Why Layout Evolution Matters in UI Design
Introduction
While researching old operating systems I decided to try an experiment and re-created old UIs with modern components. Here we have File Viewer from NeXTSTEP operating system (left screenshot).
Old layout by modern UI components
Here we can quickly notice few problems with old layout :
It’s unclear what first row do. I still can’t say for sure, seems like a favorites
Second row uses for navigation, but selection of the Preview.app is duplicating selection inside of the folder
Navigation uses horizontal scroll, but folder content uses vertical
Vertically almost half of the windows is taken by favs and navigation rows
After rebuilding it with modern components (right screenshot), we still have all these problems. Yes, the app icons look interesting, but the whole window is not really usable. It’s fair to say that this approach does nothing to improve the UI.
Modern layout by old UI components
Now I have recreated the modern layout using the old UI components for comparison (right screenshot below). Now it’s clear that this approach works better because we can clearly see where users are currently, where favourites are, a direction for sidebar and content. And the overall use of window space is now better, especially when we need that window into horizontal space of a screen itself.
