Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cyberax 4 days ago
Linear enshittified their UI in the name of "clarity". You know the drill: remove functionality, add small icons with invisible text and HUGE padding, hide controls, etc.

For example, the search field only shows if you press "ctrl-f".
2 comments
lenkite 3 days ago
This pretty much sounds like the result of AI coding. No - I am not being facetious. This is exactly how AI generates websites like an unergonomic stamp quite contrary to a way an experienced CSS/UX designer would do.

Somehow the web-sites AI generates and the websites an experienced human manually creates are very different.

link
smt88 4 days ago
I wouldn’t call it enshittification because there’s no business purpose to it.

It’s more like Applification. Apple removes every hint the user needs to know how to use its UIs in the name of “simplicity,” which makes them undiscoverable and complex.

link
majormajor 4 days ago
Apple generally makes it hard to do non-default things, but "basic" functionality is usually evident. E.g. it's not hard to delete a photo in the iPhone photos app; but it's multiple taps to get to manual edit options through a non-obvious-to-newcomers "sliders" button first and then a pen button on the top side of the screen (whereas the first edit button was on the bottom). Advanced stuff isn't discoverable, basic stuff generally is (there are exceptions, of course).

This wave of business apps (Notion is another one) takes things one step further and hides even more things, even the simple stuff. They make it hard to do even a lot of the things I'd consider bare-minimum. The Atlassian apps were't much better, and were in many ways even more annoying, but at least they didn't hide the basic biz-app functionality as much.

link
cyberax 4 days ago
Yeah, agreed. We need another word for that. Literally everybody in the industry is affected by this.

Typically it goes like this: you make a good UI that users like and release your product. The product manager gets rightfully promoted and starts working on other stuff.

A new manager comes in, and they can't really do much. The UI is already close to perfect, after all. So they do a major UI overhaul that inevitably removes/hides functionality and makes things worse.

link