Our interfaces have lost their senses

When iOS had a couple gestures to get away from needing physical buttons, things were pretty good.

However once you realize that you can add new gestures without having to defend adding a physical or screen real estate button, it takes a lot of discipline to avoid adding more. I like to think that Steve would have told most of their people to fuck off and we’d have one or two new gestures now, instead of twice as many. They would have found some other way.

Also, just to add to that because it's on my mind now, I think there's a ratchet effect to "UI that screams at you" or at least "UI that tries to tap into my senses". The more of it becomes common place, the more people expect to be able to annoying you, via your devices.

It doesn't matter that I can force my phone's vibration motor to only output an anemic "buhhhh..." no mater what coeffienct of bothersomeness some app sends to it. The person causing my phone to make that API call still expects the cacophony of pain to emit from it. We all become numb to how annoying this all is because it becomes the standard TO BE annoyed and distracted.

The uber eats sound is annoying because it conveys nothing except "whatever you're doing is unimportant!!!! PAY ATTENTION TO UBER!! UBER THINGS ARE HAPPENING!!!". There's a million other better ways to do that, so *I* find the information. *I* go to the stupid glass brick when *I* can take on a new order. But because we already set the expectation that the user is allowed to set off an alarm in any kitchen in the city for the low-low price of overpaying for food, the stupid glass brick tells ME when it's time to deal with it.

Spatial computing (like the example of a note taking app) now introduces all of the extra work of cleaning to a digital note. The computer wants me to sort my own notes now. It opens up the potential of being an e-slob for no reason other than my ability to make it as equally messy as my desk.

I don't know why we would expect this even-more sensory-focused model of computing to not also ratchet up the stress and dread of being alive.

I'm 27 going on 95 I guess, just send me to the old folks home now lol

Agreed.

> I WILL become a chicken farmer

Chicken don't hold a reputation of being calm and considerate about what noise at what level they'll emit during the day or the night.

If I can advise, silk worm farming could be it

> This is a beautifully designed and illustrated page.

Hard disagree. It's incredibly distracting and the constant movement of text, the introduction and disappearance of images within the medium makes it incredibly difficult to concentrate on the message.

It screams 'look at me, I'm really smart with all these neat effects'. But you know what interface for articles like this has served us pretty well for > 1000 years? Just the words. Please, just display the words rather than this conceit.

Our interfaces have more modalities than before but they are disconnected from both physical and emotional reality. Buzzes and dings and flaps are nothing like hearing a happy shout from a friend or feeling the 'clunk' of an actual motor starter engaging.

I totally agree with OP that the 'flat' visual style is appalling. (And gray-on-gray text is an obscenity.)

The article reads like a description of personal computing in the late 90s to early 2000s. It also reads very similarly to Apple’s early marketing around multitouch displays.

There has been a number of attempts at making screens create tactile bumps and provide direct feedback which haven't yet worked which might improve physical interaction somewhat so we can get buttons and switches and knobs in a programmable way that isn't hardware specific to the task but we aren't there yet.

Beautiful? It looks like utter garbage to me. I really can't abide that twee visual style. The designer is trying way too hard and completely lost the plot.

Honestly using GenAI slop pictures to illustrate the article about the soullessness of modern computing clashes with the message in a way I don't think the author intended.

  > Our interfaces haven't lost their senses. Our interfaces have more senses than they've ever had before.

I find a lot of interfaces INFURIATING. My car wants to do things with touch screens while I want to feel because I want to keep my eyes on the road. My iPhone won't capitalize the letter I and will change not just the word I'm typing but the word previous to it making swipe style texting painful to use. Speaking of the iPhone, it's 2025 and there's no universal back. I still don't know how to exit the YouTube popup asking me to activate my free trial of premium other than swiping close the whole app and reopening[1]. Or I scroll through an app with threads (e.g. Twitter) and I move slightly left or right and bam I'm on a different tab and when I move back I'm not where I left off but somewhere completely new.

You may say "well that's a 'you' problem, I'm happy with the way things are" and my point is that humans are all different. There's no one size fits all. Maybe that swiping thing happens because our thumbs are different sizes or our phones are different sizes. Maybe you like light mode and don't open any websites with the lights off. But that difference is what makes us human. The problem is that things are converging to things that are bad for everyone. Design matters a lot and getting used to a design is very different than designing things around people. A well designed product needs no instructions (obviously not absolute), just see the "Norman Door."[2] We shit on backend developers for making shitty UIs (as a 'backend' person, I agree, this deserves criticism) but I don't think the front end people are at all concerned with design now a days either. There's a special irony with Apple, considering the magic was the interaction between Jobs and Woz. The magic is when the good backend meets good frontend. Yet now we're just doing both like it is a competition of who can create the worst thing the fastest.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News

[1] I now use Orion browser. The video quality is lower but it is better than dealing with this bullshit.

[2] https://99percentinvisible.org/article/norman-doors-dont-kno...

To add insult to injury, not only is everything inconsistent thanks to incessant wheel reinvention, nearly all of the reinvented wheels are halfassed at best and missing functionality compared to what they’re replacing. When a company writes a new widget to match their theme they only build the bare minimum necessary to visually match mockups. UI controls have become vapid and devoid of function.

I'm currently using Gnome and their UI may not be the most beautiful or complete, but they've gone all in on consistency. I don't mind software like Blender, Audacity, and others having their own design systems as their domain is much more complicated. But a lot of software only needs a few controls and the native ones should suffice.

Agree. The constant UI reinvention of lately is super strange to me. Companies want to save money but most developer time in simple apps is spent on it.

I remember 20-25 years ago mostly using Windows widgets to make Enterprise apps. It was fast to make, fast to run, and users back then knew how to use. Didn't look the best, but at least was consistent.

The next 5 years we sort of tried to do our best, but most things were still sort of standard-ish.

Then for about 5 years or things like Bootstrap, Material, etc, dominated. It was nothing special, but at least consistent between apps.

But in the last 10 years pretty much every company I worked on had a custom UI built ENTIRELY from scratch by a designer and a small army of developers to implement it. It looks "the same but different" in an uncanny valley way.

I honestly feel like this is the worst possible use of frontend developers, period. Not only from a financial perspective but also from an end result.

But hey jobs are generated so what do I know...

The "great flattening" fashion has made computers harder to use for many people.

Older UIs separated computer output from where user input is expected. Compare Windows 7 or 2000 to Windows 10 or 11 and the older Windows versions win. It's the same with Android.

UX designers follow fashion as much as the garment manufacturers on the catwalks of Milan, even if the fashion is uncomfortable.

Just because something is new, that doesn't mean it is better.

There is also a big elephant in the room that we are sort of ignoring with the whole AI stuff, which is when flat design came about, a lot of the designers who weren't really good now suddenly had jobs because everybody could put a flat thing on the page and call it a "button".

Good designers still exist but they are simply crowded out.

The same is happening today with the AI generated apps. Most front ends now in another 10 years will be filled with AI generated apps. But good design and applications will be around but they will be crowded out.

And you see this in almost other industries as well. For example, architecture has simply gotten worse. A building from today looks much, much worse than let's say a building from even 300 years back.

So we will simply have worse software and worse performing software which breaks down all the time in the near future and we will all suffer but there is no solution out of this.

Things don't always get better.

Definitely AI generated.

https://wattenberger.com/thoughts/our-interfaces-have-lost-t...

What are those floating letters? Does the keyboard have 3 rows of keys, or 4? What's going on near where the esc key should be? Why does the screen look like the back of a park bench?

Did we read the same article?

  > The real challenge is that UI designs are ultimately constrained by their hardware.

The problem is what you mean by "UI"

UI means "User Interface". It does not mean "Software defined User Interface".

  User interfaces are composed of one or more layers, including a human–machine interface (HMI) that typically interfaces machines with physical input hardware (such as keyboards, mice, or game pads) and output hardware (such as computer monitors, speakers, and printers). 

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_interface

> truly revolutionary interfaces tend to require equally revolutionary hardware to match

The prime examples given were about mixing and matching capabilities that most hardware already has. Most computers and tablets already have a microphone and some kind of tactile input (touch or keyboard).

So, I wouldn’t say that you’re wrong in tying UI innovations to hardware, but it feels like perhaps you didn’t read the whole article. We can innovate by remixing existing functionality without having to wait on entirely new paradigms being adopted and universally available.

It didn't help that bigger companies were hungry to integrate vertically and build the biggest moat they could, to the point it became a "eat as much as you can" landscape.

When Steve Jobs was saying DropBox is not a product but a feature, it surely didn't reassure DropBox that they could keep making simple and transparent services that the platform owner will gently play nice with.

This is a true gem of a thought that every designer should consider at the outset of a project: "Some things are an experience, other things should just be quietly useful."

Consistent use of context menus would actually be a boon, because it’s a single mechanism that can be applied everywhere, and just opening a context menu is a benign interaction (no fear of triggering some undesired action). The disappearance of context menus is one thing that I lament about modern UIs (another is tooltips). There may be “share” or “ellipsis” or long-press menus, but they are highly inconsistent, and you never know where to look for desired or possible actions.

But don't you love buttons with ad-hoc icons and no text and no explanation of what they do and they don't even have any visual indication that they're buttons? :)

>Thankfully, the X-T5 is covered in physical dials, switches and buttons. Without looking at the camera's screen, I can quickly change shooting modes and the majority of the settings I care about and be confident that I changed the right things.

> The same cannot be said about a large number of modern cameras, which opt instead for a more digital approach.

I feel you. I can only imagine the horror of looking at a small but very bright touch screen in the dark, eyes adjusting, etc.

> So much so that I've recently been finding myself looking to recreate this tactile experience on my general purpose computers. I've been looking at weird bespoke dials, switches and various input hardware to make processing the photos (among other tasks) feel more tactile.

A physical knob on my desk to precisely control the volume of the speakers is a very handy one for me. Don't know how to live without that. Especially because one big yank on the knob mutes unsuspected annoying sounds.