Yes, it’s wonderful having to figure out 50 different UIs designed by 50 different artists with 50 different ideas of what a drop-down should look like and how it should work.
The mental overhead from having slightly different drop shadows and button sizes is minimal, and I think pretty overblown by people who prefer identical UIs for everything regardless of form factor (which is of course a valid take).
But someone could just as easily respond to today's UIs with "Yes, it's wonderful that every single app looks identical, as if it was all designed by one pretty boring artist with no creativity whatsoever" and that would also be a perfectly valid take.
Predictability is a feature. That does include button sizes. To me that's where the asymmetry is. The "boring artist with no creativity" complaint is aesthetic, whereas predictability is a functional concern.
It’s more like I have to actually think about where the program options are. Or that on firefox nowadays I have to snipe a tiny small spot on the title bar to move the window, instead of clicking some button that doesn’t look like one.
When I first used MacOS I was surprised about tute consistency to access the settings of every program, even third party, with the same shortcut cmd+,
Do you have a solution in mind? While a platform (OS) can provide a UI toolkit and provide a HIG, one cannot stop language and programming tools vendors or programmers from doing whatever they like.
I'm starting to think that it would take replacing basically everything that's happened on Web frontend development since XMLHttpRequest with an alternative system that's still standards-based, platform-agnostic and Web-centric, but designed from the ground up as a GUI toolkit instead of a markup language for hypermedia formatting.
Because with the current status quo, the platform that dominates everyone's mindshare is HTML/JavaScript/CSS. Which has a really rudimentary concept of UI controls, and human interface guidelines that spend 90% of their effort on begging people to manually implement usability features that we used to get for free with native GUI toolkits. And I think that we might need to get away from that mess before it's possible for anyone to have any energy left over for worrying about HCI on the level that we used to in the late '90s and early '00s.
But realistically, you’re never going to stop a motivated app designer who is dead set on making their app an unique snowflake art project rather than a tool that users need to use.
There are also some classes of apps where the platform UI kit is insufficient. Immediate examples that come to mind are kiosk software, trading software, games, etc.
