THANK YOU!
None of the current SaaS apps I use can come close to the experience of using softwares from that era.
Take a simple list view of a typical Windows/Mac software?
1. Command clicking selected multiple objects
2. Shift clicking selected a range.
3. Right clicking brought up selection actions.
4. Double clicking opened an object.
This pattern was followed in almost list views and there was no re-learning and surprises.
Now can you say the same about the list views of modern web apps?
Can you apply the same list selection experience across Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive and Apple iCloud? Nope.
That's were we failed as an industry. We let a lot of designers run too wild with their ideas, to put it bluntly.
CTRL+A selects all
CTRL+Shift+End selects all from where you are to the end
CTRL+Shift+Home selects all from where you are to the top
One of the (many) problems of web UIs is they often ignore the keyboard completely.
>CTRL+Shift+Home selects all from where you are to the top
Those two don't need CTRL, just so you know.
>One of the (many) problems of web UIs is they often ignore the keyboard completely.
They are also starting to ignore the mouse.
Well, yes they do, only it's different with and without CTRL. For example in a text editor (or a normal webpage without any fancy JS):
- Shift+End goes to the end of the line
- CTRL+Shift+End goes to the end of the document
and the same is true for Home (substitute "end" with "beginning").
I have seen people, even "technical" people, select a text with the mouse from the middle of a large Word document to the end, because they didn't know this.
They also had to do it often (several times a day) and it had become a significant part of their workload...
Not to mention that with SaaS being more profitable than selling unlimited-use licenses, a lot of apps also have HTTP backends and webapp versions, which can share a lot of HTML/CSS/JS code with a browser-based desktop version. Think of Slack/Discord/VSCode/etc. Sure: Qt, Flutter, etc also have web versions, but they just don't look/feel as good in the browser as an HTML app normally can.
If you want a "Premium" native look and feel, people gotta go directly to the source: native APIs. Qt won't do it without a lot of work. Lots of companies have separate Android and iOS teams. Or they go directly to HTML when there's not enough cash (or even things like Flutter, which look ok in mobile). High-quality macOS apps, like those made by Panic, Rogue Amoeba, etc, use Cocoa directly.
Standardized controls and shortcuts unfortunately end up being collateral damage in all of this.
If you want a "Premium" native look and feel
I've seen this regurgitated a hundred times, but I don't really know any more what that "native look and feel" is. On Windows, it might be the old Windows 95 controls, but those are quite limited. What system today is made of dropdowns, checkboxes and OK buttons?
Animations may seem fine and fun the first time you encounter one, but when you think you'll have to suffer through it every time an action is taken, it becomes a whole different story.
Maybe the list of docs in https://docs.google.com?
Best example: Gmail is one of the only webapps I'll ctrl click a few items at the top of the list, ctrl click a few in the middle, and then shift click to the bottom and it works exactly how I'd expect - everything stays selected and the shift+click selects from your previous click to the next item. I think it gets wonky if you change directions but I can't imagine how I'd expect ctrl+click item 1, 2, 9, 10, then shift click on 4 would work.
Windows, or MacOS, both have design guidelines that was produced, and they expected native apps to follow. Most native apps do (the few that doesn't have either good reason, or were unique enough that their customers don't care - think photoshop).
With the advent of the web, such a guideline for software no longer mattered, because the controls and UI elements are all custom - since html is not an application GUI library!
So every man and their dog has a different UX and UI interaction built for their own app, because the web encourages it. The designers are also at fault for not standardizing on a set of common UI widgets, but i cannot blame them as this isn't the easiest path.
It almost sounds old-fashioned in 2023 to talk about usability, affordance, and user-experience.
Part of being a native application was/is for the application to look and behave like the rest of the user interface. Standards are important because learning how to use a tool is important. Users are important.
Software has become a way to make users miserable. Oh, and while confusing them, throw some advertising at them too. ^_^
I'm afraid you're looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses. In general software back then sucked hard. User experience did not existed at all. Developers bundled stuff around, and users were expected to learn how to use software. Books were sold to guide desperate users through simple user flows. Forms forms forms forms everywhere, and they all sucked, no exception. Forget about localization or internationalization. Forget about accessibility. Developers tweaked fonts to be smaller to shove more controls into the same screen real estate, and you either picked up a magnifying glass to read what they said or you just risked it and clicked on it anyway.
Software back then sucked, and sucked hard. Atrocities like Gimp were sold as usability champions. That's how bad things were.