but I learned to live with it.

Eliminating even the horrible soft buttons, though, would be a bridge too far in terms of reducing usability.

I would argue that the improvement is the arrangement of pixels to be more eye pleasing -- design improvement would be addressing all of those issues outlined. In fact, this is a design failure.

That's the main problem. Change is good only if it's optional, by choice. Forced redesign only makes designers happy, because they can now stop looking at that old version that they released some years ago and want to sunset it.

Apparently not, because we went for decades without them, and no one complained about a bad UX from buttons that are too small to click. Which could have something to do with the aforementioned high-precision pointing device, which btw. can be configured to the motoric requirements of the individual user.

However, a lot of people complain about UX gone to hell as of right now. So I'd say its a pretty safe bet that things, as a whole, didn't go into the right direction

Besides, a requirement on a PHONE is not an excuse to do the same thing on a DESKTOP. My desktop PC isn't a phone, and I value information density more than click-area. If an interface ignores these facts, then it is a bad UX for me.

Yes. Sometimes. I said so in the afterword of the piece. Maybe you missed it: “Does every virtual button – every button in a graphical user interface – have to look like a pressable, physical 3D button? Of course not. They also don’t need to look exactly like my redesigns either. On a case-to-case basis it might even be better to do something else entirely.

The whole idea is to reduce cognitive load. And since the brain works by recognising patterns and dividing the environment up into areas, this reduction is best done by making elements with different functions appear markedly distinct from one another. It is, in other words, a fallacy to believe, that the brain has an easier time if everything looks “simplified” in the way which happens with the flat design doctrine. The opposite is the case.”

> There are reasons beyond numb-headed fashion that lead to their use.

Certainly not where buttons that used to have button shapes were replaced with only icons or text.

> After all, it’s not enough to understand that something is a button, you also have to understand what it does (or more specifically, people who have a use for it need to understand what it does, and people who don’t have a use for it need to recognize it is irrelevant to their situation). This can only be done with context.

That is correct but it also wasn’t the scope of the article at all. It was simply about the importance of understanding which element on a bitmapped screen is a button in the first place. How to make a button – no matter what it looks like – communicate what its function is would be more than enough scope for another article.

> I think the problem with your article is that you are not taking the style you’re arguing against seriously.

In what sense am I supposed to take seriously a UI decision that was detrimental to usability?

> If you think it’s always wrong and can’t see any good reason why it’s used, you will not be able to make a good argument for why to use more traditional buttons instead.

That is not a logical statement. I can, for example, say that National Socialism is always wrong and still make a good case against it.

All that being said, I’m actually a great fan of reduced aesthetics. The torn-off paper in the various notes app and leather stitching were horrible. But as I said in the piece, They are still to be preferred if the only other option is a reduction that makes the UI unusable. My exact words were: “Just because a user interface uses 3D-buttons and some shading doesn’t mean that it has to look tacky. In fact, if you have to make the choice between tacky-but-usable and minimalistic-but-hard-to-use, tacky is the way to go. You don’t have to make that choice though: It’s perfectly possible to create something that is both good-looking and easy to use.”

They do/might but adding all that empty space in the desktop version of Firefox is quite pointless, considering that it has a mobile version.

I get that there are people with Surfaces and whatever. There are also people with 30" screens. A mobile UI that fits a phone's screen but not a tablet's is considered poorly-designed. It's high time we acknowledge the same thing is true on non-mobile systems.

That being said, things are not as easy to fix as they seem. Paddings have been getting bigger as the use of contrast in UI designs has decreased, and as UI elements have gone increasingly fatter. Without either of these visual cues, the only way to "isolate" pieces of information is by keeping it apart from other pieces of information -- i.e. by whitespace. If you just took one of these interfaces and reduced all padding values by 50%, you would get sane spacing, but the whole thing would be a jumbled, unreadable mess.

(Edit: obviously, adding some visual cues like borders, if not full-on 3D frames, or at least using colours that people over 30 can differentiate on a cheap monitor in a well-lit room, does fix the readability issues, but it also gets you burnt at the design stake for being a heretic so ¯\_(?)_/¯ )

It's been a few years now, and they still haven't fixed so you can copy and paste text in their text inputs.