Can you go into some more detail as to how "UX has become universally terrible"? I'm a UX person, so I'm always intrigued when I hear people say that UX has become terrible.
- Essential functionality shoved into some sub-hamburger-menu because it "didn't fit the design".
- Low information density
- Pointless cruft like animated menus and hero images + resource intensive pseudo-minimalism, where the app/page/whatever, despite the low information density, somehow still manages to load ungodly amounts of data, or eats tons of resources, or both.
- The latter point contributing to the situation where we have apps that run worse on 2022 hardware, than apps in the early 90s did on a Pentium I. I know that design isn't solely to blame for this, but it certainly played a part.
- Circumventing OS or browser default functionality. Example: Webpages that hijack the onscroll event. I use my mousewheel to scroll, not to advance through whatever the designer thought was a must-see presentation about their companies "values".
- Smooth UX breaking down the instant the user leaves the happy path. Trying to setup an account? Easy. Trying to change the auth method to MFA? A hellride.
- Modals. Modals everywhere
- Everything trying to look like a smartphone app, no matter the viewing device. I have a high resolution screen and a high precision pointing device in front of me. Why are half the webpages and many apps presenting buttons the size of texas?
- Super smart designs causing the page layout to change after it's loaded. Nothing more fun than to accidentially click the wrong thing and then having to reload the previous page because the layout changed under my thumb.
- Next to zero configurability.
Apps are tools. Webpages are tools. I am not starting a program to look at it's amazing design, same as I don't pick up a hammer to marvel at the color choice of the handle. I pick up a hammer to hammer at nails. If I get the impression that the process of picking the handle-color was getting more attention than the process of making a good, sturdy, serviceable and reliable hammer, then I will not use that hammer.
Google search bar breaks macOS keybindings eg. option-arrow doesn't work as expected.
Of course, with the rise of microservices, everything that requires an account is also unreliable.
Also, there's the dark pattern of returning incorrect results during partial outages, so even when stuff is "working", it's mostly gaslighting the end user. This was pioneered by Netflix's frontend team, but it's seeped into all sorts of inappropriate things. A surefire sign of this is opening up an online-only app, and having it report stale data until it updates. My car does this. I don't care what its charge level was sixteen hours ago (typically displayed by my phone for 10-60 seconds), or four days ago (from my watch).
Their initial idea was to synchronize warehouse inventory with the online store in realtime, so that users would never buy anything out of stock. That proved logistically difficult and expensive, so they decided that the frontend would merely checkpoint inventory levels at intervals. When someone inevitably ordered something that was no longer in stock, they simply sent a robo-apology note and refunded the order.
Mitigating the hit to customer satisfaction was deemed cheaper than the very expensive proposition of synchronizing distributed warehouse inventory levels in realtime over unreliable networks.
This seems to happen far too much. Nowadays usually causes me to give up on a site and go somewhere else. Feels like eliminating stuff like this should be low-hanging fruit UX-wise (albeit not especially exciting, I guess)
I strongly believe that's the main problem. Today UX thinks of computers as Assistants. It is clippy all over again.
That is why tech is so exited about Amazon Echo, ChatGPT.. It's the ultimate assistant.
Nobody wants to teach their users anymore, it's supposed to work out of the box. Easy, simple. There should be one button or one way of doing something (the dreaded User Story). Otherwise the user will go elsewhere. So we get these one trick apps.
In the 90s the user was seen as an intermediate user. Today it's all about onboarding.
- Desperately trying to make everything from PCs to cars to refrigerators to space capsules look and behave like a mobile phone for no reason on (or off) God's green Earth except "Woah, trendy."
You're making a very broad assumption here that everyone is like you. The fact is, they aren't. Big click targets are important for accessibility (if you want to read more, theres a pretty good article on the topic here: https://ishadeed.com/article/clickable-area/)
Apparently not, because we went for decades without them, and no one complained about a bad UX from buttons that are too small to click. Which could have something to do with the aforementioned high-precision pointing device, which btw. can be configured to the motoric requirements of the individual user.
However, a lot of people complain about UX gone to hell as of right now. So I'd say its a pretty safe bet that things, as a whole, didn't go into the right direction
Besides, a requirement on a PHONE is not an excuse to do the same thing on a DESKTOP. My desktop PC isn't a phone, and I value information density more than click-area. If an interface ignores these facts, then it is a bad UX for me.
> An important law to be followed in UX design. In simple words, the larger and closer the touch or click target is, the less time it will require the user to interact with it.
...and mistakenly concludes that, if you just make buttons bigger and add more whitespace everywhere, you get widgets that are easier to click.
If you try to run the numbers on "facelifted" modern interfaces vs. their older counterparts, you'll find that many of them actually fare worse even in terms of Fitts' model.
E.g. if you have three equally-sized widgets side by side -- three buttons, for instance -- simply making them wider by some proportion of the initial width increases the difficulty of getting from the center of the leftmost widget to the center of the rightmost widget, because the distance (up in the nominator) increases by a higher factor than the width (in the denominator). In practice, increasing widget sizes increases the index difficulty in basically every UI that has more than two widgets laid out along a given direction, because it causes the distance to targets to grow by more than the widget size.
(Edit: this is commonly forgotten because "literature" drones about Fitt's conclusion without explaining the context in which it was determined: repetitive motion over a single direction between two already widely-spaced physical items. Making the items bigger resulted in lower distance because, unlike in a modern fluid UI, where widgets are placed at constant paddings that are a fraction of their physical size, that did not cause their centers to drift further apart. Whereas in practical UI cases, increased paddings and widget sizes often result in the average distance to widget centers increasing by way more than (half) the widget width, so the ID actually grows).
The example shown in the article just so happens to fare better because it makes a widget taller by about 10%, while reducing the distance between the only two widgets shown on screen about three times. IRL padding between widgets has steadily grown, so while the numbers line up, this isn't a very representative example -- in fact, many designers would probably object that the design on the right is also bad because there's not enough space between the text field and the button.
But even if we take the design example at face value, generalizing from it is a really bad idea. Because the ID is logarithmically-derived, if you were to take the "narrow" button on the left and just bring it 16px away from the text field, the difference would be minute -- no more than 5% (assuming strictly vertical motion between the midline of the text field and the midline of the button; in practice it's probably way lower than that, since LTR users tend to click towards the left of the field; although FWIW I bet in practice moving the two widgets close together has barely any impact at all, as the text field is likely auto-focused, so motion will commonly happen between wherever the cursor happens to be on the screen and the center of the button).
That's a good trade-off if you only have two widgets on the screen, as in a form -- you don't lose anything other than some whitespace by making a widget bigger. If you have more elements to show, though, that's a very bad trade-off to make. An ID difference of 5% is barely noticeable (IIRC it's just above the "noise floor" in a standard Fitts experiment), which is more than offset by the additional difficulty introduced by scrolling (because you can fit fewer elements on the screen).
So that's why Microsoft made the calc.exe fill the whole screen. /s
This does not explain however why the scrollbars are so small. Are they no click targets anymore ?
Not to mention essentially nonexistent window borders and putting active controls in the title bar. Have people forgotten that those are click targets, too? Sometimes I want to move the window or resize it, and Windows makes that hard.
* Apps feel generally disorganized. Buttons are unlabled. Many things are hidden somewhere between layers of unlabled buttons. In the past you could count on the menu bar giving you quick access to anything.
* Lack of functionality / composability. Avoidance of the file system. Tunnel menus that you have to take one step at a time.
* Every program has UI that works and looks differently, made worse because even the same programs redesign their own UI periodically.
* Flat design. Lack of 'affordances'. Buttons don't look like buttons, draggable things don't look like they're draggable. E.g. scroll bars in the past had this serration to suggest interaction. This leads to hidden features and surprises, where things that seem like static images suddenly hide important functionality.
* Lack of configurability. Configurable Toolbars, arrangeable view panes, tabs etc. And unnecessary limits even when you can configure things. Like, Firefox only has a list of preset zoom levels, to get finer zoom levels you have to go into about:config. Or the fact that it limits the size of tabs to a rather large minimum. For no reason at all.
* Lack of consistent (or even discoverable) keyboard navigation. Rebinding short cuts is not a thing anyone seems to care about anymore.
* Readability, use of space. This applies more to the web, but grey text, ultra-narrow columns, inconsistent scaling.
Also, try to teach a young person to use an old program, or an older version of an office program
(It's whatever Manjaro defaults to. It looks like xfce, but I'm pretty sure it's KDE. The point being that I don't know because it's not configured terribly out of the box like modern gnome.)
The minecraft launcher does regularly bring him to literal tears though. :-(
Funny enough, the few times I had to do that, it turned out to be easy.
Why? Because the software may not look shiny, but it's obvious and discoverable. There is the menu-bar. It says "File". The assumption that "File" is the right place to look for the button that saves the work to a file is one that comes pretty naturally. And of course the keybind is written right there next to the menu item.
Ugly? Maybe. But it's obvious and gets the job done.
Now let's look at some "modern" software, and the Button to save is...yeah, anyones guess really where it is.
Might be in some hamburger or sub-hamburger.
Might be in some animated menu that I have to scroll beyond the various cloud-store options to store to disk, which is a common dark pattern, because cloud solutions are something I can sell, while the users disk isn't.
There might be some gesture-based menu, even in desktop apps.
It may be a button in the interface, but which one is anyones guess ... because apparently the floppy disk icon is not "modern" enough, so there may be any combination of boxes, arrows, arrows in boxes, or whatever happened to be the ultimate wisdom in save-button design at the time.
I have seen apps where it was in the "Share" menu, right next to whatsapp and facebook integration, because these are vitally important options for all apps apparently.
My other usability pet peeve. Traversing a big number if things by paging. The UI will not give you the total number of pages anymore. You can increment 2 pages at a time. Sometimes you can change the url to try later pages but not always. Sometimes there will be a button for the last (final) page but when you click it, it doesn't exist. To make this even worse most times this is loaded via JavaScript so if you're on the equivalent of page 50. The next time you get there you have to keep loading more until you're on 50 again. There is no way to bookmark state or go there directly. I am assuming this is a JavaScript Json thing that somehow became a pattern, like getting a total count is now impossible or something.
My car hides map functionality in buttons that are simply not present until you interact with the map in some magic way that triggers a heuristic that you want the buttons to appear. Slowly.
When I want to see chargers drawn on the map, I don’t want to move the map. So why TF do I have to move the map to convince the software to draw the button so I can tap it? While driving or perhaps waiting at a red light.
- content areas that truncate half a sentence
- expanded content that reveals in a different part of the screen from the place where the teaser lives
- cookie notices - when then problem is not cookies but data exfiltration
- opt-in by default instead of opt out
- accept data exfiltration or don’t use our site
- images with rollovers that hide the image when rolled over
- text content that changes when you toll over
- headers that change size as you scroll so content jumps u predictably
- sticky headers
- sticky footers
- footers with useful content that you can’t read because there’s also an infinite scroller above it
- hamburgers on desktop sites
- landing pages that are 70% negative space
- poster/hero images so large there’s no actual content above the fold
- newsletter subscription modal popovers
- any kind of modal popover that appears mid-way through reading the content
- images with CSS that causes them to shrink when you use screen zoom (amazon product images)
- mistimed animations
- logins with the username and password on separate pages
- password fields you can’t paste into
- “repeat your email” fields
- carousels with differently sized panels so the content below shuffles ip and down whilst you’re reading it
- auto-play videos
- ads every fucking where
- social share buttons
Haha, this seems to be a "design guideline" in both iOS and Android.
- The introduction of several banners/popups/modals, either to shoddily comply with tracking consent laws or to drive up engagement (newsletter subscription, notifications, check out new feature X)
- The display of several, sometimes even nested loading indicators all over the place
- The adoption of "trendy" UI patterns that don't necessarily fit (e.g. "stories", a few years ago)
- An obsession with reducing information density and making everything very sparse
- Rejection of color as a redundant signifier for UI elements, particularly icons
- An overall extremely hostile attitude towards the user, with dark patterns, disregard to preferences and privacy
We need simplicity and stability - the latter being the most important for user interfaces.
For some reason I cannot comprehend, I can split the screen horizontally, which results in two thin strips side-by-side that are useless for anything that I can think of. It is not possible to split it vertically so that I would have two reasonable aspect ratio apps on top of each other. Now they added a convoluted "multitasking" mechanism that kind of lets me solve this for reading, where I can have two 3/4 sized apps overlapping each other, but I still cannot just split the screen or have freely resizable apps (which, again, is a problem solved already in the original Macintosh).
This type of terrible UX has become endemic, and is even worse in non-Apple products. The root cause I believe is "authoritarian simplicity", where some UX designer or team thinks they know the best and force a single, over-simplified, over-specified solution on everyone.
Everywhere there's dark patterns, performance overhead, mandatory updates degrading user experience, unnecessary JS and walled gardens breaking accessibility/compatibility, online-only etc.
For performance overhead and unnecessary JS, that sounds like poor development practices that happens to also degrade the end experience for users, although some of that unnecessary JS could be some sort of tracking implementation that was included through business requirements.
the need for "new", when in most cases something vaguely similar to WinXP or OSX is fine for 90% of things.
When you say that being vaguely similar to WinXP or OSX is fine for 90% of programs, is that in terms of looks, journey path, or something else?
The article mentions this in the Business > User section, saying (removing euphemism and double negatives) the prevailing wisdom is that you will probably be fired unless you actively worsen the product, and provide metrics to explain how you did it.
I’d think that companies with customer bases that don’t actively hate them are less likely to have big layoff rounds, but I am not a UX expert.
Maybe some out-of-work UXRs would like to offer views on how to fix the site?
[1] - https://englishcitiesfund.co.uk/ - though when I just revisited, it appears to be broken for both mobile and desktop.
[2] - my (very personal) view is that the site was in fact designed to showcase work done, so it could be referenced in the Annual Reports of the Fund's partner companies, allowing them to check whatever corporate checkboxes they needed to check that year during their AGMs. Though people tell me that I am too cynical so I could be wrong.
- infantilization of interface to treat everyone 'like a 5 year old'
- removal of functionality , homogeneous bootstrap-like interfaces with rounded corners everywhere, to the point where you no longer recognize which system you re using
- "mobilification" of the desktop
- no more rational organization: no hierarchical menus, only the top 5 buttons survive
The worst example I encounter on a daily basis is Twitter. Each tweet has at least 8 sections that do different things when tapped. I never know quite where to long-press with my thumb over the tiny timestamp to open it in a new tab, or where the boundary is between the single line of text and the username.
Consider the power of piping a few unix commands together, this is an advanced task that enables power users, but is nearly impossible for a new user.
tldr; For the common cases and beginners UX has improved, but dropped off for users that go beyond that.