When every app looks the same, none of them look like anything any more. Plus it’s just fugly with excessive whitespace, overly wide fonts and button sizes that seem to be optimized so my neighbor from across the street can easily understand the UI. It almost feels like UI parody to me.
Hot take: I miss apps looking the same. Consistency is good because it reduces cognitive load when switching between apps. No need to figure out how to navigate an app when it’s using a standard UI toolkit for the system it’s running on (or at least a popular one that other apps use).
Remember the Windows 95/98 days? You could set a system theme with custom colours, fonts, etc and it’d apply consistently across all apps. The majority of apps used the standard system UI components.
I don’t like every app being a special snowflake that doesn’t follow the platform’s UI design standards. Don’t even get me started on Electron apps where every app is custom-rendered…
When every app looks the same, none of them look like anything any more. Plus it’s just fugly with excessive whitespace, overly wide fonts and button sizes that seem to be optimized so my neighbor from across the street can easily understand the UI. It almost feels like UI parody to me.
Hot take: I miss apps looking the same. Consistency is good because it reduces cognitive load when switching between apps. No need to figure out how to navigate an app when it’s using a standard UI toolkit for the system it’s running on (or at least a popular one that other apps use).
Remember the Windows 95/98 days? You could set a system theme with custom colours, fonts, etc and it’d apply consistently across all apps. The majority of apps used the standard system UI components.
I don’t like every app being a special snowflake that doesn’t follow the platform’s UI design standards. Don’t even get me started on Electron apps where every app is custom-rendered…