to me the converse is what's amazing: that we can waste SO MANY PIXELS while displaying even less.
I don't care that UI elements take up 4x, 9x, or 16x more pixels, or whatever, I care that user interfaces seem to be designed by people who simply do not care (or do not understand) how to convey information visually.
UIs were pretty good before Human Factors and UX people came around and needed to start justifying themselves. Now, UIs suck while looking so much better.
if UX people studied usability and utility, we would be converging on a ruleset for the perfect user interface, but instead things keep changing by larger amounts more rapidly.
Go look at the Windows User Interface Guidelines document published for application developers developing applications for Windows 95. I would like to see something of this quality today, with all of the ability to convey information that this UI paradigm allowed. A contemporary UI design standard doesn't have to look like Windows 95 at all, but it needs to be as discoverable, as complete, and as useful as this design document describes.
There is a later version of this by Microsoft for UWP applications, which even Microsoft failed to follow alarmingly often. links which should be buttons, buttons which should be links, etc. (buttons take action and links navigate, and let's keep it that way, please.)
I don't care that UI elements take up 4x, 9x, or 16x more pixels, or whatever, I care that user interfaces seem to be designed by people who simply do not care (or do not understand) how to convey information visually.
UIs were pretty good before Human Factors and UX people came around and needed to start justifying themselves. Now, UIs suck while looking so much better.
if UX people studied usability and utility, we would be converging on a ruleset for the perfect user interface, but instead things keep changing by larger amounts more rapidly.
Go look at the Windows User Interface Guidelines document published for application developers developing applications for Windows 95. I would like to see something of this quality today, with all of the ability to convey information that this UI paradigm allowed. A contemporary UI design standard doesn't have to look like Windows 95 at all, but it needs to be as discoverable, as complete, and as useful as this design document describes.
https://www.ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/M...
There is a later version of this by Microsoft for UWP applications, which even Microsoft failed to follow alarmingly often. links which should be buttons, buttons which should be links, etc. (buttons take action and links navigate, and let's keep it that way, please.)