Personally, I find that most modern UIs that explicitly do not conform to an OS’s opinionated UI design style (for example: the majority of web stack UIs[1]), are often better in almost every way vs apps that do conform to OS style!
When I’m using an advanced UI to do some specialized task, I generally appreciate when the UI patterns I learn on one OS transfer seamlessly to any other device and OS I may use to do the same task.
But I especially appreciate that apps can choose the UI style and design to suit the task at hand, rather than some notion of conforming to OS style patterns that may or may not work in its favor. For example, I prefer that Visual Studio Code looks the same on all platforms, because I find its UI to be superior to the default style of any OS!
What do you think about these thoughts? Am I alone in preferring custom UIs per app, with consistent app experience across devices?
[1] For the sake of this argument, I’m not counting differences in runtime performance and efficiency, since that’s a whole other topic, and one theoretically orthogonal to the UI design.
1. The reason for platform UI conventions is so users can transfer knowledge between apps. Some specialized apps may want to establish their own conventions, because they are aimed at experts who will be investing a lot of time in the app. Most apps aren't in that category.
2. HTML and JS make sucky UIs regardless of how much "work pools", because the underlying APIs are limited and incomplete. For example, scrolling: there is no native support for large tables in HTML, so apps either do some janky faulting in like infinite scroll, or reimplement scrolling entirely. Cut/copy/paste/undo is another example, along with keyboard navigation in general.
Custom UIs by themselves are not the culprit. Apple itself is "guilty" of that, using special controls and styles for their own apps (including even the new Reminders in Catalina.)
But if an app on macOS puts a close button in the upper-right corner of a window or panel (like Windows does) instead of the upper-left, for example, or when an iOS app uses the Android sharing icon, I feel annoyed.
A worse and more practical example is when an app is missing some of the global system features I described in my previous comment, like common text field options (spelling, transformations, dictionary lookup etc.) missing from an Electron-based chat app and so on.
I can understand that some might want the same experience across apps. That said, I tend to agree. I mostly favor applications that are cross platform and similar across platforms. There are times the Mac version, for example, uses mac idioms and I find it painful to use.
Most cross platform applications feel alien somewhere, and I use Windows, Mac and Linux enough that I'd rather a given app be more consistent to the application. Yeah, make the toolbar use the global one if there is one, use the menu conventions, etc... but beyond that, I'd rather the app be pretty consistent to itself over the OS.
As an example, most archive manager applications, and a lot of file transfer/storage applications are really painful to use on macos vs windows or linux where they just feel better and more usable.
When I’m using an advanced UI to do some specialized task, I generally appreciate when the UI patterns I learn on one OS transfer seamlessly to any other device and OS I may use to do the same task.
But I especially appreciate that apps can choose the UI style and design to suit the task at hand, rather than some notion of conforming to OS style patterns that may or may not work in its favor. For example, I prefer that Visual Studio Code looks the same on all platforms, because I find its UI to be superior to the default style of any OS!
What do you think about these thoughts? Am I alone in preferring custom UIs per app, with consistent app experience across devices?
[1] For the sake of this argument, I’m not counting differences in runtime performance and efficiency, since that’s a whole other topic, and one theoretically orthogonal to the UI design.