[culebron21]

My impression is that almost everything that's made with touchscreen is a worse of an interface. I think the're four big reasons:

1) the notion of design has been subtly replaced with style;

Sleek wins over functional. For instance, scroll bars on desktop UIs were thrown away, because they were too fat for phones, and phone UI now sets the trend. So nobody among designers cared that the scrollbar you see with peripheral vision does help you orient in apps.

2) styles are in perpetual rat race, you must be trendy and throw away anything that's drawn to 5-year-old fashion;

3) constant feature creep; Social network VK offered music playing, but over the last 5-6 years the number of taps it takes to start playing grew from 3 to 6 or 8 if you need a particular playlist. It's just awful and irritating.

Consider public transit apps. In my city, you must do 15-20 taps to see the routes you need. I struggle to do this while walking. And I have a good vision -- imagine how tough it is for an old man. But a public sector manager, who drives a new sleek Mercedes and never took a bus/trolleybus last 20 years, tells you this is the future.

4) imprecision of touchscreens and curvature of a thumb. Feature creep requires to stick more and more items in the screen, and on a phone, you must be able to hit 1*1 mm area with a rather flat surface of your thumb.

I've only driven Renault Logan derivatives that have no touchscreen, and kinda scared of the perspective to have to deal with touchscreen while driving.

[ethbr0]

The problem is modern attempts to birfurcate UX into silos of efficiency-agnostic design art + implementation-only engineering.

If you call designers artists, remove objective KPIs, and give them free reign, you get one-button mice. Similarly, if you let engineers build something, you end up with git's cli.

In contrast, design and use been studied as a unified discipline since the early 1900s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_motion_study

Taking decades to reinvent a preexisting organizational wheel is why "Humble" should be a corporate value in every company: learn from the past.

I drive a 2015 Hyundai Genesis. Why? Because I test drove recent Infinities and Mercedes (and I can't stand Lexus' grill). Knobs with tactile bumps work.

> Social network VK offered music playing, but over the last 5-6 years the number of taps it takes to start playing grew from 3 to 6 or 8 if you need a particular playlist

(Cue MySpace laughing in the corner, smugly rocking zero-touch autoplay since the early-00s)

[tomrod]

> If you call designers artists, remove objective KPIs, and give them free reign, you get one-button mice. Similarly, if you let engineers build something, you end up with git's cli.

Am I in the wrong to think both of these are plenty functional to the point I like them?

A one button mouse functions a lot like a touchbad when you factor in meta keys (at least to my memory -- I've only ever used one in conjunction with schooling years due to low-Apple footprint). And having learned git cli recently, it seems to make sense to me.

But I agree generally -- silo boundaries can lead to poor results due to ignoring second order effects and holistic user experience (your users aren't siloed).

[ethbr0]

Regarding the optimal number of buttons on mice, I'd respectfully observe that the average number of human fingers on a hand is 5.

And as for git cli, I have no problem with it (conceptually or practically), but I also accept that most people aren't us.

It's moderately difficult to build something that's perfect for yourself: it's much harder to build something that's optimal for everyone not-you.

[culebron21]

I used Mercurial CLI in 2010-2016, before finally having to completely switch to git. I almost never had to memorize or look hg commands up. In Git, I routinely need to google that same answer on SO for flags. I do understand that it's the real inner machinery, and back in 2009 I did read how git works, but still cli is hard to remember.

[twic]

In some ways, the Git CLI is easier: whatever you're trying to do, the command you need is always "checkout".

[mguerville]

Mobile stabbed the scroll bar but SPAs and infinite scroll put the nail in their coffin.

My other pet peeve triggered by your transit app comment is creeping privacy intrusion. I use a private DNS and can barely go a week without having to tweak my allow-list because an app that use to work fine now is blocked because they added yet another tracker. Looking at you Park Chicago, CTA apps, and seemingly every public service app I’ve ever used.

[waboremo]

None of these reasons are exclusive to touchscreens, you haven't really justified why the touchscreen results in a worse experience. Even the scrollbar example, phones have those still, they just aren't the huge glossy things of windows XP. Or the idea that feature creep requires more items on the screen, when the reality is different, features get dropped and more things are hidden under different tabs. Which is a problem itself, but not the one you're describing.

I do agree however regarding accessibility. But again, this problem exists no matter the interface. Old people aren't thriving on desktops, they're struggling to manage flip phones with actual large buttons on them. We need to do more here, but I sincerely doubt changing the interface will solve the problem entirely.