white text with colorful background is less legible. Calcite follows design that Windows 8 ushered in. No color, no texture, "flat" design with minimal difference between icons. Users find it harder to understand.
Bring color and texture back to icons and buttons, add serif to your fonts, and increase size of buttons and text. Also consider using "regular" language like replacing the word "extent" with "map area" like I have done; tell users with tool tips to zoom in for scale dependent layers, and definitely bring back checkboxes to the layer list in web apps and add partial checkbox icons. These are things I have suggested for close to 15 years. I'm patient. But each year stuff like this just sits, while new/shiny stuff no one asked for gets developed at great expense. (digital twin, and probably next, "AI") I posted a moving popup demo here and on github a decade ago and even a 4x moving popup API demo half a decade ago, and it hasn't been implemented yet.
User interface is the product. It's the tip of the spear. If it's hard to use, that's a barrier to GIS adoption.
Field app teams "get it". For example they are making the Related Record button larger. That's actually a big, big deal. Things like that, I hope Calcite team can look in to.
Look at what I did with www.sagis.org/map for example rollover on buttons should be standard. It was hard to know which button was being rolled over until I added that. The 'previous extent' dialogue was hard to see and also used the word extent which no end user understands.
