Until the early 2000s, consistency between applications used to be a top priority in UI design. There were decades of serious usability research underpinning the Windows and Mac interfaces, and the APIs were finally getting to the point where you could spin up a standard UI with useful controls and trust that it follows platform guidelines, inherits accessibility features, etc.

Then came the double punch of web and mobile. All the hard-won lessons of desktop consistency were thrown out of the window. Many UI designers used to have a background in psychology and cognitive science; they were replaced by graphic design graduates whose primary concern was picking custom fonts and drawing pop-up menu buttons that look nothing like the OS standard component.

A lot of managers got “design thinking” religion and drew exactly the wrong lessons. They started believing design leadership is a fourth-grade Steve Jobs imitation: wear a turtleneck, bark opinions in meetings, and make sure their product UI is a completely custom thing with lots of blank space, no useful information density, and controls that look like plain text.

There’s no going back. Apple could have made a difference by enforcing iOS UI guidelines more strongly in the early days of the platform, but that opportunity was lost. The web remains beyond hope as even the most basic UI components are constantly reinvented by graphic designers wielding Figma because the browser is a useless UI platform.