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Comment by fugaziboutit | Hacker News Reader

User activity heatmaps over the last five years increasingly show that users often tap on things they want regardless of whether that word/graphic/icon has any outward indication of being interactive.

Of course the hottest of hotspots are always the high-contrast button-looking things, but I can understand the trend towards card-ifying or completely unwrapping touch targets given that users stab more freely than they used to.

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Surely this should mean "debuff the design of the non-interactable elements (desaturate, shrink,...)" and not "crank up the interactable ones" or "make everything interact!"

Just like "customers keep running into our glass door" doesn't imply approval of glass and it doesn't mean you should turn everything into glass.

It's a race to the bottom. Users have to anticipate designers making inconsistent apps, so designers feel vindicated in their idiosyncratic and frankly user-hostile designs.

Such win-win horrors..

Only because devs and designers are making things so unrecognisable that people have to do that, or try to tap to see. Now those developers and designers think it is working. It's the other way what you said.

Many people I met everyday have to be given tutorials where to click in modern apps. I guess all these devs live in a bubble with other devs and make such comments.

Let's make everything a guess work and over many years forced people to learn to tap everywhere to do everything. Good game.

It's like herding cats to try to get consistent interfaces in software, in part because lots of people want to change the world with something new, and in part because UI is often an untested afterthought for people doing the 'real' work of launching features. For many devs, the downstream effects of actual UX design are an unknown unknown.

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