Why have desktop UI’s gotten so bad lately?
My theory is that before we had UX experts, they had to hire, like, actual graphics designers.
My theory is that before we had UX experts, they had to hire, like, actual graphics designers.
To me, Discord's UI - especially on mobile - exemplifies this perfectly. They change the image upload process every few months, alternating between various levels of decent and terrible design.
First it used to be one tap, then they put it in a submenu, now it's back to one tap but uploaded images get grouped together requiring tapping on them to scroll through, so we're forced to upload them one by one to have them show in the more convenient old way, making it still strictly a step back.
Add in the managers who think that not having large UI changes every few years is a sign of stagnation regardless of reason.
This explains a lot of user-unfriendly changes in other areas, too. I worked for a prominent travel web company and the army of people in marketing were constantly looking for new sources of "incremental revenue" to justify their work. This led to pop-unders and pages packed with more ads than content.
A couple of instances come to mind. The first was with CarPlay. They went from list of thing (playlists, podcasts, etc.) that you click on to get to a new section to a home page with a row of useless tiles and a "view all" that is difficult to get to if using something like a scroll wheel in a BMW. Thankfully the feedback was so bad that they reversed the decision. They made the mistake of thinking that everyone with a touchscreen in their car uses it.
The second is everything related to podcasts. Podcasts and music need to be completely isolated from one another because the method of browsing and maintaining are completely different. To this day there is no way to simply view a list that has all episodes for podcasts you follow and sort by recently updated. There is a "new episodes" thing that exists but if you click on something and back out it gets removed from the list. This assumes it is even updated, because clicking into loads from cache rather than doing a refresh. The only safe way to get an updated list of episodes is by hard closing the app and then re-opening it.
We don't know what we're doing.
- Corporate interests lead to enshitification and chasing after local maxima.
- We never learn from the past, new blood comes in faster than seniority can deal with.
- Trends and fashion give us comfort and a superficial feeling of (faux) improvement.
- Preferring change over stability.
- Vague methodologies and adages that sound good, instead of dry, actionable quality metrics.
- Proliferation of bureaucracy and marketing.
- Productization instead of standardization leads to a lack of foundations that can be relied upon.
I also think the death of native development has a lot to do with it. The web is now the UI layer of desktop, but that means there is no consistent design language across the system.
The big problem with classic Mac was the cooperative multitasking weird OS and the unstylish and clunky hardware. The UI needed polish and modernization but was not fundamentally bad.
The complete loss of OS coherence has a lot more to do with the web than anything else.
My guess is that this happened because real UI designers are harder to come by and cost more, while generalists are more common and cost less. I’ve not hired for these positions though so I don’t know for sure.