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?
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 😎