Why did UI's turn from practical to form over function?
E.g. Office 2003 vs Microsoft 365
It's easy to remember where everything is with a toolbar and menu bar, which allows access to any option in one click and hold move.
Seriously? Big ribbon and massive padding wasting space, as well as the ribbon being clunky to use.
Why did this happen?
I’m so tired of neck beards assuming that any spacing in a design is a waste, as if a good design packs every milimeter with stuff. Proper application of negative space is common in art and throughout design.
Almost like Microsoft did a tremendous amount of user research aimed at improving the accessibility of the most commonly used features. I don’t use their products much, but the design has definitely improved over the years and extra padding is a big part of it.
The usability has been plummetting with every single redesign for quite a while, though.
Used to be everything could be found and done in two or three clicks... now it's five minutes clicking and scrolling through the useless single windowed chaos of the configuration app looking for where the last update randomly moved it to (finding one or two options that are almost what you're looking for, but can't do what used to take just a couple clicks), five minutes looking it up on what's left of the internet while avoiding ads, spam, and hallucinating LLMs, only to find out this setting you and everyone you know had been using almost daily was removed by the last update “to improve usability”, and five minutes writing eldritch incantations into the registry, group policies, or powershell to finally configure the fucking setting...