Why I dislike Modern UI (opens in new tab)

For me, the criticism is pretty specific:

  When I see these modern interfaces and 
  all these animations/transitions

Probably because it resonates with me. The experience is that someone else has decided what the perfect amount of time I should wait to do what I want to do...someone I don't know who does not know what I am actually trying to do (something for which using the UI is only an incidental step).

Over my years in design, I've see a pretty regular pattern when someone walks through their design for a project that boils down to: the user arrives here and is forced to do X. Narrowing down the user's possibilities via force is probably a reasonable backup strategy for parts of a penitentiary. Most of the time, I find good design creates possibilities.

So for me, the brevity is warranted because the problem is so fundamental. A couple of years ago I opened up my copy of AutoCad R14 from the early 1990's in a VM to goof around. It was radically different: type a command and it executes instantly. Modern UI's have the tail wagging the dog. There is latency in web interfaces due to round trips over the network. Animations can be a way of papering over that latency in lieu of not stalling while waiting for data. They are not an independent end...good design addresses actual problems.

From TFA: "When I see these modern interfaces and all these animations/transitions, I get sudden emotions which seems good, but that fades away quickly and after that it turns out all too noisy. There is no serenity in it."

He's getting sudden emotions? What does this even mean? And do I really need "serenity" in a GUI?

For me, the real problem with GUIs is that it's not easy to repeat or automate a task.

You may be downvoted to oblivion for asking how it gets on the front page (some people think it is of interest is the usual answer, IIRC), but honestly, however this ended up here, I am struggling to work out the point of it is.

It's four short paragraphs, short enough for a forum comment, of someone vaguely talking about UI, with zero examples. It's also the only post on the site. Fishy.

I feel bad saying this as the author may just have English as a second language but due to some wacky, essentially meaningless sentences, I did wonder if the point was it's an example of text generated by "AI".

Edit: And this gets downvoted within seconds. Ridiculous.

With 5 lines of CSS added it would be. Currently it's not.

When I read something from Stallman I always take the time to either download the html and convert to pdf or manually add some CSS for font size, line length and centering justifying.

It looks broken, like someone's typoed the css filename

I used macOS and I'm not sure of others. I'm not totally against animations on Modern UI. But I think it is used heavily in certain places like twitter for example. The profile parallax transition and other animations is kinda laggy when I'm on the low-end processing machines. Also Airbnb's new design and Apple's product pages are heavy if I'm on a slow network. Animation/transition are mostly used to cover the slow network latency. Also most people think that it is fancy to use animations rather than solving a problem. I think design should be consistent across devices and networks, showing a different design for users on a slow internet connection is kinda ugly.

I think he/she is referring to Microsoft's design guidelines ?

Anyway, some exemples would be welcome.