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The hamburger menu, the account picker and the huge share pill, they all look exactly like that!
Congrats OP this meme actually annoyed me 😭Yesterday describing how to do a thing to my wife over the phone “The menu button” “There is no menu button” “It’s a hamburger icon” “What?” “3 lines” “How is that a menu?”
I often help my parents use their phones.
It is so hard when every app they use has its own garbage bespoke design language and you get such pearls as:- Buttons and tabs can be any combination of Colored Square, White Square with Outline or Grey Text on White Background (and they switch every screen!)
- Modals without a scroll bar so you can’t tell there’s a “Confirm” button at the bottom
- Awfully confusing share dialogs before the Native system share sheet opens
- Inconsistent iconography
- Overflow menus hidden behind 3 dots, 3 lines or neither
I feel like it’s almost second nature for tech savy people to wade thru this crap but for your average granny this shit is practically unparseable.
And then we have insanity like Instagram, where the logo opens a separate area
How the hell does the logo ever load anything but the home screen?
I’m working on a mobile app, this commentary is very helpful to me.
If you want to help the grannies of the world, grab an older budget device with a not so big screen resolution and crank the device scale / text size super high.
Man, you would not believe what havoc that causes on most apps.I know responsive design is hard but damn…
I think a great test is grab a 5 year old budget phone with low screen resolution and slow CPU, and hand it to a few people with your app on it for a few minutes. See what they complain about or can’t figure out.
Back during covid we sent my wife’s grandparents a smart phone so they could video call. They only had a dumb brick phone.
I forget what model but it was one specifically aimed at easy of use for seniors. We had it delivered so I could set it up. Then delivered it to them ready to go.
It was impossible. Even just answering a call being touch and hold the green circle then slide it 2cm in any direction and release took nearly an hour.
My wife does social care now and a client yesterday had managed to enable audio description on his firestick. This is what i was explaining. Hold back and menu on the remote to turn it on/off. He’d probably done it by accident and now his TV is explaining everything on screen after every button press and he has no clue where to even begin to turn it off. It’s utterly incomprehensible. I’m sure they thought it was a good idea to have a way to turn it on that doesn’t need you to see the screen.
We’ve got my 95 old grandma https://enna.care/ and she can use it. Instead of having to use the touch interface it works by placing cards on to an NFC reader.
This is awesome! My Dad has trouble speaking so voice commands are no go. I wonder if the cards can be customized by someone they trust for new/other actions.
It’s because tech savvy people see digital products like old people would see a thingamajig out of a woodshop. We have an inherent understanding that the thing we’re looking at had a creator intention behind it, as well as an understanding that they may have done a poor job implementing that intention. We understand more underlying patterns to look for. We have a deeper intuition of what is “right” and that any “wrong” can be infinitely different than any other “wrong.” We know the internet isn’t prod; the internet is like your feature branch on steroids. We understand that the internet often uses fancy tricks to scale, and those tricks can lead to behaviors which seem to contradict causality (e.g., distributed systems, you receive a message before it was sent because of eventual consistency). These are problems we’ve been exposed to over and over, forced ourselves to work our way through them, even built some of the machines that had these issues.
Old people had similar advantages with things like housework, woodwork, automotive work, …
Very Adobe
Yet both should learn from each other.
The FOSS world needs more UX/UI specialists.
Donate to your favorite project.
The FOSS world needs more UX/UI specialists.
Or even just hobbyists…
Personally I think a lot of FOSS maintainers are burning out. If you maintain a remotely popular project you basically have a second unpaid job.
For the average user — yes; for me — I don’t care.
Most of my work is in the terminal either way so I tend to care way more about a searchable documentation, reference, manual. Other than that I really like the textual toolbar with dropdowns plus some context menus.
I want my interface to be dense with accessible information.There’s room for flare tho, I still need feedback on my actions: hovers, drags, clicks, etc.
No.
Please expand on your posture. I’m intrigued.
UX and UI specialists is how you get the crap that is foisted on us today.
Famous example when you unleash them on a project: Windows 8.
I will admit it is a knee jerk reaction, and it seems like maybe we are turning a corner to refinement over mass changes.
One of the major issues with paid software and UX and UI designers is that in order to keep a job, they keep making changes. And nothing is worse than making changes to customary patterns.
Perhaps FOSS wouldnt have that problem, as the job is labor of love. Who knows.
This is shockingly ignorant of how design actually works. The enshitification you see today is purely because of executives demanding their designers and devs jump on every new buzzword the shareholders learn this quarter. Lack of design is a choice too and it fucking sucks.
No it is not ignorant. You are ignorant, LOL!
So many people get a bunch of artsy crap ideas and then implement them breaking simple easy to use workflows. You cannot convince me other wise.
On the other hand, I did mention that to keep their jobs there is churn, and you just mentioned one of the reasons for it, execs are a problem. Buzzwords are a problem. Trends are a problem.
But I can point to lots of projects that were given a team and time. Particularly worse if they asked users what they wanted because they are some of the biggest morons to ask in the first place.
To be fair the left part also once was “Software, by corporation” (i.e. Photoshop CS and prior)
That’s inevitable enshittification.
Yeah, they needed to capture a user base first and only then start enshittifying. This is what they always do - in software, hardware and other products & services
“Make the best software we can” vs “Make the most money we can”
Valid on both side, honest soft and services vs which are not, the worst malware is mostly FOSS which you can find in the onion. Also nowadays the biggest FOSS catalogue is by Google Labs and Microsoft, FOSS to make money. There are others, like the famose Irfanview, free proprietary soft and absolute trustworth and definitively the best which you can find, there don’t exist a real OpenSource alternative.
Absolutely - anything can have more than one objective. But when money is an objective, the one constant is that it changes what it affects. Sometimes better in some ways, sometimes worse.
Sport is a good analogy here, I think. Amateur sport has little impact beyond those directly involved. Adding money increases exposure of those sports, better facilities, lots of scope for good - and yet big money sports are also very often mired in corruption and greed. (FIFA being a timely example) Those base human behaviours never go away.
FIFA is simply a money wash engine, nothing to do with sport.
It kills me that fucking everything is a fucking website these days, even “desktop” applications.
Though not having to download and install a random program from the Internet, with full access to your hard disk, if often nice. When running in the browser, it is automatically sandboxed hard.
So true. I don’t miss the “subscribe to be able to write a page of text” lifestyle.
Also why the fuck do they need basically my entire identity just so i can write words on a document?
Might be wrong speak, or a new idea they can steal!
Or to train their shitty ai models?
Usually to make sure your document is synced with the cloud.
To their credit, they do a bit more than just that. They also sync your personal information with their cloud, and often, the clouds of third parties as well.
And then sell my data to the highest bidder.
Fuck this is quintessential enshittificaction of modern interface
deleted by creator
I’ve been seeing more and more
open sourcedisclosed source software that fits the category on the right…We tend to forget that the design on the left was the corporate ux language for a long time. Open source is just slower to fall for the trends, but they fall eventually.
This is about more than design. The right is pretty much just what flavor of the week looks like in CSS. This is about web devs infecting desktop software
It has gone the same way as physical goods. My parents still have appliances (food mixers things like that) that still work and they bought them in the 1980s. Good luck getting anything to last that long these days.
I’m sorry to say this, but this is survivorship bias. We produced plenty of crap that broke a few months after use even 50 years ago, it’s just that you don’t notice the crap because it was thrown away after it broke and all you see now is the stuff that surprisingly made it for decades. That’s not to say that enshittification and planned obsolescence is not a thing, it’s just not as extreme and “we used to build things that lasted” as people would like to believe.
It is true that merely from the observation of old things, you cannot conclude that all things lasted long.
But as a matter of fact, from different observations by many people and areas, mid- to high- end stuff really lasted much, much longer. It was as an average rule more simple, less compact, and it lasted and still lasts really long without degradation.
There’s also maintenance blindness. It is easy to see how something lasted forever, when you weren’t the one doing the maintenance and repair work everyday. Also, many “good ol’ immortal appliances” neglect to mention how most of the parts are actually brand new or it wouldn’t be functional otherwise.
The ability to replace parts is part of why they last so long
If you say so
AI button pop up should cover about %70 of the screen
See, you’re thinking like a user. You gotta think like a CEO tho. There’s no AI button popup, the AI features are automatically activated when you use the tools. You gotta go into the settings and explicitly disable automatic AI actions. And only THEN do you get the AI popup to pwease use the AI features.
And it should be vague enough that it takes you 10 minutes to find it
how it feels going from using a 2003 software for work to a newer version
Don’t think that open source is immune to this, OnlyOffice has an AI button and many OSS devs are integrating Claude into their dev nowadays. It’s getting annoying.
tbf ai can be useful, and will be even more useful once we optimize it enough that you can just run good models locally, without being a slave to the llm coorps. even if they will technically always have the “frontier”, most of these applications don’t really need the best of the best
we should strive to achieve that since it won’t go away, and you can’t really fight it long term
It depends on several things which is preferable, at the end it’s depends on the intentions and ethics of the author respect the user, on the other hand questionable in case of products (often also FOSS) from big corps where ethics respect the user are too often secundary. To say “OpenSource is always good and Proprietary crap” is a big mistake
A good article
