Microsoft is busy rolling out new curvy and colorful new Office icons, and now it’s revealing a set of design concepts it experimented with before finalizing these new icons. Some of the concepts are radically different from what Microsoft is shipping, with design explorations for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that more closely resemble the Office for Mac icons of the past.
https://www.theverge.com/news/799736/microsoft-office-icons-test-versions
Over 25 years Audacity has gone from simple audio editor, to a UX nightmare. If you can get past the terrible logo, version 4 looks like it might fix that. It was no surprise that when Audacity revealed its new logo people on the internet got a little worked up. And look, there’s no two ways about it, the logo is pretty bad. The font it quite nice, but the bewildering take on its traditional headphone icon is rough.
https://www.theverge.com/news/792368/if-you-can-get-past-the-terrible-logo-audacity-4-looks-pretty-great
One of the biggest new features of iOS 18 is a completely redesigned Photos app. Apple calls it the “biggest redesign ever,” and the massive changes have been quite contentious, to put it mildly. Many users have expressed frustration with the new layout, complaining about missing features (some of which aren’t really missing) and difficulty finding what they’re looking for.
https://www.macworld.com/article/2547052/hate-the-new-ios-18-photos-app-heres-how-to-fix-it-in-a-few-taps.html
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The overarching goal of the new design, Weiss says, was to give users more context and more focus. “We think of these as modes of work that you have,” he says. “I catch up on everything that’s going on, I respond to inbound, I triage and respond to all the activity, and then I go through my to-do list of what I need to follow up on — that’s what this is organizing, is modes of working rather than types of objects.” For more chaotic, everything-all-at-once Slack users, Slack has also been reworking its multi-windowing system so you can have multiple views open at a time. It all adds up to not quite a total reorganization of Slack but at least a slightly different way of thinking about the app. Before, it was two things: the list of all your stuff on the side and whatever you’re currently engaged with in the middle. Now, there’s a third organizational layer in between, aiming to sort and filter all the stuff you care about in a few different ways. “It was about actually putting all the things that we’ve built over time into a sensible, comprehensible place,” Weiss says. It’s going to look and feel really different to a lot of users at first, but Weiss is confident users will like the new tools. And if the pitch doesn’t resonate, well, that’s why Slack rolls out new products slowly — and has been testing it for a while.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/9/23824562/slack-redesign-app-dms-activity-later