Productivity software, computer maintenance tools, creative software suites, integrated development environments, habit trackers, language learning apps, video games, video streaming libraries, pretty much anything that involves a screen feels bad. It's so odd that every bit of software's UI/UX feels both overly designed/bloated but also simultaneously barren and empty. Software design seems increasingly unable to fulfill its basic functionality. So many of the bits of software that we interact with feel identical but also somehow feel distinctly bad.
I can't articulate how capitalism is to blame but if any of you could help I would appreciate it.
You’d think that there would be some sort of universal visual/technical language we can all agree upon but it seems that there is no real driving aesthetic philosophy for systems we use every day. Aside from getting users to interact with a payment system/outlet all of the software we use has dreadful UI/UX.
Paying for something is very easy. Simple and intuitive (most of the time), it’s usually one to four clicks/taps but actually using a thing is seemingly more difficult. Using a common feature of a product can be somewhere between two to nine clicks/taps. I don’t think everything should be command-line interfaces (CLI) of course, but I will say that CLI at least usually allow users to get what they want.
I know it’s usually answered with “because money”, but how and why are UI/UX so universally bad for pretty much every bit of software we all use? It feels kind like how every car (fuck cars) had the same weird amorphous shape that is both considered “normal” must also universally unappealing.
What happened?
Modern UI is mostly designed for mobile devices as mobile devices are the largest share of people using the internet. Then the association for modern design becomes synonymous with mobile looks even if it doesn't make sense for desktop software.
The vast majority of Gen Z people are not computer literate. There was a sweet spot for Millennials in which they grew up with computers before they became streamlined into non-functionality. I remember an article about how Comp-Sci professors were having to go over basic concepts like directories because everything is stored in one or two folders on a mobile device. People who enjoy niche forums like Hexbear self-select for being computer literate so it's not a realization many of us have. I almost had a stroke when my younger sibling couldn't figure out how to open a browser on a desktop and it's only a 4 year age difference.
Feeling like a senior citizen in ur early twenties because u know how computer works :chomsky-yes-honey:
Thank you to my parents for having me at apparently the perfect time to learn how to use a file system
my younger sibling couldn’t figure out how to open a browser on a desktop
I am going to tear my eyeballs out
I keep telling folks I work with, there's a difference between computer literate and digital natives. I was shocked when I learned a lot of college students do all their work on an ipad or worse, an iphone!!!!
Someone just submitted a group discussion in my college course by screenshotting a text message.
I promised myself I wouldn't become a boomer who shits on younger folk for not knowing obscure tech I grew up with but it's gotten so much harder. At least rotary phones were obsolete, desktops are still the standard in 99% of workplaces.
I've realized that I need to go over how to turn on a desktop tower and monitor because they literally can't troubleshoot it on their own.
Do they even use a bluetooth keyboard? Surely this is asking for some kind of RSI.
I was showing my 14y/o BIL how to make a basic web server with python. He's been taking a python class in school and it was basically useless.
The kid has a gaming computer with a multi-monitor setup and when I was walking him through setting up WSL and vs code, he barely knew how to navigate his machine. Start menu? Huh? basic google searching? nuh uh, "drag that window onto your other display so we can reference it as we go "whoaa".
I'm happy to help but I can't imagine being given a nice computer at that age and not figuring out how to make it my own.
We must bring back awful PC ports that require you to implement ridiculous hacks whose only instructions are in README text files to get the gamers computer literate.
The only reason I have a degree in computer shit is because I needed to host a pirate minecraft server from the command line. My entire career in tech after that can be drawn as a straight line. I repurposed a computer from like 2003 to be an always-on debian based MC server that had well over a year of continuous uptime before being shut down.
Before MC it was pirating GTA: SA and Halo.
My company just switched to windows 11 and the UI is almost cartoonish
I fucking hate it
I just realized you can’t even drag the tab into its own window.
even Nautilus, the shittiest big name file manager in the world, has this feature
I didn't quite realize how profoundly terrible the iPhone mobile design has had on everything designwise.
Steve Jobs was just about Patient Zero for the plague of pretentious tech ceos wearing turtlenecks while rubbing their chins while receiving worship. :disgost:
iOS has actually good UI design most of the time. Desktop software is where UI design sucks, because there aren't any good UI frameworks for most programming languages.
Are GTK4 and QT6 not good enough?
The worst desktop UIs I see are all electron apps.
I'm 100% convinced there must be a better way to program GUIs than what these libraries with their massive class hierarchies do. I just don't know what it is. That stuff's painful to use. It's not so bad when you're just sticking to the premade widgets, but fuck you if you need to create your own widget, the whole glorious spaghetti mess of multiple levels of superclasses becomes visible. The other annoying thing is that I'm fairly convinced that correct way to structure the data→display pipeline is to write it like a stateless function. But you can't do that because GUI frameworks are like an eldritch horror of persistent state. Well I never figured it out, anyway. OO was a mistake.
Agreed 100%. UI stuff is always so clunky. Dozens of implementation attempts, none good.
I'm not actually familiar with them, but don't Elm & Relm4 fit that paradigm a lot better?
No side effects gang 😎
Can you use either of those from any language other than C++? And it really isn't convenient in any way to actually use existing GUI frameworks and publish desktop applications. The web stuff is so popular because it's easy to actually publish it in a polished form (as a website) or some packaged Windows program (Electron).
Yes there are bindings for tons of languages. The frameworks themselves are either C or C++, but applications targeting them can be any language with bindings.
Idk anything about Windows packaging, but Linux apps are easy enough to publish.
I know easy, consolidated web, mobile, & desktop UI is what makes electron so popular, but it's so sluggish with UI that doesn't fit in any native system.
GTK apps are so clean by comparison. Still largely unused, but the GTK broadway backend could be used to render apps in a browser.
Fucking wikipedia redesign. Who asked for this shit? Why is there so much white space and literally zero colors or borders? It's bad folks
What's worse is they have some article saying "Dark mode would take dev time so here's some workarounds and stuff you can download." Dark mode would improve readability 1000000x more than any redesign they could come up with. Its so infuriating.
Dark mode would take dev time
Shit's just css and a JS button to change it
When will game developers make a fucking video options screen properly
Don't make half the highest options "high", a quarter of them "ultra" and another quarter of them "extreme" and then give no indication of which is the highest option. Put a fucking couple of dots or a left right arrow that gets greyed out when its maxed one way or the other. i don't wanna check every single goddamn option.
And no, the top option to set the settings to the highest setting doesn't work. They almost always leave some shit still not on the highest setting.
FUCK.
I love CLI, I really do! I just think CLI can be a bit of a turn off for our non techie comrades. I love the fact with a few hotkeys and arguements I can do turbo-nerd shit with the computer, but I don't think people should have to be technowizards to navigate the systems and interfaces they deal with everyday. I would like if UI/UX had the common folk in mind, I feel like someone's granny can't do something with your tech you should have to redesign it.
developing UIs is a process of creating an abstraction that provides a mental model for interacting with a piece of software. trying to simplify the interface via visual metaphors can be powerful but it's hard to do well. yet language is equally flexible and it's generally easier for most people to design a linguistic interface than a visual one - we all have regular practice explaining how to do things to others. I think that's why CLI interfaces are usually more powerful and simpler to learn, if you can get past the upfront cost of computer literacy.
I love learning a common language with my computer and speaking to it with my fingers.
Hello little computer, please move to my pictures directory and upload "hahaha_yes.png".
The only thing that makes command lines useful is bash completion. And that can be really slow sometimes.
I've taken the black pill with regards to UI, which is that all UI is shit. UI only becomes "good" when you're used to it, and "good" UI that you encounter in the wild only seems that way because it's similar enough to UI that you're used to that it behaves close to your expectations. So UI will always seem to be getting worse, because new UI will always have elements that you're not used to making it seem bad, but UI will also always slowly get better, because you'll be getting used to it through exposure.
I’ve taken the black pill with regards to UI, which is that all UI is shit.
The only correct take. Anyone who has to do tech support for their boomer parents will learn this the hard way. There's never a time when a site redesign wouldn't cause them to completely panic. And the time when they finally acclimate to the new design is also the time when the site has another site redesign, beginning the cycle all over again.
There is no good UI. The least bad UI is the one you've used the most.
there's good principles like the three click rule and understanding that a screen isn't a piece of paper
It seems that there is no real driving aesthetic philosophy for systems we use every day.
I think it's the gui version of Zawinski's Law.
Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment, also known as Zawinski's Law, states:
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
Some have interpreted this as commenting on the phenomenon of software bloating with popular features:
Zawinski himself has stated:
My point was not about copycats, it was about platformization. Apps that you "live in" all day have pressure to become everything and do everything. An app for editing text becomes an IDE, then an OS. An app for displaying hypertext documents becomes a mail reader, then an OS.
Damn, I never heard of that this dude or this law in all my time online and in computer science. Very dope and insightful.
Apps that you “live in” all day have pressure to become everything and do everything.
So very on point espically for when something said ~15 years ago. Goddamn.
well jwz just spends his time nowadays getting mad about mastodon and that his web server cannot handle 1000 requests fast enough
I think some of it is grooming people over time to difficult, unintuitive interfaces so that eventually the user finds competing software "unusable" since the sunk cost to learn an interface is real. I believe this was what happened to WordPerfect back in the day. Businesses were lobbied to use MS products and the interfaces are different, I heard from people that they didn't use WordPerfect because the interface was "harder". I think it's just intentional sunk cost to encourage monopoly.
This is interesting as a theory because adobe internally accepted certain levels of piracy because they recognised that the piracy was giving them market domination. People were learning photoshop via piracy, and that would inevitably mean that's the tool that everyone knows therefore it would be purchased for business use. They were outwardly pursuing anti-piracy because that's what the system demands with respect to protecting your brand while internally they were actually leveraging it.
Bit different as no matter what graphics editing is always going to have a sunk-cost associated with learning. But your theory makes sense.
I disagree, UI/UX is generally designed after lots of user research and feedback
If you know how to use a CLI, you are nowhere near the average user of software
I do know how to use one, but I hate technology and live my normal life with less tech than the average zoomer and I think UI/UX is pretty nice to use nowadays
If you know how to use a CLI, you are nowhere near the average user of software
Good point and also very true!
I do know how to use one, but I hate technology...
:sicko-hexbear: As you should. That is the correct reponse to tech as someone who understands it, hating tech is good for the soul :sicko-hexbear:
I think UI/UX is pretty nice to use nowadays
Fair enough, personally I feel like so much of our interfacing with technology could be improved in a lot of different areas. I feel you though.
Cars are at least influenced by both safety regulations and aerodynamics. So a random outlandish shape might not be viable
Idk what's up with UI.
Good point! There are certain engineering principles govern design. It's wild if they applied UI/UX to cars.
Coming from a design profession, you betcha there are principles and standards but those are often fought over and treated as handicaps more than anything.
can’t show profit for your better designed software, as there are no competing programs. Say hi to monopolies.
I think only 3D space, and video editing is somewhat different, and even then davinci is close to premiere.
Also you have thousands functions you will always get 2-9 clicks on them.
I think mobile user interfaces are half decent. Desktop UIs suck except for video games, which sometimes have pretty slick UIs that are actually navigable (I always think of Overwatch here, but they've made it worse over time).
I think a lot of apps start with a good, well thought out UI, but as you add features on to the core, it becomes harder to fit all the features in one UI under the initial design, and they end up being tacked on in a non-intuitive way. UI design really is "design" in the same way designing the software is design. It requires "systems" and ways of mentally structuring things so users can organize it in their minds. That is difficult to do when you want to keep adding things incrementally. And you don't want to overhaul a UI too frequently, just like you don't overhaul the design of the code too frequently, because it would end up making the UI worse due to having to relearn it constantly. But I'm not a UI designer.
I do know that hamburger menus, invisible gestures instead of buttons (swipe to go back), and UI elements that move around while you're doing stuff (the stupid header and footer in every mobile app now), need to go. You're giving users nausea if everything is constantly sliding around on the screen. And it makes using it way too slow too.
GUIs suck, but if you think they've been getting worse you're just doing a nostalgic fallacy. We all hate change when we're not in the right mindset. It's also perfectly reasonable not wanting to relearn shit you already know how to do. With free software there often are some old farts keeping that these programs in working order so you can just keep on using your 40 year old text editor and 30 year old mail client, but with a lot of proprietary software and especially online services, you're basically forced to upgrade, which sucks.
BUT I'm actually fairly convinced people treat UI design way more seriously than back in the day, and the occasional good idea does indeed proliferate. Some software may be getting worse as it's getting more bloated or ruined by the marketing department, but the overall state of the art is improving I think.
