The Decline of Usability: Revisited (2023)

I recently cancelled my Spotify subscription because I just simply can't find my way around the app anymore. This is not an exaggeration—I really don't know anymore how to do basic stuff like getting to an album from a song (without going through a series of obscure right clicks).

I'm 38 and have used computers since I was 5.

This is not even software but somehow on/off switches are a challenge. When I was a kid I remember struggling to figure out how to use a power switch on an extension cord. You'd slide it one way and it revealed the word "on", and the other way revealed "off". But did that mean it was on when it said "on" or was "on" telling you to what moving the switch would do - which is how pause/play buttons on video players work today? 30 years later I got stuck with the same problem in my iPhone. Today they have green coloring to help but back then, I think it was more confusing. Computer monitors today are worse - you never know if it's blank because it's turned off (indicated by LED being on (or off) or a certain color) or no signal (indicated by LED being off (or on) or a different color).

I’ve dealt with bug reports where users turned out to be completely unaware that they could scroll an area of UI, but yet we continued the war on scroll bars. I thought that users literally not being able to use the product trumped aesthetics but the Jonny Ive inspired minimalism over functionality won out.

One other gripe that I have with modern UIs, which I didn't see mentioned (but which I might just have read past) is the scattering of controls in different places. Many are, of course, across the top in either a real menu or (yuck) a "ribbon", but others are down at the bottom, or along one side or the other of an app's window.

My recollection is that MsWord is particularly bad at this, but since I no longer have it installed (one reason is exactly this!), I can't show it.

But I do have Ms's Visual Studio Code on-screen. There is (thankfully) a real menu, with File, Edit, View and Help (the latter no longer exists on most Microsoft products). I happen to have a terminal open; it has six mostly indecipherable icons across the top of its pane. All the panes--the terminal, the file edit panes, and the "bar" at the right-hand side, have a '...', which seems to be the equivalent of a hamburger menu for that pane. Finally, the status bar down at the bottom of the window has still more indecipherable icons near the left end, and a few info things near the right end, some of which are controls ("Select Interpreter", inexplicably highlighted in brown with yet another icon), and some of which appear to be just info (line and column)--except these at the bottom of the window turn out to pull down a special menu item at the top of the window. For example, the control labeled "Ln and Col" (the latter means the character within the line, not the column in a tab-delimited file) pulls down a menu item that allows you to go to a particular line (but not a particular "column").

Thinks you can click on should look like things you can click on. This is why the hamburger menu is bad. Even people that have been in tech for decades often don't realize that's the menu they're supposed to click on. This is why it was bad all those years ago when "UX" suddenly became a thing and designers inserted their craft into everything as if they were in marketing or something.

There is a happy medium between something written by a ham radio operator in 1997 and what counts as "good ui design" today.

Though you probably shouldn't listen to me. I still prefer the look of the Windows 3.1 GUI.

I will truly never understand the mind of people who make decisions like "scroll bars should hide". They are like aliens to me, simply impossible to relate to.

Gawd, yes. Modern UIs are far less discoverable, and less usable, than their predecessors.

It's less about the look than the state. The article shows the complexity of Blender menus. But that's not the big problem. For an object to be visible, four things must be turned on. It's hard to figure out which setting is set wrong. Especially when a new release adds something new that has to be turned on.

This is a generic problem in Blender. You can't do something because you're in the wrong state, but nothing tells you that you're in the wrong state.

GNU GIMP has always been much worse than Photoshop in this way. When inserting text, the text is in a default size. If you change the size, and then click on a new insert point, it goes back to the default size. Whether or not the last change has been committed is not obvious, and until it has been committed, many menus and icons do nothing, silently. Selection vs. layers vs. commits are very confusing. Just keeping the dockable menus visible is tough.

IMO, Human Interfaces Guidelines should be primarily thought of as a foundational layers, like a standard library for common patterns. But the true driver of UX should always be the domain, be it word processing, 3d modelling, or graphic editing. Instead, we have company branding and oversimplification.

I've moved to Emacs, TUI, and CLI tools to escape the madness, not because they'r e better, but they let you do stuff and are at least stable so you don't have to alter your workflow every quarter.

I think they make valid points (they really do describe the problems with many modern UI that I see, and that many older ones are much better), but they did miss a few things, such as:

- Having keyboard commands is helpful.

- Good documentation is very helpful; a program is understandable if it is documented.

- Some of the difficulty seems to be due to the programming environments and libraries that are used for making these programs; due to badly designed UI libraries and programming environments, the result will also be bad. However, this is not the only thing that can cause these problems.

- On a computer it should also be helpful that the operator is able to make other external programs and can interact with them too, with your software. Command-line programs, user configuration settings, API, etc, can also be helpful in doing this.

FTA: Another widespread source of influence was IBM Common User Access from 1987, which among other things introduced […] the ellipsis ("...") to indicate menu choices that opened a dialog window.

I think that the Mac, possibly even the Lisa had that before the CUA. https://andymatuschak.org/files/papers/Apple%20Human%20Inter..., page 23: “A dialog box appears whenever the user chooses a menu item that is followed, in the menus itself, by an ellipsis (…)”

Irreducible complexity is a good term. I think that's the problem with modern IDEs. Writing code is a complex task that can take infinitely many different forms. Sometimes all I need is just notepad or nano. Other days I need to look at four files, debug output, and an SSH session at the same time.

In order to solve this irreducible complexity, all modern IDEs are simply trending toward the simplest, """cleanest""", bare minimum of functionality.

It might look great to your UX design artists that want that promotion you promised, but where the rubber meets the professional with thousands of hours of experience, it falls apart. By removing complexity from your tools, you remove the ability to do complex tasks.

When my work involves processing huge amounts of information as fast as I can and my tools doggedly remove as much information as possible from my screen... Do these 'designers' actually know any programmers? Does anyone involved here actually write complex programs where you actually need the hidden 90% of functionality?

I've given up at this point. I canceled my JetBrains subscription and I'll be using the 2024.1 versions of all tools until someone comes out with a more modern IDE that's designed to be used by professionals and not children or c-suite types.