Modern UI design is such a colossal nightmare of inconsistent command lists, hidden menus, changing interface behavior, duplicative functionality... My understanding is that many developers now engage in "telemetry-based design" that work to redesign interfaces around user behavior, leading to such excellent decisions as

- W11: emoving directory line tracing from File Explorer and nesting all file locations under "Desktop"

- Spotify: removing the iPod-style sub-locations for Artists, Albums, Playlists, etc. and instead showing them all as a continuous "library" where you filter for content based on buttons that reorder themselves and spill off the right side of the screen

- Google: constantly reordering the "images", "shopping" etc buttons depending on what it thinks you're most likely to click on

And it slows everything down! Every application seems to need to send telemetry back to the hosts. Spotify won't even render your "downloads" section in under 20 seconds if you're not connected to the Internet.

Not only is this modern UI field hell for actually experienced users (where are the function grids? Why is everything a two-color React card now?), I believe it's dumbing down non-technical users.

I sometimes send a picture of a well-ordered woodshop wall and a picture of a Tesla interior to sinternal company designers to ask them to stop turning every functional tool our internal ops people use into a point-and-click iPad program for toddlers. Give us the woodshop, not the white-seat-and-tablet view. Even that doesn't always work! I recently sent some devs an Excel mockup of a very tight, neat "task creation form" menu and they turned it into a disorganized nightmare of React fields with none of the visual justification and sorting enabled by the spreadsheet view. What is going on? Why are people allergic to functional UIs all of a sudden?