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Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

I really like the 1+1=3 cognitive load analogy on the cost of adding a "single" click to something. One of the most aggravating things in the last 15 years is a seemingly industry wide decision to "declutter" menus by burying even very simple, common actions 4-5 menus deep, often with icons that have no discernible clear meaning until you click around for a while and figure it out.

Why? Seriously, why?

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A recent favourite of mine was trying to find the odometer reading on my humble Skoda - couldn't find it on any screen, nothing helpful in manual. I eventually realised that the odometer and the speed setting for the cruise control share the same area on the screen so if the cruise control is turned on then you can't see the odometer.

Because "modern" designers are often degenerates who have zero fucking clues about ergonomics. Their ideal design is an empty screen with a single light gray element on white background.

No, they are not. They are just wrong people hired for the jobs by ignorant management which has no idea how diverse can be design tasks. It’s like blaming React developers working on some Jira tickets without a full picture, which is not a website but a satellite RTOS. An experienced generalist would understand the challenge and may refuse to do it if they don’t have the knowledge, but most people would simply incorrectly assume that they can do it. Management on the other side should have done better.

What I've described is bad in either case, be it Tesla, Web Page or desktop app.

lol what makes them degenerates

I don’t agree with it, but I can take a guess as to why - they are putting the cart before the horse - cars truly aren’t self-driven enough to take our attention away from the road. If they were, we’d have the time to tinker deep into menus or whatever.

As a driver I really want tactile feedback on my controls - even clear buttons on a screen require a half-second glance off the road which in bad weather is not a good idea. Needless to say, all forms of self-drive features give up in inclement weather.

They want to please everyone. Basically, what ends up happening is that new features get added but the company doesn't want to choose which buttons are more important than others. There is no one-size-fits all solution: every option makes somebody else's workflow worse. The most "neutral" and "logical" solution is to construct an ontology of button types and then materialize that in the form of nested menus. Hurts everyone the same.

I think this is a problem at the product-management level, where they cannot decide which user persona they want to prioritize. Could also be financially related, and other users complain when the company picks a side.

The only positive takeaway is that it got so bad that we'll inevitably swing back to the older, better state of things.

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