There's still room to make a real difference with people who use a desktop from day to day. We're honestly all just waiting for someone to come out with a drastically more efficient UI paradigm. It's fundamentally a skeuomorphic UI evolved to lose the skin and to hide most of the controls. Developer laziness, perhaps? I call this Digital Brutalism, it's at once "function over form" but at the same time missing a great deal of the "function" that the previous era had. Skeuomorphism was rejected in favour of what some call "flat" or "material" design, first in the Microsoft Metro form emulating highway signs, and then in the Google form emulating. What skeuomorphism added in terms of enjoyment was lost in terms of losing all of the expected conventions of normal desktop applications: drag-n-drop, multiple select, keyboard shortcut consistency, etc. There was a reaction to this modernism, and it came first in the form of Late 2000s Skeuomorphist UI as on iOS and in many creative applications on desktops preceding it: the 90s style being seen as too corporate, too 'suit', we ended up with skinnable apps, and apps that mimic the real world (I'm thinking of Propellerhead Reason here as the king of these). I'd call that late 90s style Modern Desktopist, where the metaphor of being a 'desk' we may have seen in some 80s Classical Desktopist has been left behind and replaced with functional, well-designed UI widgets building on years of refinement. There's no shortage of people (myself included) that will still defend it as being a pinnacle of sorts, though I'd point at NeXT as being the real high water mark. If Windows 2000 wasn't "aesthetic" then we wouldn't have Vaporwave, after all look how that late-90s look is glorified now. Aesthetics are always going to be critical to the consumer experience of technology the problem is that there are difference schools of aesthetics, and presently the high-status UX school is a minimalist one that values showing as little information as possible in order to look 'easy to understand' in screenshots and at-a-glance tours. We've gotten so worse, it is appalling and we should all be ashamed. If it wasn't for Elliot Noyes, no one would ever think of IBM in the same way. We need to revive some people like Paul Rand and Josef Muller-Brockmann, may be get Stankowski and a few others to do marketing. Developers love Stripe design, but it is overrated - full of animations, bright colors, sexy transitions and for some reason they love diagonal lines. Just look at and see how loud it all is. Furthermore, needs overhaul on multiple fronts since great design doesn't sell apparently according to most rebuttals. It requires complete scrub of how we think about building excellent products with deep understanding of humans (not users). This is just the symptom of a larger, deeper and more insiduous problem - design education, short-term corporate targets, discipline, anti-functionalism, celebration of aesthetics, marketing overreach, lack of rigorous criticism and unwilling to convince users.
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