I'm glad the pendulum is swinging back with this one. With UI paradigms, we seem to have this tendency to throw out the baby with the bathwater, or be so intrigued with the possible new benefits we can get (buttons can change according to context!) that we forget what current benefits we would give up to get them (learnability and muscle-memory because the button always does the same thing, being able to feel your way to a button without looking at it)
It reminds me of what happened with the flat UI/anti-skeuomorphism wave a bit over a decade ago. It seemed like someone got so incensed by the faux leather in the iPhone's Find My Friends app (supposedly made to look like it had the same stitching as the leather upholstery in Steve Jobs' private jet) that they went on a crusade against anything "needlessly physical looking" in UI. We got the Metro design language from Microsoft as the fullest expression of it, with Apple somewhat following suit in iOS (but later walking back some things too) and later Google's Material Design walking it back a bit further (drop shadows making a big comeback).
But for a while there, it was genuinely hard to tell which bit of text was a label and which was a button, because it was all just bits of black or monocolor text floating on a flat white background. It's like whoever came up with the flat UI fad didn't realize how much hierarchy and structure was being conveyed by the lines, shadows and gradients that had suddenly gone out of vogue. All of a sudden we needed a ton of whitespace between elements to understand which worked together and which were unrelated. Which is ironic, because the whole thing started as a crusade against designers putting their own desire for artistic expression above their users' needs by wasting UI space on showing off their artistic skill with useless ornaments, but it led to designers putting their own philosophical purity above their users' needs, by wasting UI space on unnecessary whitespace and forcing low information density on everyone.
I don't think that while ever ended! Have you seen Jetbrains' IDEs "new UI" (now the only UI except for a soon to be deprecated plugin)? You can't tell where a tab ends and the next one begins, it's just floating text on a solid background, with slightly more space between names. They also got rid of most labels, so it became a game of guessing what each symbol could possibly mean (another provably awful trend).
And the worst is, they're likely just copying competitors because as a sibling comment days, some people see the old accesible UI and think it looks old fashioned.
I love the new UI. Reduces a lot of visual clutter and lets me focus on the code. I don't understand the problem with telling where a tab ends and the next begins; I don't click on the borders of tabs anyway, just the text. (And there's an icon in front of the tab name.)
Plenty of UI designers just follow trends because everyone just copies the current popular things, especially when their competition starts doing it too. They don't really put a ton of thought into it or don't do it as part of a wider cohesive strategy where it makes sense for what they are building.
Really shows the power of UI designers at big organizations like Apple, Google, and Tesla.
That "flat everything" design trend of 10-15 years ago was sooooo annoying. And it was so apparent that extremely little thought about the usability of it was considered once the trend gained momentum.
I remember when Android (don't recall exactly which release) replaced their standard back, home and menu buttons with just a triangle, square and circle. It was so bizarre. I felt like a toddler playing with a "fit the blocks into the different shaped holes" toy.
"Was"? flat UI is still here and it's horrible. It drives me crazy having to guess that a featureless piece of text might be a button because its position in a window vaguely suggests it may be a button and not just a random piece of floating text. So much subtle information is just gone from modern UIs.
It's due to fashion. New tech trend comes in and companies want to use it to differentiate their products as newer so they seem more valuable. When the tech ages and becomes just another commodity the usage settles down. When blue LEDs came out every hardware company put blue LEDs everywhere but that's no longer the case as they're not fashionable. Another example is glass-look UI buttons from the first iPhones.
I got an email from Microsoft recently with that funny thin font used for headers. It reminded me that that was a trend around 2016 or so. The headers would have thinner font strokes than the body text, despite being substantially larger.
I remember that around that time (I was quite young) I was putting it in all my attempts at websites (all hideous, even at the time) and I thought it looked really cool. Funny the way trends go.
In the case of the email it was clear that it just hadn't been updated with the times.
I'm still waiting for tech to return to the decades of UI/UX design guidelines they all ditched during what I call The (Not-So) Great Flattening.
Actionable items were indicated by a button, highlight, or underline (hyperlink!). A scrollbar showed you when there was more to see. There was consistency across all apps on a platform.
It took me a year of using Apple CarPlay to realize that if you touch the album of a song on the Now Playing part of Apple Music, it will bring you to that album's tracklist. Needless to say I felt very dumb upon discovering this so late, but I didn't feel at fault. Why?
Because when I touch the artist's name - it does nothing. When I touch the song title, it does nothing. When I touch the album art, it does nothing. All despite these having the same design style as the touchable album title. There is no reason to expect that the album title would be any different.
iOS, macOS, and Windows improved a lot, but the design is still horribly lacking in usability problems that were already solved decades ago.
IIRC Material Design actually came before iOS' pivot to Immaterial Aero We Have At Home. Metro was indeed first, though, so kudos for actually mentioning it. Everyone seems to forget that the Zune was what really got things rolling.
Material came out in mid 2014. I know that for sure because I was at the Google I/O where they presented it together with Android L/5. iOS 7 was released in 2013.
It reminds me of what happened with the flat UI/anti-skeuomorphism wave a bit over a decade ago. It seemed like someone got so incensed by the faux leather in the iPhone's Find My Friends app (supposedly made to look like it had the same stitching as the leather upholstery in Steve Jobs' private jet) that they went on a crusade against anything "needlessly physical looking" in UI. We got the Metro design language from Microsoft as the fullest expression of it, with Apple somewhat following suit in iOS (but later walking back some things too) and later Google's Material Design walking it back a bit further (drop shadows making a big comeback).
But for a while there, it was genuinely hard to tell which bit of text was a label and which was a button, because it was all just bits of black or monocolor text floating on a flat white background. It's like whoever came up with the flat UI fad didn't realize how much hierarchy and structure was being conveyed by the lines, shadows and gradients that had suddenly gone out of vogue. All of a sudden we needed a ton of whitespace between elements to understand which worked together and which were unrelated. Which is ironic, because the whole thing started as a crusade against designers putting their own desire for artistic expression above their users' needs by wasting UI space on showing off their artistic skill with useless ornaments, but it led to designers putting their own philosophical purity above their users' needs, by wasting UI space on unnecessary whitespace and forcing low information density on everyone.