If you have two candidate ui designs you pick the best of the two. If you have an established ui and a candidate the new design needs to be dramatically better. It has to scream superiority. If it isn't that you are just ruining ux.
I install Gimp one time. I like to casual draw on autopilot, usually while doing something else, talking, watching a movie, listening to a podcast etc. For some reason half the icons were missing and the existing set was replaced with the hipster horrifying flat single color monstrosities. This would have been a waste of their time if it was only an option for no one who wants this some place buried deep in the settings where it would only clutter the nesaserily complex options.
With MS it feels more like intentionally trolling the user
The best spot for the applications sub menu is to not make it a sub menu. The second best is to leave it wherever the fuck it was before. I want to struggle remembering what an application was called and wonder why they are organized so poorly. (Not by file Association) In stead they have me wonder where they even are???
I'm actually not sure what you're saying about GIMP. I mean - I understand the frustration, the "button groups" or whatever they did to declutter things made things (imo) worse; I don't think it's a good default.
BUT
I don't actually understand your sentences for the most part. I really had to work to glean what you were talking about.
I'm not trying to be insulting here; sometimes I write in inscrutable ways too. But - could you reword a few things so I know what you're trying to say?
I've never been sentenced to repeating myself. I'm sure people normally hope for improvements in silence without informing me. Thanks!
The general point was that "Improvement" that ruin muscle memory usually aren't. It should be the most basic UI design principle.
One should be able to instinctively click on the Gmail icon while focused on the task at hand. If the icon isn't where one expects it to be you are no longer doing email things. Same goes for having the user search for the inbox inside the application. If they can't find it they are unproductive and feel dumb but they aren't to blame. Some bad designer came up with the brilliant idea to call it "all mail". The inbox is expected to live at the top of the menu. You can't improve it.
It's such basic stuff. It's like someone used your tools or your kitchen and put everything in a new spot. Eh, I mean the wrong spot.
I could give 1000 example inside windows but it seems everyone is trolling their users. They all want to create the new and improved slashdot, now without threaded discussions! - Hurray!
Very impressive effort. He mentions so many cool ideas. I really like the drop-down with what you want on the toolbar. Good way to unclutter the settings menu.
I wonder what would be a good way to visualize settings the user changed (and changed back) and some way to see the defaults. Perhaps save custom settings? Useful but it adds even more cans of worms.
Say, after I change the minimum font size on my browser, is it still usable for webdesign?
What if I want to configure Audacity for podcasts and for music?
I wondered if one could ask the user when they started using an application but it seems unworkable.
Then had a silly idea to do a slider that moves the ui in time with animations so that you can see buttons fly in and out of sub menus. Slide it a few decades to the left and you are back in windows NT. Not a realistic thing for MS to make but depending on the project it might be cool.
Then had an idea for a tree shaped slider with all the ui branches in it.
For websites I often keep the old designs on the server and append a date to the file name. Never had a reason to expose the user to those but it could be fun. I did lots of crazy experiments that didn't live up to expectation.
Can in stead throw designs in there that appeal to single digit % users. And then they won't be able to find it.
> This would have been a waste of their time if it was only an option for no one who wants this some place buried deep in the settings where it would only clutter the nesaserily complex options.
I'm not sure what this sentence means. Perhaps you already knew that Gimp's monochrome icons can be replaced by colorful ones by going to the Gimp settings under Theme -> Icon Theme, and unchecking the "Use symbolic icons if available" checkbox. That may be what you meant by "some place buried deep in the settings". But if you didn't, at least now you know how to get the colorful icons back.
The reason I'm making this comment, though, is to contrast it with Windows. A comment by chasil, left shortly after your own comment, said that "[a]n attentive steward of Windows would allow older gui themes (xp, Win7 Aero, etc.) to be applied for the nostalgic." Gimp has done just that: in Icon Theme, you can choose the "Default" or "Legacy" icon theme, so if you got used to the older icons, you can get them back. And you can still use the newer icon set if you like, but get the icons' colors back by unchecking a (confusingly-named, the name definitely needs improvement) checkbox. Windows doesn't have any built-in way to get the older themes back; if you want Windows 11, or even 10, to look like Windows 7 or XP or whatever version you trained your visual memory on for years, then it takes third-party software to make that possible. (And it may not even be possible, I haven't checked).
When even one of the most infamous-for-confusing-UI pieces of open-source software (I mean Gimp, of course) is doing a better job of providing good UI than Microsoft is, Microsoft has a problem.
I'm happy the old icons are still available. I consider the flat icons (by default) a bad idea because one can't use them with peripheral vision. Even after getting used to them i have to look much longer to see which does what.
There's another pressure: each major release has to look different from the last one, otherwise it feels like a minor release. In this regard XP, Vista and 7 were successful. 8 also succeeded here, but at the expense of usability.
It doesn't have to use different window layouts, just differently themed decorations. Changing the default wallpaper is a simple way to do it.
I install Gimp one time. I like to casual draw on autopilot, usually while doing something else, talking, watching a movie, listening to a podcast etc. For some reason half the icons were missing and the existing set was replaced with the hipster horrifying flat single color monstrosities. This would have been a waste of their time if it was only an option for no one who wants this some place buried deep in the settings where it would only clutter the nesaserily complex options.
With MS it feels more like intentionally trolling the user
The best spot for the applications sub menu is to not make it a sub menu. The second best is to leave it wherever the fuck it was before. I want to struggle remembering what an application was called and wonder why they are organized so poorly. (Not by file Association) In stead they have me wonder where they even are???