We’re headed towards more roundness to invite a friendlier brand tone, and to make Mastodon feel more native within modern browsers (most of which have adopted a rounded aesthetic).
*moan* I get that things have to keep up with the zeitgeist, but I really wish the zeitgeist wasn't shunning rectangular borders.
The rest looks nice, though I feel like the right side of the screen is yawning emptily and the center column feels a little disjointed from the rest of the page due to its different background color. I'm glad they are willing to make big changes though, as a whole the redesign does feel a lot more "casual" (in a good way) and welcoming.
the pastels definitely feel softer, but yeah not a fan of the rounded corners. feels overdone. personally i think rounded corners help conceal poorer UX, which may be the case here (solid rectangle looks bad, rounded solid rectangle is "contemporary design")
I want to believe someone wanted to try Mastodon, and they were put off by the pointy corners
You might be surprised. First impressions of UIs have a huge impact on the amount of time people will spend trying something. If their initial impression is 'this looks and feels like a weird geek project where people like me aren't welcome' then they won't use it long enough to see if that's true, they'll spend two minutes and then say 'I tried Mastodon, it was a weird geeky thing' to everyone who asks.
Once people are active in the Fediverse, they can tailor the UI however they want, but until then having something that's familiar eliminates big barriers to entry.
In the early days of OS X, Apple found that salesdroids showing some of the flashy animation effects led to a measurable increase in sales. Most of these were motivated by real usability reasons (e.g. the 'genie' effect gave you an obvious visual cue where a minimised window was), but people playing with a system for two minutes notice the flashy bits, not the mundane usability.
One feature that would improve Mastodon for me is a chronological feed that starts from the last post I read, rather than the standard reverse chronological feed. It's confusing to read a bunch of posts in reverse.
Deleting the window chrome makes it feel like the application is only supposed to be used once it's already open and positioned correctly and that moving it around or minimizing it or tabbing out to other programs was forgotten, like it feels like the applications is forgetting that people, like, use their computers, and not just the application.
There are some program types where this is expected these days like game launchers, but for the overwhelming majority of programs it is counterproductive. At least google chrome and other browsers have the decency to emulate the native window chrome. Discord has emulated native window chrome and it's one of the glitchiest parts of the interface; the only reason I tolerate it is that discord has a generally low-empty-space design and used the combined emulated chrome to save vertical space for chats. In these Mastodon images I do not even see emulated native window chrome.
Please tell me I'm wrong and they have window chrome.
Everything having a border radius of 40px also doesn't look good either. I know it's "modern" but I really don't think it's going to last.
I might be misunderstanding your post here, and if so I apologize in advance, but this isn't an application. It's a web UI. The window chrome is your browser.
The second image has the text "The desktop 5.0 web interface ..." -- I'm interpreting that as "the desktop application that is a web interface". Is it instead the web interface that you get when visiting the website on desktop?
Yea, desktop web UI vs the mobile web UI. As far as I'm aware (and don't hold me to this), there's no official Mastodon desktop application. There's a mobile app, but nothing official on the desktop.
Thanks for clearing that up for me! I rescind most of my criticism. I have a few other things I'd complain about the screenshots but they wouldn't be productive.
To me it looks like they finally said "just make it look like Twitter" then someone else decided to sprinkle a little bit of Microsoft Teams in the recipe. I'll still continue to use it and hang out with the SDF crew but only time will tell if it's a real improvement to the platform.
I don't understand why the new mastodon UI is so cramped despite having so much space it could be using. There's a metric shit-ton of whitespace everywhere, looks like a website with ads run through an adblocker, there's so much weird space I thought for a bit something must have gone wrong loading the CSS. And all the information and buttons is crammed into a tiny slice in the middle. Like there's too much space and not enough space at the same time.
Also putting buttons to the lower left is very awkward. I don't know if it's a "don't you guys have phones" moment or what. It doesn't seem like 3 minutes have been spent considering someone might use this on a PC.
nemin | a day ago
*moan* I get that things have to keep up with the zeitgeist, but I really wish the zeitgeist wasn't shunning rectangular borders.
The rest looks nice, though I feel like the right side of the screen is yawning emptily and the center column feels a little disjointed from the rest of the page due to its different background color. I'm glad they are willing to make big changes though, as a whole the redesign does feel a lot more "casual" (in a good way) and welcoming.
pgn | a day ago
the pastels definitely feel softer, but yeah not a fan of the rounded corners. feels overdone. personally i think rounded corners help conceal poorer UX, which may be the case here (solid rectangle looks bad, rounded solid rectangle is "contemporary design")
sph | 15 hours ago
I want to believe someone wanted to try Mastodon, and they were put off by the pointy corners. So unfriendly!
This is obvious corporate newspeak by artists that have grown their career at FAANGs.
david_chisnall | 9 hours ago
You might be surprised. First impressions of UIs have a huge impact on the amount of time people will spend trying something. If their initial impression is 'this looks and feels like a weird geek project where people like me aren't welcome' then they won't use it long enough to see if that's true, they'll spend two minutes and then say 'I tried Mastodon, it was a weird geeky thing' to everyone who asks.
Once people are active in the Fediverse, they can tailor the UI however they want, but until then having something that's familiar eliminates big barriers to entry.
In the early days of OS X, Apple found that salesdroids showing some of the flashy animation effects led to a measurable increase in sales. Most of these were motivated by real usability reasons (e.g. the 'genie' effect gave you an obvious visual cue where a minimised window was), but people playing with a system for two minutes notice the flashy bits, not the mundane usability.
leela | 19 hours ago
I look forward to writing custom CSS to try to reduce the rounded everything and the faded top bleed.
arialdo | 16 hours ago
Please, share it when you've done it. That would be much appreciated.
cesarandreu | 11 hours ago
One feature that would improve Mastodon for me is a chronological feed that starts from the last post I read, rather than the standard reverse chronological feed. It's confusing to read a bunch of posts in reverse.
wareya | 22 hours ago
Deleting the window chrome makes it feel like the application is only supposed to be used once it's already open and positioned correctly and that moving it around or minimizing it or tabbing out to other programs was forgotten, like it feels like the applications is forgetting that people, like, use their computers, and not just the application.
There are some program types where this is expected these days like game launchers, but for the overwhelming majority of programs it is counterproductive. At least google chrome and other browsers have the decency to emulate the native window chrome. Discord has emulated native window chrome and it's one of the glitchiest parts of the interface; the only reason I tolerate it is that discord has a generally low-empty-space design and used the combined emulated chrome to save vertical space for chats. In these Mastodon images I do not even see emulated native window chrome.
Please tell me I'm wrong and they have window chrome.
Everything having a border radius of 40px also doesn't look good either. I know it's "modern" but I really don't think it's going to last.
MikeStone | 22 hours ago
I might be misunderstanding your post here, and if so I apologize in advance, but this isn't an application. It's a web UI. The window chrome is your browser.
wareya | 22 hours ago
The second image has the text "The desktop 5.0 web interface ..." -- I'm interpreting that as "the desktop application that is a web interface". Is it instead the web interface that you get when visiting the website on desktop?
MikeStone | 22 hours ago
Yea, desktop web UI vs the mobile web UI. As far as I'm aware (and don't hold me to this), there's no official Mastodon desktop application. There's a mobile app, but nothing official on the desktop.
wareya | 21 hours ago
Thanks for clearing that up for me! I rescind most of my criticism. I have a few other things I'd complain about the screenshots but they wouldn't be productive.
stunder | 7 hours ago
To me it looks like they finally said "just make it look like Twitter" then someone else decided to sprinkle a little bit of Microsoft Teams in the recipe. I'll still continue to use it and hang out with the SDF crew but only time will tell if it's a real improvement to the platform.
marginalia | 6 hours ago
I don't understand why the new mastodon UI is so cramped despite having so much space it could be using. There's a metric shit-ton of whitespace everywhere, looks like a website with ads run through an adblocker, there's so much weird space I thought for a bit something must have gone wrong loading the CSS. And all the information and buttons is crammed into a tiny slice in the middle. Like there's too much space and not enough space at the same time.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/117/479/224/347/408/054/original/1eda563bfca6f33f.png
Also putting buttons to the lower left is very awkward. I don't know if it's a "don't you guys have phones" moment or what. It doesn't seem like 3 minutes have been spent considering someone might use this on a PC.