i really really love cohesive, homogenous design!
Today, I was forced to trade in my old work laptop for a new one. The old one was still perfectly fine, battery life flawless, no signs of use, not slow... but it was decided to get new ones. Maybe because of the ridiculous Windows 11 requirements. What a waste.
I have never used Windows 11 before, since the old laptop had Windows 10 and in private, I use EndeavourOS. I'm always enthusiastic about customizing my desktop experience, and Windows 10 barely had any settings. I always love testing how far I can push the boundaries on my work laptop before Group Policy comes along to ruin the fun1 and I also recently became rather light sensitive after my injections, so I've been turning down brightness, switching things to darkmode and so on. And my god, the darkmodes of the Office apps on Windows 10 were so severely lacking. Most of the elements were still glaring white, just the upper bars and some side bars were a variation of dark gray and light gray. It was really inconsistent between apps, and Outlook looked especially silly.
But today I tried it on Windows 11, and oh my, the options! The fact that the options are even there, and no Group Policy to hinder me! I love the specific settings for light sensitivity and sight issues. I turned on the contrast mode that has some presets and settled on one, and I am extremely happy with it. I am a Windows hater at this point, but I have to applaud this. This setting made the entire machine use the same design; not just colors, but design philosophies. The OS itself, all the Office365 apps, our intranet and our webapp-based databases now all look the same. I am impressed how well it works; I expected some things to break and look bad, some black font on dark background that was missed, but it's surprisingly good at identifying different elements. I am used to darkmode working very selectively and especially darkmode browser extensions being very patchy with what they support, so this was a huge surprise.
Now, not only the colors are consistent between all the different windows and backgrounds, but also the way buttons look, elements are separated, new lines are added into websites and databases to be visually more clear and making sure you are focusing on the correct thing. At first, I was just grateful that now I don't have to look at white emails anymore... but when I worked for a while, I just noticed how frictionless everything became. How it was easier for me to enter a sort of flow state. I recognized that now, there's less of this little period of adjustment when I switch from our databases to Outlook to some folder structure on our shared drive and back, each which would normally look very different and have different color coding2. Without this change, I wouldn't have noticed how there is just this tiny amount of energy spent each time orienting yourself in this new environment, even if it's just a second or less; with this change, while they still might have different philosophies on how content is structured on the page, but the rest is all the same.
I am blown away with how much of a difference it makes for me. I would have never thought to ask for this or to see this as a possible solution for a sort of drain or dread during long office hours, or why sometimes, even repetitive tasks cycling through software can feel overstimulating. I also feel reminded of this post on idiomatic design. Maybe idiomatic design shouldn't just be about menus and how data entry or selection is done, but also go for colors and applying a device-wide design to things. I certainly would enjoy more of this (opt-in in the settings, of course).
Reply via email
Published 20 Feb, 2025
One time, I changed icons and then one day it was reverted and not possible anymore to set custom icons because it was controlled by admin. Oh well.↩
Our important database buttons are originally a dark teal, the ones in the other are dark blue, in another the buttons are just gray; in one of them, deletion is a red button (good), in another, it's a gray bin symbol (bad).↩