I got irritated by my dad’s cluelessness with gadgets but maybe tech is to blame

UX design is like yeast in bread. Too much, the bread overflows the pan and burns everywhere. Not enough, the bread does nothing. Maybe the 90s UX designers didn't use enough and thus we had boring UIs. But today we have 99% yeast and 1% flour and oh it is ugly.

Hang the fads, no more gesture-first uninuitive magic PLEASE! Styling is not evil, contrary to the 'unstyled HTML only' crowd, but consistency first and foremost makes for good UX. Consistent (accessible, localizable) look & (undo-able, default cancelling data-destructive) behavior above all, then look at 'intuitiveness' etc.

My parents were on the cutting edge of technology. My dad had self-taught and setup auto-dialling dial-up WiFi accessed over PCMCIA cards that he and my mother used for desktop emails, eBay when it was brand new, 320x240 video messages, even some skype. There was nothing they couldn't do on the computer with a little bit of googling and poking around the Control Panel or registry.

Today, not so much. And little wonder. User-hostile OS, application design abounds.

All of the geniuses at these companies have cargo culted stupid stuff to a grotesque degree:

- flat button icons instead of 3d buttons with text (it saves localization costs!!!! at the cost of user confusion)

- hamburger menus instead of "scary toolbars" (A menu bar with options? eww! we are too cool for that. smush all the options into one triple dot or even better, toolbar icons with no tooltips)

- "clean" workspaces with plenty of whitespace because reasons (good design means an empty plate where if you swipe from the right, food appears! why would you be so drab as to add a button that says 'summon food'?)

- all of this running in not-quite-responsive client side JS over native widgets (because it's better with Javascript! https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2019/04/19/its-better-with-ja...)

Yes, someone moved the cheese and all users no matter their age should keep finding it, not ceasing to learn and stagnating. "I'm not good with computers therefore I refuse to learn" is no longer an excuse.

On the other hand, if the cheese never stops for even a moment, all of the mice will die because they exhaust themselves seeking cheese they never actually get to take a bite of.

If more developers, UX designers, anyone who actually made UIs in some capacity were to read cover-to-cover and subsequently apply the principles (or if relevant, the Windows/MacOS platform specific norms) the Microsoft Windows User Experience Guidelines & Apple Human Interface Guidelines rather than uxdesign.trendy blog, we'd be much better off.