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I logged into Mailchimp yesterday and found that they moved the header navigation to the left side.

Instead of the previous menu option words like Campaigns or Audience there were icons signifying each that I had to hover over to figure out what they might mean. Then when I went to my Reports the css breakpoints seemed to be wonky making that screen hard to read and use.

Half-jokingly It almost feels like constantly confusing people is a trick to boost engagement temporarily while people are forced to figure things out.

Also half-jokingly I feel like the exact same thing happens in grocery stores.

That they frequently change the layout of their stores? I've never noticed that at any of the stores I shop at.

You aren't wrong at all. Stores regularly re-organize and what it says to customers is "your knowledge is worth nothing". The disregard of customer knowledge is an absolute anti pattern.

Some stores do it, some don't. However, when they do it's intentional in order to force you to go through aisles you might not have walked through otherwise, thus exposing you to more advertising and chances for impulse buys in addition to what you actually planned to get.

Yes, it's a definite dark pattern, but not so much an antipattern.

> I can understand why people hate tech.

To add to that, now that I'm a retired lifelong techie I realize why "old folks" back in the day would hesitate to give up the old, outdated software that they knew how to use.

E.g. I'd prod older friends and family to give up wordperfect - which they knew and loved - in order to progress to the feature-rich-new MS WORD.

Now I'm a linux advocate with its archaic terminal commands and I can empathize with anyone who wants their laptop, phone, TV, microwave, etc. to stop evolving!!

Water under the bridge now, but I bet you did some of them a real disservice.

Wordperfect had "reveal codes", so when the WYSIWYG gave you something you didn't want, you could pop open the actual document representation and wrangle the tags until you What You Want Is What You See.

MS Word has no such function, so when it screws you, and it does, you're good and screwed.

Well, since I was their go-to tech support I paid the price!

re: Reveal codes - not being able to press ALT F3 and cleanup the formatting mess that MS WORD would inevitably get into was torture!

Linux is also far from stable. There is the mess that is Linux desktops like Gnome 2, Gnome 3, Unity (okay, this was only an Ubuntu escapade). The init system changed and the result is that you have to think about things you usually don't want to. There's things like Snap and Flatpack, which pretend to make things easier, but ultimately lead to more complexity...

Hot damn is this the most concise description of how I feel.

I’ve always described it as “the design team justifying their own existence after the job is done.”

Let software get stable and boring.

> I’ve always described it as “the design team justifying their own existence after the job is done.”

I actually think that's really what is going on. Wish I had first hand evidence though.

I do know of a tangential phenomenon at a friend's work place. Her org has a dedicated build tools team. So every 6 months every project's build infrastructure needs to change to something entirely new, because the build tools team keeps having to justify its existence.

I don't know why a company would let this sort of thing happen. It's a massive waste of time for every team.

(Late to the party but) Yes, this, absolutely this. It's almost a rule now that, above some very low threshold, the more expertise and hours you throw at UX, the worse the UX is.

Some of the most annoying UX I've had is on Quora, Facebook, and the reddit redesign, which all spend a veritable fortune on it, while the best ones I've seen are something a non-specialist slapped together with bootstrap.

The thing is, I do not really hate tech, if UNIX, and UNIX alone (no GUI), is considered "tech". Most of the programs in the freely available open-source UNIX OS I use do NOT need to be updated. They just keep working and are quite reliable (at least compared to their GUI alternatives).

I do sometimes wish that there could be alternative (not "replacement") ways to do things we use "tech" to do today, where the alternatives only required UNIX (no GUI). This way if we get frustrated with a graphical UI, and myriad "updates", we can just do these things the "old-fashioned way", with comparatively smaller, simpler, command line UNIX programs.

To me, the people who would be very opposed to this idea are not users, they are developers. Having been raised on computers in the 1980's I can attest that computer users never cared about "UI" or "UX", they just did what they needed to do to use the computer. It is developers, especially contemporarary, who are actually care about "UI" and "UX", not computer users. In fact, some of them are passionate about these aspects of using a computer.

Adam Savage was talking about a scribing tool for machining which was very expensive, but which he likes very much [0].

Before recommending it, however, he felt it important to mention that for people who don't machine very much, far cheaper scribes work well because unless it's your job, your tooling is less likely to be the bottleneck, and you have fewer resources. When you machine professionally, you're tooling is likely your bottleneck and you've more resources.

I think this holds for tech and software. Think of resources here as "time spent learning APIs, bash, and remembering tar mnemonics".

At first, dragging and dropping folders isn't going to be your bottleneck. Need to move 1000s of folders scattered on the hard-drive? If you're not using a terminal, you'll be in trouble.

Everyone cares about UX, it's their experience when using tech. It's just that GUIs are better for some contexts than others.

[0] https://youtu.be/n5laGi3GO7M?t=356

Except with tar you don't even have to memorize anything, tar --help will tell you what you forgot.

   ~ $ tar --help
   BusyBox v1.31.1 (2020-03-26 00:59:22 -00) multi-call binary.

   Usage: tar c|x|t [-ZzJjahmvokO] [-f TARFILE] [-C DIR] [-T FILE] [-X FILE] [--exclude PATTERN]... [FILE]...

   Create, extract, or list files from a tar file

        c       Create
        x       Extract
        t       List
        -f FILE Name of TARFILE ('-' for stdin/out)
        -C DIR  Change to DIR before operation
        -v      Verbose
        -O      Extract to stdout
        -m      Don't restore mtime
        -o      Don't restore user:group
        -k      Don't replace existing files
        -Z      (De)compress using compress
        -z      (De)compress using gzip
        -J      (De)compress using xz
        -j      (De)compress using bzip2
        -a      (De)compress using lzma
        -h      Follow symlinks
        -T FILE File with names to include
        -X FILE File with glob patterns to exclude
        --exclude PATTERN       Glob pattern to exclude
   ~ $

And what's the recent surprise UI change? That xz decompression gets autodetected and doesn't need -J? Most software isn't even as friendly as that infamous command.

> To me, the people who would be very opposed to this idea are not users, they are developers. Having been raised on computers in the 1980's I can attest that computer users never cared about "UI" or "UX", they just did what they needed to do to use the computer. It is developers, especially contemporarary, who are actually care about "UI" and "UX", not computer users.

... what? Are you suggesting computer users in 2020 - which includes everyone from your nana on her iPhone to a toddler watching YouTube on a tablet - want to use CLIs, and are being forced by baddie developers into using apps?

Remember that "alternative" is not the same as "replacement". This is similar to the idea of "more than one way to do it" in computer languages. Users have freedom to choose. Here, one of the ways is without GUI, using UNIX. Only applies where the task does not inherently require graphics.

> For most people, technology is a haunted house riddled with unpleasant surprises.

I'd change that to: "For most people, corporate neoliberal technology is a haunted house riddled with unpleasant surprises."

Writing that recognizes that we live with the most un-free market of all time:

"We are in the middle of a global transformation. What that means is, we're seeing the painful construction of a global market economy. And over the past 30 years neoliberalism has fashioned this system. Markets have been opened, and yet intellectual property rights have ensured that a tiny minority of people are receiving most of the income." [1]

And:

"How can politicians look into TV cameras and say we have a free market system when patents guarantee monopoly incomes for twenty years, preventing anyone from competing? How can they claim there are free markets when copyright rules give a guaranteed income for seventy years after a person’s death? How can they claim free markets exist when one person or company is given a subsidy and not others, or when they sell off the commons that belong to all of us, at a discount, to a favoured individual or company, or when Uber, TaskRabbit and their ilk act as unregulated labour brokers, profiting from the labour of others?" [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnYhZCUYOxs

[2] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...