| Yes, I absolutely think they do, whether they realise it or not. Overall I believe that computers have never been harder to use and this "nobody cares" attitude is exactly why. To use my father as an example, he sat at work with computers on his desk for 20 years, running everything from Windows 3.11 to Windows XP. He never had a problem using or understanding the computers in front of him because generally any pattern that he learned in one place would apply pretty much everywhere else on the system. Buttons had a uniform look. Radio controls worked the same way. Menus were in predictable places and had similar structures. Toolbar icons, if present, had a uniform appearance. Folders and files were presented uniformly. Tooltips appeared over many things if you hovered your mouse pointer over them. Embossing, solid, thick and dotted lines all had meaning designed to guide the user in certain directions. Disabled controls looked visibly non-interactive. Even "Open", "Print" and "Save" dialogs were globally consistent. In that regard, older versions of Windows were beautiful in their simplicity — they were uniform and predictable. The same is true of classic Mac OS also. The reason for this is because both Microsoft and Apple spent a lot of time and energy working with real world users to figure out what made sense and what needed work. The result was that they both ended up with clear user interfaces that had learnable visual cues. Then this aesthetic design trend started and now user interfaces have never been more unclear. Overwhelmingly UI elements are now flat or inconsistent in their appearance. It isn't clear at a glance which objects are interactive and which aren't, or what the side effects will be when you click on given thing. To make this worse, Electron happened, effectively leaving developers (who usually have completely insufficient understanding of user experience or design) to roll their own user interface toolkits and to build applications that end up looking nothing like anything else on the system. So now you don't just have to contend with the fact that the operating system controls aren't as friendly as they used to be, but now every application is out there trying to play by its own rules too, with their own designs and their own learning curves. Now we're in a situation where very little of what you learn in one application makes sense or applies in another, which is the epitome of user hostility. I spend a lot of time trying to remotely diagnose wildly inconsistent applications over the phone and try to help him make sense of the mess that is modern day desktop computing. He rightly finds it confusing and overwhelming. Even in my own experience, modern macOS isn't much better. At this point, Microsoft's "Official Guidelines for User Interface Developers and Designers" (2001) and Apple's "Human Interface Guidelines" (1995) should be mandatory reading for everyone who thinks they know better. There's real psychology and methodology to building a good user experience. Every single detail matters. |
He is older now, still fully cognizant and lucid and gladly aging has not taken its toll yet, but he has mostly given up on computers for the very reason you write about so well -- interfaces became more and more fractured.
Things are not where they ought to be, they look different across different applications on the same operating system, they behave in different manners, and all these idiosyncrasies add up quickly, so he resigned and became mostly a consumer of content rather than a user or creator of such. He still has an old PowerBook (next to his modern M1 one) with an old copy of Adobe Illustrator as a poor man's CAD to draw and print things like cable installations and load-bearing sections of walls. It saddens me because he has such a great talent.
While we came to where we are today as mostly a slow decline, I would say it was a two-punch combo that finally broke user interfaces for good: First the complete annihilation of skeuomorphism in favour of design without any cues whatsoever, it might have looked ugly and certain abstract concepts might not have mapped well to the semantics of the physical world, it still offered a clear distinction of what was "interact-able" and what was not. And second, the introduction of Electron-type applications finally ended it.
I'm not sure there is a way out of this hole, so I am mostly resigned to not complaining to developers of apps like the original author either. Because what good does it do?