No, no, emphatically no. It’s not just about being familiar with computers. These fashionable user interfaces are just objectively, measurably worse. They did

No, no, emphatically no. It’s not just about being familiar with computers. These fashionable user interfaces are just objectively, measurably worse. They did scientific studies, with video recordings and stopwatches and stuff. I don’t know why Norman and Tog focus so much on back and undo. Undo is inherently challenging in a world with mutable state. A knife has no undo. For me, the emblem of bad design is: Buttons without borders. We had that back in the early 1980s. Because we had only like 320×240 pixel monochrome screens. Even Palm had visual indicators on their 160×160 screens. I have 720p on my cheap phone. There’s no excuse for getting rid of hints about where you can click and where you cannot click. This is much worse on Google’s Material Design than Apple’s flat design. There’s also predictability. How many people have not sent a text message mangled by auto-correct? And there’s readability. These days, Apple’s advertising images have spindly white text on a busy background, sometimes going all the way to white. I feel similarly about spindly bright red text on a white background. A decent amount of contrast should be the default, not a special “accessibility” setting that inevitably gets left out by developers. We now have decades of research and common sense about what makes user interfaces work, and the influential companies are simultaneously throwing it all away. I don’t understand this madness.