[user3939382]

> if you rely on something ... aesthetic importance drops really fast

IMHO it bothers me more because I'm forced to experience it more. It's like the annoyance accumulates. I may care more about UI than the average user though, or maybe I'm just more able to articulate my thoughts about it because of my profession? Not sure.

[godshatter]

In some ways I prefer the older interfaces to more modern ones because, even though they were ugly, it was often more obvious what was clickable, what workflow was expected, and if you needed something it would probably be in the horrendous menu tree somewhere. Nowadays it's often impossible to determine what is clickable and what is not, but things look much prettier. I don't really need pretty, it's just a nice-to-have. Of course there are newer interfaces that are easy to understand and older interfaces that are borderline unusable. It's just been my experience that an older interface will be easier to use, though probably more annoying to go through. YMMV.

[graypegg]

I think the clearest delimitation between old and new is a lot of old interfaces really tried to make every GUI element appear distinct. I think as we presume that users are familiar with basic GUI elements we’ve started replying on them having intuition from context clues instead. “The button doesn’t look pushable, but we know that you expect a button here anyway.”

I signed up for a Lemmy instance a while ago, and just stopped using it because the default lemmy web UI adopted 2010s worst trend of making buttons, text areas, and combo boxes all the exact same featureless rounded pill. It’s legitimately difficult to use on a phone. One big pile of pills that do random things.

[graypegg]

Humans are pattern-matching machines though. I think anyone, UX-designer or not, can notice annoyances that are clearly just not following the obvious pattern.

I know people that have quit jobs, because they were forced to use software that “I could never learn”. (Salesforce) It got in the way of them doing their job.

However, I’ve seen way more people tolerate an outdated or badly styled UI because “it just works for me, ok?”. No one is quitting a job because their CRM is aesthetically unpleasing.

[JohnFen]

As a dev, I've never quit a job because I didn't like the software I had to use. But if I'm evaluating whether or not to take a position somewhere, the use of certain software is certainly a mark in the minus column.