I don't like the new UI design

[nezumi]

Just to add my voice to the choir - I really dislike new export panel. It was so much easier to click on big icon on the top to choose format... Plus it was really pleasant to see all that colorful icons. Instead of that now we have... small, soul-less, grey drop down list. Are we Adobe here or what?

And preview widow. PLEASE make it optional. Pretty please!

Other other that - so far so good for me.

[Didge]

Agree that - the export dialog is a real step backwards.

[Lemon Tree]

I have to disagree about the export dialogue. Of the two (and I did put them side-by-side to compare them) I prefer the V2 one for TIFF export. The advanced settings are available a mouse scroll away instead of being hidden behind a "More" button as in V1. When you did click "More" – which is Windowsy, it should have been "Advanced" on macOS – you got a nested pop-up, which is widely considered bad UI design. On recent versions of macOS that pop-up was tall and skinny, making it harder to read.

The scrolling dialogue boxes aren’t very Mac-like, but they seem to be pervasive in V2 (e.g. in Preferences) and I can understand that a small company like Serif wants to prepare one set of training material for both Mac and Windows users.

[Didge]

I have to disagree with you there ...

1. The Advanced settings are hidden behind a Drop-Down, and you have to scrooool down or expand the window to see them. Twice as much as clicking a 'More' button.

2. The v1 'More' button gives you a view almost identical to the v2 Advanced window.

3. The v2 Advanced button also has a hidden 'More' button in the guise of 3 little bars - would be easy to miss.
That lets you manage Presets - which is much more easily done in v1 using the prominent 'Presets' button, than the incognito bars in V2.
So you have a 'More' button nested inside an 'Advanced' button in v2, which IMHO is bad design.

4. I'm not certain what you mean by the 'nested pop-up' in the 'More' button ?

5. Yes - the 'More' popup is tall and skinny - also not moveable - which IMHO should have been fixed.

6. The scrolling dialog boxes are consistent with the Ventura design paradigm - which is based on iOS.
Personally, I don't like them - which is why I made the comment about v2 not honouring the MacOS Accessibility settings.
But easy enough to get used to, they dont form a big part of day-to-day workflow.

7. The problem with 'one-size-fits-all' approach is that no-one gets an ideal fit - everything ends up as a compromise.

Without wanting to offend Windows users, its a fact that Mac found widespread adoption in the design/ graphics market because of its intuitive GUI.

What we find with many cross-platform solutions is that the excellent features of one platform are removed because they are not available on the other platform. The inevitable result is that everything outstanding is removed in favour of maintaining the 'ordinary' - which is what has happened here.

Regrettably, v2 fails to leverage the best of MacOS or Windows - it has been dumbed down to become MacDoze.

 

 

 

[deeds]

2 hours ago, Gary.JONES said:

Regrettably, v2 fails to leverage the best of MacOS or Windows - it has been dumbed down to become MacDoze.

Deserving of its own sloganeering:

 

 

[Didge]

8 minutes ago, deeds said:

Deserving of its own sloganeering:

 

 

Very good

[Lemon Tree]

3 hours ago, Gary.JONES said:

3. The v2 Advanced button also has a hidden 'More' button in the guise of 3 little bars - would be easy to miss.
That lets you manage Presets - which is much more easily done in v1 using the prominent 'Presets' button, than the incognito bars in V2.
So you have a 'More' button nested inside an 'Advanced' button in v2, which IMHO is bad design.

4. I'm not certain what you mean by the 'nested pop-up' in the 'More' button ?

6. The scrolling dialog boxes are consistent with the Ventura design paradigm - which is based on iOS.

7. The problem with 'one-size-fits-all' approach is that no-one gets an ideal fit - everything ends up as a compromise.

...What we find with many cross-platform solutions is that the excellent features of one platform are removed because they are not available on the other platform. The inevitable result is that everything outstanding is removed in favour of maintaining the 'ordinary' - which is what has happened here.

3. The "3 little bars" are called a "hamburger menu". The macOS equivalent is three dots, but is supposed to be used sparingly; Apple themselves have been criticised for overusing them in some of the bundled apps. I do agree that a hamburger/three dots menu is inappropriate here, because to what do the presets apply? Just the advanced options? I don't think so.

4. "Nested" just means dialogue boxes on top of dialogue boxes which have to be dismissed in reverse order.

6. I thought so too based on the screenshots and posted to that effect here a few days ago. But they behave differently. In Ventura's Settings, scrolling to the end of one section doesn't move the cursor in the categories column at the left.

7. We need to be realistic here. The video tutorials from Serif are outstanding, and partly because of them I am more expert now in Photo than I was in Photoshop. If having two different interfaces for Mac and Windows means half the quantity of those videos, I'd prefer that Serif carry on as they are. They haven't used any UI which isn't familiar to everyone from web apps, and unlike Adobe the controls are native macOS and so far the keyboard/mouse focus behaviour appears correct to me.

[joe_l]

I like the new design, but I am getting "mad" about the same mistakes Serif made in V1. I have to ask myself whether the differences between Light UI and Dark UI were not tested properly. E.g. in V1 some icons were barely readable in the Stroke panel with the Light UI and the icons for cell strokes were clearly readable in the Table panel. In V2 it is exact the opposite. So I am "forced" to use the Dark UI (which I dislike) in Publisher or memorize which icon means what in Light UI. On the other hand this would be good brain training for elderly people like me.

[Didge]

Yes - poor display contrast and icon design are recurring themes as far as v2 is concerned.

[Thomas Johnston]

On 11/12/2022 at 8:21 AM, brunoczech said:

I know I'm in minority but I am used to light UI - and in V2 this is totally wrong. First of all there is no Alpha settings for UI as in V1. And all the buttons - especially in the toolbars - seems like they are already in a clicked state as opposed to V1. See the attached screenshots.

Came here to say this!

While almost everyone else is in love with Dark Mode Everything, I can't look at it for very long before I get eye strain. I wish it were otherwise because dark mode does look cool.

I find the V2 UI in light mode very difficult to work with and @brunoczech's screenshots comparing the versions illustrates this perfectly.

But as I've read elsewhere it's still early days for V2. Affinity have done an incredible job bringing these apps to all the platforms, and things can only better from here. I have every confidence that V2.1 will address a lot of the issues we're talking about in these forums.

[Jose Alvarez]

The new V2 UI is more likely in some aspects (like monochromatic icons, I like it) but in others are a lot worse. For example, that icons to select type of paragraph alignment or table cell strokes. I upload 2 examples,

V1 version:

V2 version:

In V2 version is almost indistingible what are you selecting. I must move back and front my laptop screen and my head, like a little owl! 

In both versions, anyway, when you select a field to fill with a value, the blue remark around the field box is so small that is dificult to see. It must to be very evident what field are you selecting.

I encourage our Affinity friends to fix that little things that do the Affinity Experience a bit (or very) dissapointing.

[loukash]

Meanwhile, I'm trying hard to get used to the dark UI in v2, because the light UI is really too flawed. 

[ATP]

The MacOS and Windows versions seem to differ in contrast throughout the UI with the MacOS version having more contrast. I think Serif should consider making the Windows version similar to the MacOS version as buttons and such stand out more from the background. I only tested with the dark UI.

[loukash]

On 11/18/2022 at 6:42 PM, loukash said:

Meanwhile, I'm trying hard to get used to the dark UI in v2, because the light UI is really too flawed. 

Aaaand… meanwhile, I'm back at getting used to the flawed Light UI because … duh 

[Brian_J]

3 hours ago, ATP said:

The MacOS and Windows versions seem to differ in contrast throughout the UI with the MacOS version having more contrast. I think Serif should consider making the Windows version similar to the MacOS version as buttons and such stand out more from the background. I only tested with the dark UI.

I'm a Windows user and after watching some of the Serif videos (recorded on a Mac) about v2 features, I was thinking the contrast on Mac looked better than on Windows. One issue I'm having is, when dragging a layer to a different location in the Layers Panel, it's difficult for me to see where I'm moving the layer to (mask, child, or above/below another layer). There's not enough contrast between the semi-transparent blue that covers the layer being moved and the blue vertical/horizontal lines that indicate where the layer is being moved to.

[Zlatko]

The main issue is the contrast between the colors. Here is a comparison between Illustrator default and designer 2 default.

 

The Illustrator one has a larger difference between the grey's and there's also a dark outline around the elements to further distinguish them. Whereas in AD2 there is nothing of the sort and the colors are practically indistinguishable from one another, with no stroke aroudn them except from the darker grey itself.

I do prefer the old style with shadows/highlights but I don't care if it's removed. The contrast however has to be fixed as it is very difficult to work.

[Didge]

I agree ...

The 'new' style for buttons and controls is a real step backwards - contrast is too low, and many buttons have no built-in context, so its impossible to tell whether they are ON or OFF.

V1 was much better.

[Zlatko]

Did a bit more digging, and this for reference I'm using BenQ Designer Monitor so it's a relatively well calibrated model that isn't professional but well above most non-calibrated models.

As you can see by the image, in V1 I have provided the Lightness values (The L from HLS system) and the LG (gap between both colours) and you can clearly see, that not only was the V1 UI consistently less dark the gap between the colors was also consistently higher.

To the extent that the highest brightness of V2 (LG of 7) is even lower than the lowest gamma of V2 (LG of 9). This means that the colors in V2 are closer to each other. This contributes to the significant detriment of legibility. I can't really imagine what would make them allow setting the UI to near complete black, and having the element colours nearly identical, but the opposite isn't true, making them even more distinct.

 

99% of visibility issues would be solved by simply increasing the gap between light grey and dark grey.

[Sonny Sonny]

Yes, I agree. Honestly I like V1 UI more than V2, especially "Layers" panel. Working with V2 Layer panel really a challenge when I have much layers/groups.

[oscarlosan]

On 10/11/2022 at 9:12, krbo said:

Había hermosas marcas de verificación en un panel Capas, puedo ver desde una Luna qué capa está activa y cuál no.
Ahora se reemplazan con horribles puntos grises oscuros y grises no tan oscuros en los que pierdo el tiempo haciendo clic para detectar qué está activo. lo que no está activo.

(no puedo dar una muestra en este momento ya que se canceló el soporte de Win7)

Interfaz de usuario horrible

previamente:

you're right. Looking at the layers panel makes me dizzy. The type of layer is information that is not necessary. And that point is not understood what it is. On the other panel you didn't have to think. This new one saturates my brain. 

I want to enjoy, not think. Affinity don't be Adobita. UI V1 is better, it frees up memory to think about our projects, and not waste time on the program.

[walt.farrell]

25 minutes ago, oscarlosan said:

The type of layer is information that is not necessary. 

It can be very important. Some examples: 

Pixel layers behave differently from Image layers, or Raw layers.

Shapes converted to Curves behave differently than if they weren't converted. 

And more. 

But you can turn off those indicators if you really want to avoid having the information displayed.

[Didge]

Wholeheartedly agree ... the new UI is a step backwards vs v1 - which I still prefer.

But we've had ZERO feedback from Affinity on this thread ... or any of the other threads I've started/joined on this topic ...

James ???

@James Ritson

 

 

[Didge]

Seems this thread is heating up again - probably because none of the issues raised in it seem to have been addressed in the recent AP update.

The least Affinity could do is show whether the thread has been read by someone at Affinity who understands good UI design.

This update is a terrible step backwards - I just hate using V2.

And its not just me - there are hundreds of posts in these threads where users agree that v2 is a horrible mess.

 

[Tia Lapis]

I DO think Serif read it ages ago. I'm not really sure what people are trying to reach here.

[Didge]

You might be right - my point is that there is no way to know for sure.