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Comment by causality0 | Hacker News Reader

I would add the momentum of resources has not only made programmers lazy, but has produced a cultural momentum for inefficiency in almost every aspect of computing. Personally I've watched the amount of information and functionality in a given amount of screen space plummet in my lifetime. Pull down the quick settings menu in Android 13 and it uses a three inch by five inch rectangle to show...eight buttons. Windows 11 won't show you the names of the windows you have open unless you edit the registry. What the hell is happening to us?

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UI changes are the perfect example of "change for the sake of change". I am sure these people don't even consider the fact that over time the UI of a software becomes part of the user's subconscious and it just fades away and let the user do the job as quickly as possible, changing this UI to something completely different is just a mental torture for your users.

> UI changes are the perfect example of "change for the sake of change".

Exactly. It's just making changes to comply with whatever is fashionable at the time. Utterly pointless and annoying crap.

Most of the decisions about the direction of UIs weren't made by "programmers" acting on their own but by companies - mostly Apple and Microsoft with Google and others involved at different points. I think the decisions were made for the same reasons companies like to dumb down everything - least common denominator is good for sales and dumbed-down means users have less power and are more dependent.

Extra tragedy here is that people now live in software and so most people have to live in this stupidity.

My mom, cause of her eyesight, constantly increases default font size and every single simple action on her phone is like solving a sudoku puzzle.

My theory is these designers dont have family members or they dont care about them.

> My theory is these designers dont have family members or they dont care about them.

Or they don't have family members with bad eyesight.

Or they actually do have family members with bad eyesight, but those are not active smartphone users.

Or they actually do have family members that both have bad eyesight and are active smartphone users, but they take the advice to simply buy a device a mobile device with a larger screen.

that's a shoddy metric though. I'm not an aircraft pilot or a lover of 90s teletext, measuring efficiency in terms of number of buttons per square inch makes no sense on a medium that has infinite scrolling surface.

Empty space is very much a good thing, we crammed things together in the past because we had no other choice, not because it was very legible.

It's not just about the visible buttons (and scrolling is not a "free action"), keyboard shortcut support has been going down.

Even merely finite scroll can cause UI issues.

Today, with invisible scroll bars, it's not at all unreasonable for someone to be oblivious to the offscreen content; but even making them always-visible isn't enough, as my dad demonstrated by taking 3 years of home internet to realise Google search results were not just limited to the first three that just happened to be at the top of the page.

He'd retired a few years earlier, having been working as a software developer since approximately when that became a new idea in the UK private sector, back when punched cards wasn't a cute retro reconstruction.

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