It’s often said that what’s inside matters more than one’s looks, but it’s hard to argue that a product’s looks and its physical user experience are what makes it instantly recognizable. When you think of something like a Walkman, an iPod music player, a desktop computer, a car or a TV, the first thing that comes to mind is the way that it looks along with its user interface. This is the domain of industrial design, where circuit boards, mechanisms, displays and buttons are put into a shell that ultimately defines what users see and experience.
Thus industrial design is perhaps the most important aspect of product development as far as the user is concerned, right along with the feature list. It’s also no secret that marketing departments love to lean into the styling and ergonomics of a product. In light of this it is very disconcerting that the past years industrial design for consumer electronics in particular seems to have wilted and is now practically on the verge of death.
Devices like cellphones and TVs are now mostly flat plastic-and-glass rectangles with no distinguishing features. Laptops and PCs are identified either by being flat, small, having RGB lighting, or a combination of these. At the same time buttons and other physical user interface elements are vanishing along with prominent styling, leaving us in a world of basic geometric shapes and flat, evenly colored surfaces. Exactly how did we get to this point, and what does this mean for our own hardware projects?
Bold And Colorful Shapes
Industrial design is less of a science and more of an art, limited only by the available materials, the constraints of the product’s internals and the goal of creating a positive user experience. Although design has always played a role with many products over the millennia, these were generally quite limited due to material and tooling constraints. As both plastics and electronics began their stratospheric rise during the 20th century, suddenly it felt like many of these constraints had been removed.
No longer was one limited to basic materials like stone, metal, wood and paint, while internals got ever smaller and more flexible in terms of placement. Enclosures now could take on any shape, while buttons, knobs and dials could be shaped and placed to one’s heart’s content. This change is clearly visible in consumer devices, with the sixties and subsequent
decades seeing a veritable explosion in stylish transistorized radios, home computers and portable entertainment devices, with industrial designers getting the hang of all these new materials and options.
The peak here was arguably achieved during the 1990s and early 2000s, as electronic miniaturization and manufacturing chops led to device manufacturers basically just showing off. Personal Hi-Fi systems and portable devices along with computer systems and laptops grew curved, translucent and transparent plastic along with a dazzling array of colors.
These days we refer to this era as the ‘Y2K Aesthetic‘, which was followed around the mid-2000s to early 2010s by the sweetly named ‘Frutiger Aero‘ era. During this time both hardware and software underwent a transition from mostly utilitarian looks into something that can be defined as tasteful to over the top, depending on your perspective, but above all it embraced the technologies and materials in its industrial design. Futurism and literal transparency were the rule, as a comfortable, colorful and stylish companion in daily life.
From Brick To Slab
Ask someone to visualize a Nokia 3310 and even if they’re born after 2000, there’s a good chance that they will be able to tell you what it is, what it does and what it looks like. Then ask that same person to describe any modern cellphone, and while the feature list should be quite easy, asking them to draw what differentiates, say, an iPhone 16 from a Samsung Galaxy S25 is effectively impossible unless they have memorized the layout of the cameras on the back and perhaps the side button placement.
Over the decades, cellphones have seen their displays grow larger and larger. With voracious appetite, these displays have consumed bezels, front speakers, keyboards and home buttons.
Along with the demise of these features, front facing cameras were only preserved by literally punching a hole in the display, but notification LEDs vanished right along with headphone jacks, IR blaster LEDs, swappable covers, removable batteries, etc.
The current scuttlebutt is that Apple will be the first to drop any and all connectors from its iPhone cellphones, with the iPhone 17 reportedly nearly becoming the first to do so. Along with eSIMs, this would leave smartphones as glued-together slabs of plastic-and-glass with only a screen, some cameras and a couple of buttons.
In marketing shots smartphones are always shown with a lock- or home screen open on the screen, because otherwise there would be just a lifeless black slab of glass to look at from the front. From the side you can see the same slab, which easily wobbles on its ever-growing camera hump that’s sticking out of the razor-thin case like a bad case of optical melanoma. At this point in time, the most exciting thing about cellphones is whether it can flip or not, followed by whatever subdued color is applied to the slippery glass back that you want to cover up with something concealing and grippy as soon as possible anyway.
Naturally, it’s not just phones either, but also computers, with the iMac’s evolution showing a clear ‘evolution’ from colorful and bold designs to geometric slabs:
Whether you call it ‘modern’ or ‘clean’ design, the trend is quite clear. Curves are removed, colors are purged or at the very least muted and the overall design reduced to the level of excitement experienced while being stuck at an Ikea showroom during a busy weekend with the family.
Lifeless Slabs
There was a time when televisions had a recognizable look to them, with a stylish bezel, a real power button, as well as a couple of front input connectors and buttons to adjust basic settings like volume and the current channel, which could also be hidden behind a small flap. This is now all gone, and TVs have become as visually striking from the front as modern smartphones, with the speakers fully nerfed since there’s no space on the front any more.
All inputs and any remaining controls are now hidden on the back where reaching them is borderline impossible after installation, never mind if you mounted it on a wall. You’re not supposed to find the TV visually appealing, or marvel at the easy user interface, just consume whatever content is displayed on the bezel-less screen.
The rest of any home entertainment setup has undergone the same process, with the HiFi stacks and mid-sized sets of yesteryear replaced by the same smartphones and TVs, along with a bit of plastic that you can stick into a slab TV to stream content with from some internet-based service.
Rather than a stereo – or better – HiFi setup, most people will have a bunch of usually mono Bluetooth speakers scattered around, each of which possessing the visual appeal of a radar dome. If you’re lucky there are still a couple of touch buttons to fondle, but virtually all of your interactions with such devices will go via an app on your slab phone.
Touch controls are also all that you will get these days, as physical buttons, dials, sliders and switches are almost completely faux pas in modern-day product design. Everything has to be smooth, stealthy, invisibly present and yet always there when you crave that entertainment fix.
This design language isn’t just afflicting home electronics either, as over the past years car interiors have seen physical user controls vanish in favor of one or more touch screens, with cars like those from Tesla being the most extreme example with just a single large touch screen on the center console as the sole user interface. Users are however pushing back against this change, with a number of studies also showing that touch-only controls are less effective and less safe than fumbling around on a big screen while driving to adjust something like the climate controls or radio station.
There Is An App For That
Want to set up your new formless slab of plastic or fabric? Please download this special mobile app to do anything with it. Got a new pair of headphones? Better pray that the mobile app works well on your slab phone or you’ll be stuck with whatever preset defaults it came with, as physical controls on the device are for dummies.
Whether we like it or not, the human user interface part of industrial design has been mostly taken out back and replaced with software running on a slab phone. Whatever vestigial controls still remain on the device itself will only be a small subset of what its electronics and firmware are capable of. The slab phone has thus become the user interface, with that part of industrial design often outsourced to some third-party mobile app developer.
This has massively backfired for some companies already, with Sonos in 2024 releasing a ‘new and improved’ version of its slab phone app that was so buggy and plagued with issues that it rendered the Sonos speaker hardware effectively useless. While physical user interfaces have their issues, sinking an entire company due to a badly arranged set of knobs is not as easy as with a slab phone app or equivalent, not to mention the potential to retroactively brick the user interface of devices that people have already purchased.
Yearning For That Human Touch
Here we can see parallels with computer user interfaces, where much like with industrial design there’s a big push to reduce shapes to the most basic geometric forms, remove or reduce color and remove any ‘superfluous’ styling including skeuomorphism. These parallels are perhaps not that surprising, as companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft produce both consumer hardware and software.
Google, for example, has heavily invested in its Material Design design language, which can be summarized as having flat color backgrounds with the most simplistic UI elements suspended in said void. UI elements like the ‘hamburger’ icon are used to hide menus not just on phones, but also on desktop systems, where a form of extreme minimalism is being pushed to its ultimate extremes.
In the case of consumer electronics that means devices that lack any distinguishable features, as minimalism is a poor way to distinguish one product from another. The removal of visually pleasing and physically practical elements also means a dull, stimulation-free experience.
There are no pleasing elements to rest your eyes on, no curves or colors that invoke an emotional response, no buttons to press, or any kind of auditory or physical response. Just lifeless touch controls on slabs of plastic and glass with maybe a sad beep as confirmation of a touch control having been triggered.
In this context, what is often called the revival of physical media can be interpreted as not just a yearning for a more visceral audio-visual experience, but would together with so-called retro-computing be a way to experience personal electronics in a way that stimulates and invigorates. Where physical buttons are pressed, sliders slid, dials turned and things go click and whirr as one’s fingers touch and manipulate the very real user interface elements.
We know that chronic boredom can be extremely harmful to non-human animals, with enrichment toys and activities prescribed to make them happier and more content. With modern day consumer electronics having become incredibly dull due to the death of industrial design, it would seem that us human mammals are seeking out our own enrichment activities, modern design sensibilities be damned. If this means repeating the sins of early 2000s or 1990s industrial design in our personal hobbyist projects, it’s a price worth to pay for keeping ourselves and our fellow humans happy and enriched.
I completely understand the desire for our artifacts to be beautiful, but when it comes to some of them like my phone, I want them to disappear. I want the aesthetics to be in the “world” that lives inside the device. I sometimes think the discussions about phones being boring doesn’t really consider the idea that what most of us care about is the inside not the outside
virtual is the new real
it’s like worrying what colour the outside of a telescope is painted :-D All the good stuff happens on the inside.
I love this analogy!
Still this is the main point of discussion among amateur astronomers (besides the fights to death between lens-lovers and mirror-lovers) Ask me ho I know it :)
Like right to repair. More insides than one can shake a stick at.
Nah I want keyboard phones brought back. Miss my N900
YES! Id much rather a compact qwerty slider over a minitablet pretending its a phone.
This is why I’m always watching what Unihertz is doing with their phones, because they’re actually trying to build phones that fall through the cracks of modernity. I’ve backed the Titan II on Kickstarter specifically because it’s a modern-enough Android phone with a form factor reminiscent of the Palm Treo or the full-keyboard Blackberries.
I would love to see a modern phone using the old HTC Dream (aka T-Mobile G1) form factor, though, or the Danger Hiptop (T-Mobile Sidekick).
I feel like that fails to account for a great deal, while being pretty accurate. As your use of phones might make that entirely true for you, but between the desire for nice HID options for a specific though perhaps more niche task that keeps the phones with keyboards (etc) in production. Or the folks that want extreme minimal zero distraction pure communication only devices. Or the really small very pocket or perhaps soon wrist mounting friendly full featured devices that for lack of screen real estate must get more creative as you can’t consume 1/2 the screen to bring up the contextual HID the way you can on a larger slab. Not to mention some folks are trying to use them like a real computer so the folding screen devices grab them etc.
There is plenty of room for more interesting design choices in the mobile phone world, especially IMO with the new generations of folding phone, as that gives you the option to have almost anything on the outside clamshell closed mode with the ‘disappearing’ device that just lets you at the world inside being available when you open it. So I’d love to see a much more 2000’s buttons you can operate by feel approach on the outside for instance.
Ask any repair tech: if there’s a button to push or a knob to twist, someone will do that enough to need repair. Try that on a new IPhone. No buttons and reset boot generally returns default options.
Umm… there are still buttons on the iPhone, even the latest one. https://macreports.com/how-to-locate-your-iphones-buttons-and-what-they-do-when-they-are-used/
That’s why they should be easily replaceable. Getting rid of them just makes for bad user experience.
Yeah, things are usually a bit easier if they are completely featureless and bland and homogenous
A lot of this is driven by a single consideration: Is form following function? Slab phones don’t look the way they do because people want them to look that way, they look that way because any departure from the basic form will make them bigger, slower, or more awkward. The millennial explosion in cool design happened largely because miniaturization was ahead of the needed functionality curve, so designers had room to play. This was not true for example in the 1980’s, when if you wanted to market a computer that could be used at all (especially a portable one) you didn’t have a lot of options to play with if you wanted it to work at all. And barring some new leap in technology, like the transition from CRT’s to flat displays, we’re probably stuck with how things will look now for the foreseeable future.
That’s kind of Maya’s thesis: form has followed function down a dark alley, and gotten it’s lunch money taken.
Indeed, by taking the ‘larger display is better and bezels are evil incarnate’ concepts as gospel, there is no form left to play with. The only form left is a display with some camera modules glued to the back and one poking out through the display. There’s no ‘design’ happening any more from that premise.
There’s no form to play with because there’s no function that requires a bezel or nubs or hidden space. I think this is a good thing! I want my phone or monitor or tv to disappear except for what I need it for.
Nobody is preventing you from using CRT, just be prepared to pay five times as much for energy. There are even companies in Russia remanufacturing old CRTs into new units with warranty.
This isn’t about CRTs. There were many LCD and Plasma TVs that featured a similar front IO and speaker arrangement.
i’m amazed there’s still so much variety in laptops. i haven’t looked inside a high-end laptop in a long time but i have the impression the bottom half of every laptop is the same…a hollow plastic case, a rectangular prism about 9″x13″x0.5″, give or take. but every vendor has a different game they play with the edges and corners. symmetrically rounded like a half-cylinder parallel to the edge like my wife’s hp, or coming to almost a knife’s edge like a classic macbook air, or (mine) asymmetrically rounded almost like the bottom sheet is a shallow bowl, or crisp right angles like a thinkpad or pixel chromebook. almost irrelevant because all that’s inside is like a 3″x4″ SBC, a little cooling solution, and a custom-sized pile of prismatic lipo cells. but the tiny details of the shape still make a powerful first impression.
Well Lenovo is slightly different, it’s a magnesium case, and the styling changes very slowly, like an 80s or 90s BMW (I have a hunch the buyers of one would also be shopping for the other). And the X or P line-up could be likened to a V12 model.
Well there’s the “butterfly keyboard”.
Some of those early 2000s / Y2K designs were truly awful though. Buttons that were all different sizes, which collected dirt in them and got stuck. Plastic cases with the cheapest plastic and the cheapest matte silver paint, or else that gummy rubber coating that liquified within 2 years. And everything is a clamshell!
Peak phone was probably around 2015, whenever they started to make beveled glass edges you couldn’t hold without touching and got rid of the SD card slots and headphone jacks. At least USB-C turned out OK (at least as a phone charging cable. It’s other features are questionable.)
Cars are kind of the same, now. Mini-SUVs all look the same except for things like the shape of the lights; all the sedans and coupes are the same; the minivans and pickups and full-size SUVs …
I miss the mid-70’s Monte Carlo, everything from the 50’s and 60’s, all the ordinary cars with style.
Sure, I understand that the function now includes stricter requirements on efficiency and safety, and all the interesting details have been ground away in that interest.
I’m not even really a car guy, but I miss interesting cars.
Yep… The variety of shape is mostly gone. All there was a time when you could lean against or stand on a vehicle without denting it.
2 things:
If the vehicle doesn’t crumple, it is just passing whatever forces from what you hit (or what hits you) into your body.
Secondly: using more material than is necessary to maintain the shape against the wind is actually wasteful. You will have to spend more for the vehicle, both in materials, and the tooling needed to stamp thicker metal, and the fuel or energy needed to accelerate it. I only lean on cars along folded edges or corners where the metal is better supported, but you could in theory bond a support behind a large ‘flat’ metal panel and keep a light weight and the ability to lean on your car*.
*You might note that Pontiac/Saturn/Corvette had quite a few models with entirely ABS(?) panels that simply popped back into shape, as they didn’t carry any of the chassis loads.
The idea that crumpling is a necessary feature of vehicle design is misguided bollock pushed by never-satisfied menagers of automotive companies in Korea and Japan. The notion that a car must absorb impact energy through crumpling is simply rooted in their failure to produce thicker steel at affordable prices. Seriously. It’s not easy when you’re an island nation without natural resources (unlike the USA). What if we designed vehicles to be inherently strong, resilient and capable of withstanding impacts without compromising the integrity of the passenger compartment? A vehicle that doesn’t crumple can be engineered to instead dissipate energy by destroying obstacle it was passing through. It’s not 1980s anymore where we can choose between Ford, BMW or paper-thin Mazdas. By utilizing advanced nano-materials and structural decisions it should be possible to enhance vehicle safety without sacrificing performance.
and if the other object is another car? and the whole point of crumble zones is to keep the passenger compartment intact and use everything else to slow down slow enough to not make the passengers mush
For example of good, robust vehicle design see KIA (sic!) KLTV
yeh, now cars might as well be a dishwasher, it does what it is supposed to but no one is going be excited about it or be particularly invested in what brand name is on it
My thought as well.
Cars seem to be defined by some type of construction constraint. The side panels must be joined with the roof, 10% in, all cars have that same two roof seams, at least for the last 15 years.
Only thing that seem to change are headlights, bumpers and decals.
I still like the compact flip phone. Nice small simple screen and buttons to dial/text. Tis the height of phone design. Then went downhill after that…
I had the Moto Razr v3. It was the best phone i’ve ever owned. Had 3 of them and rebuilt 1 from parts of the 3. It was my personal phone and the work phone was a Samsung s3. The s3 was a flat emotionless slab. Phones have only gotten bigger and more slabby since. Written on my Samsung a35.
Appearance is important and I agree with your points. But I can’t get past function. I have all these frickin PROGRAMMABLE devices with crappy user interfaces and I can’t change them. Just need to change a few behaviors but there’s no user modifyable controls. Phone. Computer. Car.
Then there’s email that actually lets you set up rules for handling and ignores them. Yes, I’m looking at you, Outlook. Frustrates me to no end.
finally i’m in an time where i don’t feel ashamed for the design choices based on cocain abuse. it’s not dead, it finally come to a point it should’ve been 200 years ago!
I dunno, I think that the mobile phones of the 1820s had some serious design deficiencies.
They were wireless! (but not stringless or tin can-less)
Design does not exist for designs sake. We’d just call that art.
The design of a smart phone has been distilled down to its bare essentials, while still being ergonomic, easily carried and extremely functional.
Successful design could be the disappearance of anything unnecessary while still achieving usability goals. Successful design could be a bright pink phone that weighs 50lbs. Doubt it’ll be popular however.
TLDR: Some thoughts of mine about why the Internet as a public knowledge base is dying.
We probably mean different things in most points but still
A) Ergonomic? They are big slabs of glass with no border to hold it & no usability without looking at the screen (practically no usable buttons).
B) Easily carried?! Most are such large slabs of glass it’s pretty much impossible to comfortably carry them in any trouser pocket.
C) extremely functional…. Okay, stop trying to kill me by laughing my ass off.
Today’s SPhones are super computers compared to “old” actual computers but thanks to their complete lack of good functional and efficient I/O interfaces they (and their users) are one reason for the death of “the Internet”.
C1) How many comments on any platform reference/mention something without actually linking to what they reference? Why? Well, I’m pretty sure one reason is that SPhones are terrible (in their usability) at multitasking, clipboarding ;-) and many other “processes” easily done on anything with at least a proper keyboard (eg. Alt+Tab, Ctrl+C/X/V, Win+”notepad”+Enter)
C2) Copying the content of an error message? Nope, forget it – today’s SPhoners rather take a PHOTO of raw digital text data (eg. an error displayed in a (cmd)shell) instead of just copying the text or at least typing it down, thus making the actual error unsearchable.
C3) Not so sure about this’s connection to “functionality of SPhones” but even today’s help requests on non-forums like Reddit often boil down to this example: “My game crashes and I have mods but I’m not gonna tell you which ones & if I did it would be a screenshot of the FGW$%GW$%H& ModManager instead of any searchable data”
Which is equivalent to telling your doctor you have a stomach ache without telling them anything about your diet etc.
I think I could listen to this sermon on proper design decisions for a while longer, so do please carry on…
IMO a modern traditional smartphone is actually just about the worst design it could possible be, with perhaps a small exception here and there for the ones that are more than a slab with bugger all buttons – for instance the Samsung’s with the Pen interface have some great functionality.
The only thing the standard slab is ‘good’ at is being so painfully generic they are equally terrible/good at all things the impressive silicon inside is capable of – they make awful gaming devices compared to something with a even as primitive controls as a D pad and a few well placed physical buttons, are terrible and usually slower at text input compared to even the number pad multiple button presses per letter or wonky predictive text phones of the 90’s, terrible media players as you just can’t control them easily or without actively looking (other than the greater quality of screen, storage and processing to allow for high quality audio and video where the old portables with great ergonomic controls you can use blindfolded probably 480p video if they did video at all), and they even make worse telephones than many of the older mobiles too – harder to answer than a flip phone, more likely to end up with spurious input on the screen from finger or ear messing with your call before it even begins as with no bezel the touch inputs while your Grandparent tries to bring it to their head can do wild things, and generally now rather too large and slab like to actually put the microphone and earpiece in the right ballpark as well, so much more reliant of signal processing…
Also see the naming. A “Galaxy S(x) Ultra” is actually a Note, it was rebranded. Also see ThinkPad L and E which look from the outside very similar to the actual ThinkPad, the T class. Trying to trade on the quality of the carbon and magnesium reinforced easy to maintain models, while inside they are built like a ‘disposible’ box store spec HP Chromebook.
Cell phones peaked around 8-10 years ago with the S8 or S9 class, the size was decent, the cameras amazing, only problem being the ‘curved edge’ display meant it was difficult to use. Glass screen protectors sold out almost immediately and nobody wanted to sell protectors, probably because they were too expensive to make. Now the “base” model doesn’t get good cameras, and the next model up is firmly in ‘Phablet’ territory.
Instead if getting 5-6mm wider screens we got 10-20mm taller screens. I have yet to find a benefit, except possibly being able to see some of your content around the simultaneously playing ads all over the apps and internet.
I love the top illustration.
Someone once posted an image of about 20 different models of SUV. All damn near indistinguishable.
I would love to be able to purchase a product that has design money spent on functionality…
For example. Look how many parts on a typical automobile do not serve any functional purpose. A lot of styling, which I guess is intended to sell a car, but it all has to be designed, tooled, and ultimately paid for by the customer.
A virtual interface doesn’t ensure any functionality either. My iphone doesn’t have volume controls for it’s sounds that you can adjust when they are not making sounds, so I get ear splitting message tones when I’m connected to Carplay because the tiny phone speaker needs to be turned up. A fairly simple problem to solve in software, but again, it costs money and time to do the engineering work (but it’s a nice looking phone).
Exactly.
The author is partially or even completely right! But the system logic of gadget operation is changing and industrial design requires a different approach.
This is the reason slapping LEDs inside your gaming tower is so lame. Your gaming tower (I don’t game, so maybe I’m missing something) is what it does, not the light pollution it incidentally generates.
Please can I have a phone with buttons on the top rather than the side, so I don’t press them by accident. Please can I have a phone that is not slippery like a bar of soap (or is that the idea – you drop it and have to buy a new one). And please can I have a laptop keyboard that does not have half-height arrow keys so my fat fingers can use them without pressing anything else.
Design and aesthetics are too different things. One is more-or-less related to function, the other – related to art. In some (rather rare) examples the Venn diagram of the two intersect somewhat, however, the degree of the intersect varies from unit to unit, and at some point the economies of scale (ie, what’s the cheapest to mass produce and mass sell) simply drowns them both. Cell phone and sedan cars (or SUVs) are the two prime examples, but not the only ones, residential housing (in the US), that closely follows its even uglier twin, commercial properties.
I am a big fan of the 1980s electronics design, which grew out of the somewhat turbulent 1970s electronics designs, that were busy shaking off the whackly 1960s designs (googie architecture anyone?), that were mostly continuation/branches of the 1950s designs. However, starting with the 1990s, the recycling of the 1980s designs mostly run out of the material by the early 2000 and largely continued its downward spell ever since. The form that follows the function today is about as different as it was in the 1990s, not really; on a contrary, the last 30 years were mostly spent regurgitating the same things that were learned in the 1980s and late 1970s. GUI-bui, the SAME elements had been around for almost ever and ever, pushbuttons, dials, knobs, etc, with the only noticeable invention since then being the scrollbar (that replaced “paging”). I am talking about the concepts, not the actual implementations that vary and mimic each other (for example, the scrollbar morphed into the computer mouse scrollwheel that also doubles as a middle click).
As far as the cell phones go, they are not built for humans any more – no buttons or dials or knobs, and rather vague idea that humans have more than one finger on each hand, and more than one hand with one finger. Human hands are also shaped as squares, with stubby fingers protruding on both sides (or one side), all being the same length, spaced equally. As far as the rest of humans go, they don’t seem to have eyes or legs, are stationary creatures and sport one unblinking eye that wanders around the cell phone screen. Same “designers” seem to be moonshining designing average sedan car – the backseats are for the short stubby humans with their legs cut just below their knees (thankfully, not ALL sedans; surprisingly, compact Nissan Versa’s back seats can accommodate statistically average US adult). As far as I can tell it is still “design”, just not for the humans per se, but for the whimsical “users” who are not aware of aesthetics.
I decided on living in the past loooong ago. I use stuff that is older than me as daily drivers (my radio cassette alarm clock from 1977 for example). Sure, not everything was better back then, but I decide what parts of the past I live in.
You can kinda see the UIs plunge from Windows 7* to Windows 8 – we went from “UI that looks so awesome you need a GPU for it” to “This would easily render on a machine that ran Windows 1” – and this seems to be the new normal now. As are cars that come in silver, black, white and now an “exciting new” shade of dark gray that was last “popular” in the 1950s. Colorful cars appear to be merely tolerated, but frowned upon (ok I’m making this up). Or everything needing a SPhone app. That also tracks your behavior, sells your data and instantly stops working if the manufacturing company goes bankrupt, gets gobbled up or just feels like it.
*) I know there were Linux GUIs that looked a lot like what Vista, but years before Vista hit the market. Since I’m always running on e-waste, I’m running Gnome. Simple, easy on the resources, makes a 15 year old notebook still be snappy.
Now if you excuse me, I have to fix my VCR so I can tape that movie that’s on TV later… now get off my lawn!
The bottom line is that artistic people often get a “feeling” associated with designs and colors that are interesting. To us the current landscape is boring as hell.
Most of users didn
t like bezels or speakers. The TV is a display. I only miss the LEDs and usable keyboards from laptops, because these were useful.“The removal of visually pleasing and physically practical elements also means a dull, stimulation-free experience.”
Most of users are not enjoying electrical equipment, only using it. They don’t think about the design. They don’t want the speaker as the part of the living room, but it is a necessary something which is needed but better invisible. Companies know this :(
The slate is the “Winning Design” of the smart phone. So many thing where tried, but in the end they did not win in the Market. Color and customization where tried, users liked it. But at the end of the day they bought the black phone anyway. Flips and Keyboards where offered, but at the end of the day users always wanted the bigger screen.
Users like choice, but don’t exercise them.