[noodles_nomore]

In the 90s people worked really hard to draft up universal standards of what makes UI usable and intuitive. Most of it tends to be ignored nowadays. Try teaching an old person how to use a smart phone some time. Just some bullet points:

* Apps feel generally disorganized. Buttons are unlabled. Many things are hidden somewhere between layers of unlabled buttons. In the past you could count on the menu bar giving you quick access to anything.

* Lack of functionality / composability. Avoidance of the file system. Tunnel menus that you have to take one step at a time.

* Every program has UI that works and looks differently, made worse because even the same programs redesign their own UI periodically.

* Flat design. Lack of 'affordances'. Buttons don't look like buttons, draggable things don't look like they're draggable. E.g. scroll bars in the past had this serration to suggest interaction. This leads to hidden features and surprises, where things that seem like static images suddenly hide important functionality.

* Lack of configurability. Configurable Toolbars, arrangeable view panes, tabs etc. And unnecessary limits even when you can configure things. Like, Firefox only has a list of preset zoom levels, to get finer zoom levels you have to go into about:config. Or the fact that it limits the size of tabs to a rather large minimum. For no reason at all.

* Lack of consistent (or even discoverable) keyboard navigation. Rebinding short cuts is not a thing anyone seems to care about anymore.

* Readability, use of space. This applies more to the web, but grey text, ultra-narrow columns, inconsistent scaling.

[amluto]

> Buttons are unlabled. Many things are hidden somewhere between layers of unlabled buttons.

My car hides map functionality in buttons that are simply not present until you interact with the map in some magic way that triggers a heuristic that you want the buttons to appear. Slowly.

When I want to see chargers drawn on the map, I don’t want to move the map. So why TF do I have to move the map to convince the software to draw the button so I can tap it? While driving or perhaps waiting at a red light.

[JohnFen]

Every time I watch people use modern in-car navigation systems, I think "wouldn't it be a lot easier and safer to just use the phone instead?"

[seydor]

> Try teaching an old person how to use a smart phone some time

Also, try to teach a young person to use an old program, or an older version of an office program

[usrbinbash]

> Also, try to teach a young person to use an old program

Funny enough, the few times I had to do that, it turned out to be easy.

Why? Because the software may not look shiny, but it's obvious and discoverable. There is the menu-bar. It says "File". The assumption that "File" is the right place to look for the button that saves the work to a file is one that comes pretty naturally. And of course the keybind is written right there next to the menu item.

Ugly? Maybe. But it's obvious and gets the job done.

Now let's look at some "modern" software, and the Button to save is...yeah, anyones guess really where it is.

Might be in some hamburger or sub-hamburger.

Might be in some animated menu that I have to scroll beyond the various cloud-store options to store to disk, which is a common dark pattern, because cloud solutions are something I can sell, while the users disk isn't.

There might be some gesture-based menu, even in desktop apps.

It may be a button in the interface, but which one is anyones guess ... because apparently the floppy disk icon is not "modern" enough, so there may be any combination of boxes, arrows, arrows in boxes, or whatever happened to be the ultimate wisdom in save-button design at the time.

I have seen apps where it was in the "Share" menu, right next to whatsapp and facebook integration, because these are vitally important options for all apps apparently.

[dizhn]

Having an actual Save button or shortcut is a luxury nowadays. I will admit autosaving is convenient. But there are still places where network connectivity is spotty and one wants to actually confirm that the thing is saved. You're lucky to have a little icon color change or text that says the stuff on the screen is saved. Even when such text exists, it's often off the visible screen. Worse, sometimes a form button will not work and the error message is not visible until you look for it at the bottom or the top of the page where it's not visible.

My other usability pet peeve. Traversing a big number if things by paging. The UI will not give you the total number of pages anymore. You can increment 2 pages at a time. Sometimes you can change the url to try later pages but not always. Sometimes there will be a button for the last (final) page but when you click it, it doesn't exist. To make this even worse most times this is loaded via JavaScript so if you're on the equivalent of page 50. The next time you get there you have to keep loading more until you're on 50 again. There is no way to bookmark state or go there directly. I am assuming this is a JavaScript Json thing that somehow became a pattern, like getting a total count is now impossible or something.

[hedora]

My kindergartener definitely picked up conventional linux desktops faster than iPadOS.

(It's whatever Manjaro defaults to. It looks like xfce, but I'm pretty sure it's KDE. The point being that I don't know because it's not configured terribly out of the box like modern gnome.)

The minecraft launcher does regularly bring him to literal tears though. :-(