| > This sort of worked when the opinionated manager was Steve Jobs. Steve indirectly had a hand in this, by emphasizing the humanities. That, unfortunately, backfired as a sort of positive feedback loop. Someone hired a few underemployed artists onto the team, and the artists invited all their friends and soon took over the department. People that in an alternate timeline would be smoking weed whilst sculpting wood in a derelict loft somewhere are now the lead designers, using our software as the canvas of a perpetual avant-garde art piece. They also need to look productive to justify their jobs, so the need to change things is constant. That's why in 2026 you could have a PhD in CS and still need to watch a YouTube video to learn how to change the volume. Can anyone name a single substantive UI improvement in the last 20 years? They're simply hiding or moving stuff around at this point while no one has even touched accessibility. |
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that most of the problem can be traced back to the transition to Mobile first design. The motivations were arguably pretty innocent in general. If there were no downsides, it’s nice that there isn’t a separate code base and an entirely separate set of capabilities for desktop and little 5-inch phone screens. However, the way that we have achieved that - nearly across the board - is by lobotomizing the experience everywhere.
And because of fashion (those artists who control the UX can’t resist it), even in places where that doesn’t even make any sense because there is no mobile version (say, B2B SaaS products that only get used on a desktop), they still feel the need to cosplay as a mobile app by using all the same stupid design elements (the ••• and “hamburger” menus, the giant grids of “tiles” that should have been a table, etc.