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Comment by mrandish | Hacker News Reader

I really wish that UX designers would stop the insanity of over-simplify things into near-uselessness. People need to do real work in an operating system including organizing, sorting and arranging files. The basic functionality of the Windows OS "Detail" file view hasn't gained significant NEW functionality in nearly forever.

Rounding corners and harmonizing colors is nice but it's not what I care about. I wish they'd demonstrate their awesome design skills by working out a reasonably intuitive UX to do nested sorting. And do so without losing any existing functionality.

Another example is Firefox. Almost every UX change in the past two years has made the browser noticeably worse and requires serious users to hack CSS under the hood to fix. They keep taking things away and rearranging deck chairs while not adding obviously missing functionality like a non-right-click menu UX to manage sidebar lists.

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I agree so much on this. The biggest problem for me is dumbing down the file browser when using MS office products. I used to have a workflow of quickly organizing files directly from office. But the modern file browser is so much less efficient and the extra clicks frustrate me a lot

How far back do you want to go? Windows 3.0 file manager is now open source and readily available from Microsoft directly![1] I’ve personally found it a joy to use even on a modern OS like 10.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/winfile

If there were no UI changes then designers and product managers would be out of a job.

This is why I enjoy owning my own small software business. I can just build something great at the start, and sell it forever, without needing to worry about continuous improvement nonsense.

In my experience a lot of the UX Research (separate from UX design) is completely ignored and PM’s / developers / UX Designers do whatever they feel is best anyways. I see this trend increasing more and more in the industry.

I feel like a lot of software is designed primarily for marketing screenshots and only incidentally for people to use. Especially with "power users" being a shrinking demographic, I can't remember the last time "mainstream" software has gotten a redesign that actually made it more pleasant to use.

I use Linux 98% of the time so this particular assault on people's workflow doesn't affect me but I can hardly get around phone and browser updates (though recently I've found Vivaldi quite pleasant)

It comes to you via Electron apps, the only that most shops apparently bother with when targeting GNU/Linux users.

Gnome suffered from a form of this a few years ago. Nowhere is safe!

The problem is that those UX designers only think about colors and rounded corners. This is what the "design" is for them. Making things usable is not part of their design.

Brilliant point! How about natively display the amount of storage space a folder is taking up in the details view?

Even opensource software doesn't usually do this because computing the directory sizes is expensive and they do not want to bother with caching/async.

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