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> I think in general there is this trend in UX toward treating users as helpless children, and it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you take away someone's agency, then yes absolutely they will be helpless. They will learn to be helpless, to act like children. I don't think that's something we want to aim for in general. It's bad for society and disastrous for democracy.

On a similar note, constantly redesigning UI just to redesign them encourages this too -- why develop expertise or skill when it will be undermined because some UX designer wants to make his mark?

I get the strong impression that UX has stopped being about the users and has become more about the designer's ego or his employer's interests. It's the best explanation I can think of for all the redesigns that no one wanted or asked for.

IMHO, the first questions any UX designer should ask themselves are:

1. Is the new design a useless side-grade from what we already have (i.e. just doing something differently to do it differently)?

2. Are the advantages over the existing design significant? Is it really worth invalidating existing user knowledge?

I've had a few run-ins with UI designers and architects (of the building kind) as an end user, and they've left a sour taste in my mouth. A lot of dismissing user feedback with pablum about "change being hard" or insistence that the changes are popular with some silent majority.

I'd have to disagree. Most changes, at least at large companies, are driven by dollars, not ego.

A small change in user engagement can mean millions in revenue. Or billions, in the largest cases.

Things are extensively a/b tested to validate that the change drives revenue. And most companies are fine with forcing the user to learn, as long at it increases profits.

Dunno, my experience with large companies is that there is a lot of office politics, some are making overtures for career advancement by short-sighted but ostensibly profitable changes they hope will be noticed by higher-ups, others want to protect their fiefdom by sabotaging and delaying up-and-comers.

Most everyone is looking at their paycheck and status, not the bottom line.

It is very easy to tip an A/B test in the direction you'd like it to go by picking what you measure and handwaving away bad metrics.

A few months ago I had a discussion here with someone regarding good/bad design, what was personal preference and what could be considered objective judgment.

They mentioned something about a design philosophy in which there should never be more than one button, or if there were two then one should be the main button that people really should click on.

It seems there is an effort to raise a whole school of new designers on the idea that there isn't that much of a difference between software users and chicken in a farm.

Ironically if there's one thing utterly useless as a way of conveying information it would be a singular button.

I think there's a middle ground. Providing clear options and deliberate choices can be done through not having a thousand options and buttons.

Wikipedia is a clear example of not taking this into consideration. There's a hundred links mixed with the text, and buttons and doodads everywhere around it, which makes it very clear to actually think about what you want to do.

If you compare Encarta '96 with Wikipedia:

<https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/links/encarta.png>

<https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/links/wikipedia.png>

It's clearly very different. The Encarta design is a lot more quiet. If you're reading, then you are reading. There are sparse inline links, but nothing near the shotgun linkedness of Wikipedia.

I've experimented with stripping down Wikipedia, producing this:

<https://encyclopedia.marginalia.nu/wiki/Plato>

It's definitely several steps too far (but taking things too far is the best way to get the feel for an idea), but I find that much easier to read, because the choices are moved out of the text and into the bottom of the text. That is, you read first, and decide what to do next once you are finished reading.

All I see on the Marginalia Plato article is a site that forces an uncomfortably narrow article width on me, while eschewing almost all the advantages of hypertext in the name of some ill-conceived notion of "quieter reading".

I'm not saying it's all bad, though - it's something that could be an option offered to the unfortunate people with attention deficit disorder.

The forced text width, however, is inexcusable.

Yeah I think that's probably from my own habit of never using full screen windows. Though I'm not sure how to deal with the fact that it's very hard to read long lines of text. Most printed books, newspapers, and so forth use that width (max 60ch) specifically because it's hard to follow lines longer than that. I chose to follow book guidelines specifically because that format has been largely stable for some thousand years and is at this point the gold standard for legibility. Usually when things stagnate for that long, it's not because nobody has thought to try something different in all that time.

Maybe multiple columns could be an option, I guess. Not sure how to do that well with varying paragraph sizes, though.

On Firefox mobile, it's more like 11 characters wide. Pretty much unusable.

Hmm, strange. It doesn't have these proportions? <https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/encyclopedia-mobile.png>

I sadly can't diagnose since my phone isn't powerful enough to run Firefox. Looks as intended on Firefox desktop with emulation mode, though.

Huh. It looks fine now. Did you change anything?

Not a thing.

Works for me on Firefox for Android (Firefox for iOS being just a safari skin). I get 6-7 words per line (looks like the site authors emulated screenshot), so like 40 or so characters

I'd prefer if web designers used relative max width of maybe 80 or 90%, and left it to users to resize their browser windows accordingly. But I realize that is a pipe dream, people are too lazy for that, so I just use custom CSS browser extensions to adjust this on sites I visit regularly.

I also actually prefer wider lines, as I don't find following them difficult, and prefer wider lines and having to do less scrolling. It's also fun seeing how a lot of random blog articles which seem long in a narrow layout are in fact very short. :)

I like the page and, instead of finding the fixed width “inexcusable”, see it as an element of tasteful design that makes the text easy to read, as you’ve chosen an ideal width. The justification would work better if there were hyphenation, though.

Not much to add except wanted to say that I enjoyed becoming aware of the impact Wikipedia's design decision had on me, as a reader.

Seeing the encarta/marginalia version vs the wikipedia one really drives home the point. It's interesting how the design had a strong impact on my experience, and yet I never really noticed it before.

I feel a bit like a fish suddenly aware of the water they're in.

I was confused by the claim that the Encarta version is quieter until I read that it was because of the inline links. I thought the Wikipedia version was quieter because it doesn't have a distracting background image. I think this confusion is evidence that inline links are actually not distracting. I don't feel I have to make a decision whenever I see one because I know they'll still be there later.

Maybe it's individual variations? I struggle immensely reading text with inline links. I immediately start skimming and my attention is strongly drawn to the linked words.

Maybe you can add custom CSS rules that make links the same color? I also much prefer the wikipedia interface to the alternatives.

This pretty much is a custom CSS. I was also more than a bit annoyed by the huge downloads and 30 second page loads.

The Encarta version is much better if you want to learn about Plato, while Wikipedia makes it much easier to learn about thing related to Plato.

The notion that the relation to other things is at least as important as the thing itself permeates Wikipedia. Many smaller articles, like e.g. Differentiable Programming [1] probably link to more topics than the article itself has words.

I think a "stripped down" Wikipedia is an experiment worth trying, but it would serve a subtly different purpose, with some use cases being left behind and some being better served.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiable_programming

I think the big problem with Wikipedia's design is that it caters to too many audiences with disparate needs using the same interface, both reading and navigating and cross-referencing and editing.

I think perhaps having multiple views for different needs would be a way forward.

> I think the big problem with Wikipedia's design is that it caters to too many audiences with disparate needs using the same interface, both reading and navigating and cross-referencing and editing.

> I think perhaps having multiple views for different needs would be a way forward.

I think what this thread is missing is that Encarta and Wikipedia are vastly different products. If Wikipedia had multiple views for different needs it would literally die, because it's community edited. If its UI encouraged staying withing a narrow lane, then it would have even more problems with getting readers to cross over to being editors.

I read something once that when you come across a link, your mind subconsciously hesitates whether or not to open it and that these thoughts detract from your focus on the material at hand.

I often wonder if it would be more beneficial for websites to transition to footnotes with all pertinent links at the bottom of the page.

If you want to strip away the MediaWiki adornments and editing/interactivity tools from Wikipedia, you just have to go to the mobile page:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato

It is still consumption-oriented and stripped down, but retains far more non-textual information than your experiment.

> one should be the main button that people really should click on

I don't think there's something wrong with CTAs.

You can misuse/abuse this technology as you can with every, but providing a structured way to achieve a desired result is not bad per se.

It helps build muscle/"brain" memory and can help you perform your task better/quicker.

There was an item posted here this week with the same exact conversation. It's honestly a bit eye opening with the way UX is going. I am all for sensible defaults, but being able to tweak things here and there should really be an option, and not one seen as a failure by the designers...

Agreed, but the reason this happens is not in a bubble. "User interface design" is not a natural category of design. People in the field will point to "The Design of Everyday Things" as some sort of progenitor of the field, but if you read it, it is kind of just a pop-psychology book.

The truth is (IMO) that UX is more closely related to marketing than it is to technical design work. The entire point of having a UX designer is to get marketing speak and advertising techniques right into the heart of the engineering process.

If engineers just built tools in the way that was the most sensible to them, they would have too many options and give the user far too much control. Ostensibly the reason given why this is bad is that it is 'confusing' for the user, but the reality is that it allows the end user to use the product in ways that do not maximize the profit. Even worse, users might use the product in a way that does not reflect the spirit of The Brand. It is telling that UX revolves around creating user stories, because this is exactly how advertising is done; “Martha, a woman in her mid thirties, is trying to balance home life with her need to efficiently walk her dog…”

> there should never be more than one button

... which you have to look at, because the position and function changes. There is no muscle memory with dynamic UI.

I recall a visually impaired woman who couldn't hail an Uber. I could tell she was very fast with the old UI. But, the button had shifted. She was going to call her Husband to drive over from Oakland to pick her up in San Francisco. Instead, I showed her where the button was.

I think it is mostly a trade off.

Using modern design philosophy you won't risk getting a really terrible UI but the trade off is you will not get something new and innovative.

I am sure there are all kinds of issues with the scale of complexity also. It would seem nearly impossible for a designer to come up with a good innovative UI if they are not an expert in using the system themselves so the chicken in a farm ends up being the least bad option.

Some days I think it's learned helplessness, some days I think it is inborn helplessness.

I myself always searched for customization, starting with toys I dissembled and put together in a way I liked. Whenever I went to the toy store I looked for screws and not glue. To my first computers, I loved DOS and when it went away for Windows GUI I took to the registry and then searched for something else and found Linux. Tinkering is my destination and I am never happy with what I have. This drive is the way I am built, I think, and no matter what anybody would want me to do I simply can not. I must have things my way.

There's the opposite kind of people, who just want something that works right out of the box and find any tweaking to be a distraction from getting shit done. They are the majority and products are geared towards them because the market for tinkerers is too small for the economies of scale. I used to blame companies but now I just think they make what they can sell. And they must sell to people who actually hate computers and technology, they just like the products of it.

It always depends on the product. I have a hypothesis that almost everyone is a "power user" of something, but that something varies from person to person.

For me, I am a power user of computers and technology, but I couldn't care less about my car and just want it to get me places.

Other people are the opposite, and love tinkering with their cars. Or maybe they are a power user of carpentry tools, while others (like me) just need a basic drill.

I think one thing that worries me is that there are markets that cater to power users in other areas (cars, tools) but the way software is going, almost all software is being stripped down and power being taken away from all users since the non-power-user base is so large. This is especially true with mobile technology, but it is creeping into desktops/laptops as well.

The enthusiast car users are suffering the same thing for the same reasons. You can see the age of the modified cars - most are 20 years old or more.

If we want to be hyperbolic about the social import of these kinds of UI choices, I'm game.

I interact with plenty of interfaces that are difficult to learn but rewarding. I'm happy to spend my time working on the interface between my trumpet and my lips, or my piano and my fingers. Or hell, I will happily futz around with various synthesizers for hours, customizing which knobs control which parts of the matrix of the sound-shaping going on in the device.

I don't like to spend time learning UI that are difficult to learn but not rewarding.

I am a-okay not having to think about what color I want for the buttons the AWS console. I'm a-okay with google autocorrecting my misspellings or sending me to a different keyword, as I've taken the time to learn just enough about their interface to know how to circumvent that when it doesn't work well.

It's much more rewarding to learn the interfaces that I do want to make deliberate choices about than it is to have to master interfaces for things that about whose choices I do not care about; I feel like that choice engenders empowerment rather than helplessness.

Having to make interface decisions for the myriad of things I interact with on a day-to-day basis would be exhausting.

I agree. This constant pressure to "delight" users is just a race to the bottom. Reminds me of the scene in Idiocracy with the hospital diagnosis buttons. https://youtu.be/LXzJR7K0wK0

Children are the best target demographic for marketers. Considering the demographic decline and the diminishing numbers of children, the next best solution is to infantilize adults.

Once again we are reminded that advertising and marketing are the source of a great number of societal ills.

ah the anti-marketing dollar, huge market :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4Mn2NbjlqU

> There seems to be this notion that if the users don't immediately understand the interface, then it's a bad interface.

This might make sense for b2c public services, or areas where a high cost of training on continually 'new' users hits the bottom line.

It makes far less sense for internal services/apps, and it's something I end up 'fighting' with with clients sometimes. They'll have 'design teams' who justify their "ux of the day" decisions with data from public services.

An internal reporting system with 10-12 dedicated users who will use it 3 hrs per day as their main operating function should have more levers/buttons/filters/etc than a marketing website aimed at getting people to buy a specific brand of dog food.

But that marketing site looks so 'good' and 'inviting' because... there's only 2 buttons, in particular shades, etc. The reporting interface should be warm and inviting right? With smooth transitions to bring a sense of calm to the users, rather than induce tension, right?

A well-informed user may decide to switch to a competitor. Users who turn off tracking and data collection are less profitable. It doesn't matter how terrible and interface is, as long as people stay on the site and remain engaged as they are fed ads disguised as content.

I agree there is a UX crisis happening now, but fixing these pathologies requires changing the incentive structures around commercial software. I think the best we can do realistically is get people into open source.

Users who turn off tracking and data collection are less profitable.

For ads maybe, but if anyone thinks this for retail it's either because they are relying on the invasive tracking for (mis)attribution, or because they broke the checkout flow by putting a non-optional call to an analytics function in the button handler without a try/catch.