| > UIs are expected to reflow to devices with different screen sizes and dot pitches > Users expect their programs to give them up-to-the-minute information from the internet, with slick animation and nuanced typography. Do these requirements really come from the users? Or do they, in fact, come mainly from tech people? I never understood this mentality that mobile devices must be considered at all costs for all cases, and it seems to me that this mentality comes and always came from industry people, not users. I suspect this is related to three things: - The laptop/PC market is "saturated", in the sense that it can no longer hyper-grow, so it's not so convenient to make a billion or two; - A new zoo of careers paths has grown out of mobile and the startup era: UX designer, Product-Whatever, Growth-"Hacker", Agile Wizard, Evangelist Something etc, etc. It's very hard to convince someone of something when they salary depends on them not believing it, says the cliché but is true; - It is more lucrative to show ads to passive consumers than to sell software to creators.* This is a situation where the current game of Silicon Valley capitalism (copied everywhere) configures a race to the bottom in terms of the expression of human potential. * This is why, even when you want to buy a tool, you now have to "subscribe to a service", with the loss of sense of ownership and control that comes with it. |
I think a lot of them come from the "expectations" about computing created by the world of web applications. And those requirements themselves come from, most importantly, the advertising industry. In one way or another, by varying but important degrees, advertising defines how we create these interactive systems and worsens the user/developer divide