8 ms·

Average UX Improvements Are Shrinking over Time

105 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

daniellarusso 6y ago
I think the degradation of UI and physical switches/buttons allowed for the success of voice recognition assisted features. There is only so much you can do with a multi-touch display and a finite number of gestures.
mortenjorck 6y ago
Intuitively, this makes sense that the lowest-hanging fruit from when UX was a younger discipline has been steadily eliminated from the market as design has become less of an afterthought and a certain baseline of best practices has taken root in the industry. Thinking back to my own experience over a decade ago, the role of design in the development process has changed much for the better - it’s that much harder to make obvious UX mistakes now that design and development teams are used to working collaboratively rather than throwing things over the wall.
defanor 6y ago
The conclusion (generally improved UX) sounds a bit dubious: bloat (including bloated graphics and splash screens, as mentioned there) seems to increase, not to decrease with time. Unfortunately the linked report doesn't explain how it is estimated (beyond hinting that ROI for UX work is taken into account), and the full report (which possibly explains it) is paywalled. It's an interesting topic, but the linked document is not very informative.
- sergeykish 6y ago
  Cookie consent welcomes like splash screen before. Sticky headers steals precious screen space. I think they have measured improvements brought by Bootstrap. Released in 2011, since than websites look similar.
netfl0 6y ago
I can’t say I’m surprised by this. The last real large scale UI paradigm shift was the iPhone’s multitouch display. UX is going to follow UI capabilities and form factors. In the automotive space I’d argue there has been a UX regression as they went pure touch screen for some models.
- julianlam 6y ago
  I've been thinking for years that automobile manufacturers entered an industry (software) that they had little knowledge of, and it showed, with janky, slow interfaces and last-generation mapping software. However, they've invested in this in the past decade, and if there's going to be a UX resurgence, it's going to be in the automobile sector, as their teams are maturing more and more.
  - mattmanser 6y ago
    I've used a fair amount of different cars as I'm part of a city car club. I can't say I see this at all. Even their tactile controls are generally a mess. Controls as basic as window wipers or headlights seem to be different for ever car for no discernible advantage. A different 'start' mechanism for every car is actually quite a nightmare. I once spent 20 minutes in a car park trying to figure out how to get the damn thing to start, even their own instructions didn't say how!
    - toast0 6y ago
      > A different 'start' mechanism for every car is actually quite a nightmare. I've driven a bunch of cars, over the years. I haven't seen too many different mechanisms. What have you seen on modern cars that's different than make sure it's in park or neutral (or clutch pedal depressed) and turn the key, or for keyless make sure it's in park or neutral (or clutch in), press the brake and push the button? And if the key battery is low, press the button with the key. I've driven some older vehicles where you turned the key to enable ignition, but had a separate starter button, and some vehicles with ignition locks that didn't work, so you could turn the ignition without a key. And some cars with keys go off -> accessories -> ignition -> starter vs accessories <- off -> ignition -> starter. If the key retention in the switch/lock is broken, sometimes it's tricky to make sure you pull the key out in off instead of accessories.
krrishd 6y ago
“On average, UX changes have a smaller impact on quantitative metrics [since 2006]” does this actually imply UX advancement any more than the possibility that people have become more familiar with/adept at using UIs since 2006?
- phkahler 6y ago
  >> does this actually imply UX advancement any more than the possibility that people have become more familiar with/adept at using UIs since 2006? Not really. The kinds of changes they're taking about get tested. A site will collect data, make changes and observe the impact on the data. A good way to go is present different users a randomly selected version of a site and track which version does better. With tests like that we can rule out people simply adapting over time.
  - benlivengood 6y ago
    > Not really. The kinds of changes they're taking about get tested. A site will collect data, make changes and observe the impact on the data. A good way to go is present different users a randomly selected version of a site and track which version does better. With tests like that we can rule out people simply adapting over time. I've always wondered if the reverse study is done; keep the old versions of the UX around for months/years as an experiment to make sure the improvements are still there, or if there's a regression to the mean. This sounds much harder to do because most development is roll-forward with new features and such. Also; practically how does attribution play into conversion measurements? In theory it should be easier now to tell whether it was landing-page+UX or view-through/click-through that made the bigger difference.
amelius 6y ago
The capability of users has also improved.
AuthorizedCust 6y ago
It's because UX is increasingly becoming standardized, starting to resemble a "solved problem" in some parts. It's like website design. Far fewer jobs available in that field because so many now just use lightly configured, pre-built themes. Website designs, in other words, are standardized far more than ever. Yes, there are exceptions, as others here describe, but they don't negate a clear trend.
- swiley 6y ago
  In consumer software? No. UX has regressed and most software is now written by employees who don't have much of a say or have given up. remember that function is only important in closed software insofar as it keeps people from moving to something else. If the cost of the move is higher than the cost of bad UX there's no buisness incentive to fix it.
- superhuzza 6y ago
  >starting to resemble a "solved problem" Not at all, the field is exploding, and people's expectations are constantly evolving. Because UX is fundamentally about people, there will never be a final 'end state'. It's a bit like saying software is a "solved problem" - in reality, the needs of businesses and people will always change.
dan-robertson 6y ago
Here’s a (perhaps weak) alternative explanation for the headline and chart of the graph: suppose there is some UX quality number representing how good an average app will be if it is updated. Now suppose this number increases at 10% a year. If you update your ux every year, you might therefore observe a 10% improvement each time you update. If you update your app only every 5 years, you would instead see a 60% improvement. So my question is: how does this study compensate for changes to the frequency of updates?
- maneesh 6y ago
  Does the rule of 72 apply here? If there are 10% improvements annually, and you wait 7.2 years, you’d see a 100% improvement?
  - dan-robertson 6y ago
    Yeah in the hypothetical world where things improve by 10% each year. But I don’t really see how it’s relevant. The way to compensate would be to say something like “average growth rate := growth ^ (1/#years since last update)”
csours 6y ago
Is this not just Pareto of Zipf scaling?
stunt 6y ago
I'm not sure if that's a good explanation. It's becoming a standard practice for many organizations to involve UX designers and researchers from the very initial phase of designing a product or feature. They use existing data, user-research, user-testing, and popular best practices before pushing changes to production. So more UX focus is happening before release phases instead of after release, which means there will be much less opportunities for UX improvements after the release of each feature. Also analyzing and tracking is a default everywhere now. So many feature requests are already backed with data related to user-behavior. Which means many of them kind of include UX improvements. I think UX impact is bigger than before. But, it's becoming part of the process and it's more mature now.
chiefalchemist 6y ago
> "We weren’t surprised to see such a wide range because the outcome of any benchmarked design project depends heavily on the following factors:" I would have expected to see "users are becoming more savvy and sophisticated about UI's", as well as something along the lines of "Many experiences and sub/micro experiences are becoming standardized. It's difficult to optimize that which is already perfected."
a1369209993 6y ago
Average UX improvements are negative and have been for quite a while. (There's enough noise that it's hard to say exactly how long a while, admittedly.)
- mrob 6y ago
  Agreed. I suspect designers deliberately harm UX in an attempt to drive away unprofitable power users. E.g. Firefox recently made the about:config UX much worse. Previous version only made you click past the warning once. New version makes you click every time, and there's a noticeable delay before the config settings appear. Previous version had comfortable spacing, with everything clearly readable without excessive wasted space. New version adds an absurd amount of padding to waste your screen space. Previous version let you sort by column, so you could easily see all the setting you'd changed. New version removes this feature. about:config is mostly used by the kind of person who complains about user-hostile policies and declines to accept advertising and spying, so if you want to do these kind of things then making it worse can help drive those users away. Simply deleting it is too obvious, but sabotaging the UX has plausible deniability. If you dumb everything down enough you'll only have dumb users, and dumb users are more easily exploited. I can think of no other reason why somebody put serious time and effort into actively making it worse. (The old UI is actually still available at chrome://global/content/config.xhtml, but now that it's no longer supported it's easier for them to remove it later.)
  - pitay 6y ago
    Yeah. There was a time that you could use chrome://global/content/config.xul to get to the old about:config, but they removed that too. Don't know why they did that, only people who wanted the old behaviour would use it. Being able to sort by column is really useful, that's what I miss. Edit: Didn't see your last line about chrome://global/content/config.xhtml , now I can get the old behaviour back. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
    - sergeykish 6y ago
      There is no XUL. https://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul https://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.x...
webwielder2 6y ago
Before the iPhone, most companies didn’t bother to hire designers, or if they did, didn’t give them much power. After the iPhone, everything changed, and not just in the mobile space. The iPhone was such a vast, visceral improvement over what came before it, and the experience was so personal and eventually ubiquitous, that it shocked decision makers into action.
krm01 6y ago
Working in the UX space and seeing all of this across a wide range of projects for over a decade now, there are a few flaws in this observation. For many projects we've been involved in with our UX/UI Design service for SaaS companies, founders worked with us before releasing their product. So before the product was released we could eliminate common pitfalls based on our previous experiences. When a product is released you can then use data to optimise things. An other issue I have with the article is that in some cases I've seen upclose, a tiny tiny percentage improvement in UX equaled an extra 6-figure increase in revenue. When a product is in a stage of optimising UX for more revenue, it's in the company's best interest to focus on the improvements that have direct impact on company revenue. So improving the UX on pricing pages, cancellation user flows etc. This means a smaller UX improvement, sometimes really really small, but a huge upside for the business. So smaller UX improvements does not mean it has less effect on businesses. If anything, it's more likely the impact is growing because UX optimisations don't happen in random places anymore.
- gedy 6y ago
  > a tiny tiny percentage improvement in UX equaled an extra 6-figure increase in revenue. Is this ecommerce/landing page type UX? Or post login/SaaS type UX improvements.
  - krm01 6y ago
    The one I had in mind particularly was related to an e-commerce project. It was a series of small changes in the checkout process.
- ozim 6y ago
  I don't see any flaws that you mention when I read the article. "This doesn’t mean that we can expect 50% of all design projects will have an improvement score within that range. It’s possible your own impact could be a 500% or 5,000% improvement, but our data suggests that an improvement score that high is unusual."
GuB-42 6y ago
The UX of what? It looks like the article focuses on websites. But things can get very different if you compare desktop to mobile, web apps to "normal" websites, and web apps to native apps. The web seems to get all the attention, and one can argue that the UX is improving, especially on mobile. However, everything that is not the web, like desktop apps, or worse, special purpose hardware, is being shoved into the web model and with it comes a significant degradation.
zrm 6y ago
The UX improvement I most want to see in modern software is to optimize for reducing the amount of time I spend in your app. There are business models where companies are optimizing for the opposite ("engagement"), and that's unfortunate. But there are also apps and sites that have no need for that and are just cargo culting the same UX features, and that's avoidable.
- mattgreenrocks 6y ago
  Agree. Did you have a specific app in mind here? Just curious.
  - zrm 6y ago
    It's a prolific issue, but Windows gets dishonorable mention for making things take twelve clicks that used to take three.
    - kumarharsh 6y ago
      I doubt that's because Windows wants you to use it more. It's the freaking OS! I think it has more to do with UWP and the Settings app itself. On the (slight) plus side, they have improved their search so much over Windows 7.
    - transcriptase 6y ago
      I'm convinced that Windows developers have perverse incentives tied to optimizing engagement or telemetry metrics that happen to be highly correlated with irritating power-users.
  - Razengan 6y ago
    I'm not sure if it's intentional or incompetence but here's an example from Firefox: Count the number of actions it takes to delete specific cookies (say all matching "google", which I do every time I log into YouTube so it won't log me into Search etc.) Firefox's UI is just appalling in a number of ways.
sircastor 6y ago
This means we’re rapidly approaching LCARS, right?
joduplessis 6y ago
Other than stylistic improvements & UX optimisations, the next big "landscape" might be AR.
- germinalphrase 6y ago
  Context will be hard for AR. Fascinating and ‘the future’, for sure, - but my gut says it will end up being severely limited (in the way that there is only minimal personalization to the interactions with my Apple devices) or a total mess.
  - joduplessis 6y ago
    I actually think this too. Sadly I think that the real good stuff will only start happening in a good few years (decades maybe) when hardware catches up with our ideas.
ineedasername 6y ago
I wonder how much of this is because of establishment of more well-known best practices and diminishing returns for incremental improvements. I'll use PC gaming as an example: go back a decade of more, and it wasn't uncommon to need to use a significant portion of the keyboard (or on a console, more awkward controls). These days things are much better in a lot of games. The use of contextual controls allows the use of the same button for multiple tasks. Tabbed menus mean you don't have to have a separate key for each thing, even if many games still provide that option. That's not to say all applications have better UX than in the past. The ERP system where I work is truly cumbersome. But there's still a certain commonality of UX "language" in lots of newer projects that mean software engineers aren't having to figure this stuff out from first principles.
- MereInterest 6y ago
  Interesting examples, as I see many of those as regressions in UI. The use of contextual controls means that you're never quite sure what action is going to result. For example, Mass Effect 2 had quite a lot bound to 'E' as "interact", which could be anything from calling an elevator, talking to someone, crouching behind a wall, or picking up an item. Try to talk to someone near a wall, and you might hide behind it instead. Similarly for the tabbed menus, they hide information several clicks deep, rather than showing you what you want right away.
sirspacey 6y ago
There is a gaping hole in this assessment. Logins. My workflow on any app is: 1. Attempt to register 2. Find out I already have an account / I wait for a registration link that never comes 3. Find the “Forgot password” link, often buried. Multiply this friction by 3X to 5x on mobile devices. It’s a challenge with many issues, but the go-to design patterns for the most impactful interaction a user will have with a platform is totally broken. Just this week my son had to drop a class and re-add it due to issues with his username. The issue? The one he had wasn’t recognized on login and when he went to create it he got an error message (unfriendly of course) that it already existed. Agree with the premise, but there are definitely sink holes in today’s UX/UI.
- devmunchies 6y ago
  I recently built a login where the user types in their email and it sends them a login link whether they’ve ever logged in before or not. Link expires in 10 minutes and cannot be used more than once.
  - kumarharsh 6y ago
    That's positively the worst UX for logging in I've seen. Having to connect switch between apps and waiting for/fishing out the login email over 3-5 folders is so painful. And oh yeah - doesn't work in Incognito/non-default browser because the email app always opens the default browser in full cognito mode!
    - devmunchies 6y ago
      I said link but meant code.
scoot_718 6y ago
Every UX change is a negative to those who've already invested in learning your UX and a signal that nobody should invest further.
ksec 6y ago
I dont think that could apply to Windows at all. The same problem with Microsoft as they were in the 80s. That is 40 years now. They dont understand UX. They dont understand design. I am rather sad only Apple is really doing much in this field. Especially when I continue to loss faith in Tim Cook for some strange reason.

105 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

I think the degradation of UI and physical switches/buttons allowed for the success of voice recognition assisted features. There is only so much you can do with a multi-touch display and a finite number of gestures.

mortenjorck 6y ago

Intuitively, this makes sense that the lowest-hanging fruit from when UX was a younger discipline has been steadily eliminated from the market as design has become less of an afterthought and a certain baseline of best practices has taken root in the industry. Thinking back to my own experience over a decade ago, the role of design in the development process has changed much for the better - it’s that much harder to make obvious UX mistakes now that design and development teams are used to working collaboratively rather than throwing things over the wall.

defanor 6y ago

The conclusion (generally improved UX) sounds a bit dubious: bloat (including bloated graphics and splash screens, as mentioned there) seems to increase, not to decrease with time. Unfortunately the linked report doesn't explain how it is estimated (beyond hinting that ROI for UX work is taken into account), and the full report (which possibly explains it) is paywalled. It's an interesting topic, but the linked document is not very informative.

sergeykish 6y ago
Cookie consent welcomes like splash screen before. Sticky headers steals precious screen space. I think they have measured improvements brought by Bootstrap. Released in 2011, since than websites look similar.

netfl0 6y ago

I can’t say I’m surprised by this. The last real large scale UI paradigm shift was the iPhone’s multitouch display. UX is going to follow UI capabilities and form factors. In the automotive space I’d argue there has been a UX regression as they went pure touch screen for some models.

julianlam 6y ago
I've been thinking for years that automobile manufacturers entered an industry (software) that they had little knowledge of, and it showed, with janky, slow interfaces and last-generation mapping software. However, they've invested in this in the past decade, and if there's going to be a UX resurgence, it's going to be in the automobile sector, as their teams are maturing more and more.
- mattmanser 6y ago
  I've used a fair amount of different cars as I'm part of a city car club. I can't say I see this at all. Even their tactile controls are generally a mess. Controls as basic as window wipers or headlights seem to be different for ever car for no discernible advantage. A different 'start' mechanism for every car is actually quite a nightmare. I once spent 20 minutes in a car park trying to figure out how to get the damn thing to start, even their own instructions didn't say how!
  - toast0 6y ago
    > A different 'start' mechanism for every car is actually quite a nightmare. I've driven a bunch of cars, over the years. I haven't seen too many different mechanisms. What have you seen on modern cars that's different than make sure it's in park or neutral (or clutch pedal depressed) and turn the key, or for keyless make sure it's in park or neutral (or clutch in), press the brake and push the button? And if the key battery is low, press the button with the key. I've driven some older vehicles where you turned the key to enable ignition, but had a separate starter button, and some vehicles with ignition locks that didn't work, so you could turn the ignition without a key. And some cars with keys go off -> accessories -> ignition -> starter vs accessories <- off -> ignition -> starter. If the key retention in the switch/lock is broken, sometimes it's tricky to make sure you pull the key out in off instead of accessories.

krrishd 6y ago

“On average, UX changes have a smaller impact on quantitative metrics [since 2006]” does this actually imply UX advancement any more than the possibility that people have become more familiar with/adept at using UIs since 2006?

phkahler 6y ago
>> does this actually imply UX advancement any more than the possibility that people have become more familiar with/adept at using UIs since 2006? Not really. The kinds of changes they're taking about get tested. A site will collect data, make changes and observe the impact on the data. A good way to go is present different users a randomly selected version of a site and track which version does better. With tests like that we can rule out people simply adapting over time.
- benlivengood 6y ago
  > Not really. The kinds of changes they're taking about get tested. A site will collect data, make changes and observe the impact on the data. A good way to go is present different users a randomly selected version of a site and track which version does better. With tests like that we can rule out people simply adapting over time. I've always wondered if the reverse study is done; keep the old versions of the UX around for months/years as an experiment to make sure the improvements are still there, or if there's a regression to the mean. This sounds much harder to do because most development is roll-forward with new features and such. Also; practically how does attribution play into conversion measurements? In theory it should be easier now to tell whether it was landing-page+UX or view-through/click-through that made the bigger difference.

amelius 6y ago

The capability of users has also improved.

AuthorizedCust 6y ago

It's because UX is increasingly becoming standardized, starting to resemble a "solved problem" in some parts. It's like website design. Far fewer jobs available in that field because so many now just use lightly configured, pre-built themes. Website designs, in other words, are standardized far more than ever. Yes, there are exceptions, as others here describe, but they don't negate a clear trend.

swiley 6y ago
In consumer software? No. UX has regressed and most software is now written by employees who don't have much of a say or have given up. remember that function is only important in closed software insofar as it keeps people from moving to something else. If the cost of the move is higher than the cost of bad UX there's no buisness incentive to fix it.
superhuzza 6y ago
>starting to resemble a "solved problem" Not at all, the field is exploding, and people's expectations are constantly evolving. Because UX is fundamentally about people, there will never be a final 'end state'. It's a bit like saying software is a "solved problem" - in reality, the needs of businesses and people will always change.

dan-robertson 6y ago

Here’s a (perhaps weak) alternative explanation for the headline and chart of the graph: suppose there is some UX quality number representing how good an average app will be if it is updated. Now suppose this number increases at 10% a year. If you update your ux every year, you might therefore observe a 10% improvement each time you update. If you update your app only every 5 years, you would instead see a 60% improvement. So my question is: how does this study compensate for changes to the frequency of updates?

maneesh 6y ago
Does the rule of 72 apply here? If there are 10% improvements annually, and you wait 7.2 years, you’d see a 100% improvement?
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  Yeah in the hypothetical world where things improve by 10% each year. But I don’t really see how it’s relevant. The way to compensate would be to say something like “average growth rate := growth ^ (1/#years since last update)”

csours 6y ago

Is this not just Pareto of Zipf scaling?

stunt 6y ago

I'm not sure if that's a good explanation. It's becoming a standard practice for many organizations to involve UX designers and researchers from the very initial phase of designing a product or feature. They use existing data, user-research, user-testing, and popular best practices before pushing changes to production. So more UX focus is happening before release phases instead of after release, which means there will be much less opportunities for UX improvements after the release of each feature. Also analyzing and tracking is a default everywhere now. So many feature requests are already backed with data related to user-behavior. Which means many of them kind of include UX improvements. I think UX impact is bigger than before. But, it's becoming part of the process and it's more mature now.

chiefalchemist 6y ago

> "We weren’t surprised to see such a wide range because the outcome of any benchmarked design project depends heavily on the following factors:" I would have expected to see "users are becoming more savvy and sophisticated about UI's", as well as something along the lines of "Many experiences and sub/micro experiences are becoming standardized. It's difficult to optimize that which is already perfected."

a1369209993 6y ago

Average UX improvements are negative and have been for quite a while. (There's enough noise that it's hard to say exactly how long a while, admittedly.)

mrob 6y ago
Agreed. I suspect designers deliberately harm UX in an attempt to drive away unprofitable power users. E.g. Firefox recently made the about:config UX much worse. Previous version only made you click past the warning once. New version makes you click every time, and there's a noticeable delay before the config settings appear. Previous version had comfortable spacing, with everything clearly readable without excessive wasted space. New version adds an absurd amount of padding to waste your screen space. Previous version let you sort by column, so you could easily see all the setting you'd changed. New version removes this feature. about:config is mostly used by the kind of person who complains about user-hostile policies and declines to accept advertising and spying, so if you want to do these kind of things then making it worse can help drive those users away. Simply deleting it is too obvious, but sabotaging the UX has plausible deniability. If you dumb everything down enough you'll only have dumb users, and dumb users are more easily exploited. I can think of no other reason why somebody put serious time and effort into actively making it worse. (The old UI is actually still available at chrome://global/content/config.xhtml, but now that it's no longer supported it's easier for them to remove it later.)
- pitay 6y ago
  Yeah. There was a time that you could use chrome://global/content/config.xul to get to the old about:config, but they removed that too. Don't know why they did that, only people who wanted the old behaviour would use it. Being able to sort by column is really useful, that's what I miss. Edit: Didn't see your last line about chrome://global/content/config.xhtml , now I can get the old behaviour back. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
  - sergeykish 6y ago
    There is no XUL. https://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul https://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.x...

webwielder2 6y ago

Before the iPhone, most companies didn’t bother to hire designers, or if they did, didn’t give them much power. After the iPhone, everything changed, and not just in the mobile space. The iPhone was such a vast, visceral improvement over what came before it, and the experience was so personal and eventually ubiquitous, that it shocked decision makers into action.

krm01 6y ago

Working in the UX space and seeing all of this across a wide range of projects for over a decade now, there are a few flaws in this observation. For many projects we've been involved in with our UX/UI Design service for SaaS companies, founders worked with us before releasing their product. So before the product was released we could eliminate common pitfalls based on our previous experiences. When a product is released you can then use data to optimise things. An other issue I have with the article is that in some cases I've seen upclose, a tiny tiny percentage improvement in UX equaled an extra 6-figure increase in revenue. When a product is in a stage of optimising UX for more revenue, it's in the company's best interest to focus on the improvements that have direct impact on company revenue. So improving the UX on pricing pages, cancellation user flows etc. This means a smaller UX improvement, sometimes really really small, but a huge upside for the business. So smaller UX improvements does not mean it has less effect on businesses. If anything, it's more likely the impact is growing because UX optimisations don't happen in random places anymore.

gedy 6y ago
> a tiny tiny percentage improvement in UX equaled an extra 6-figure increase in revenue. Is this ecommerce/landing page type UX? Or post login/SaaS type UX improvements.
- krm01 6y ago
  The one I had in mind particularly was related to an e-commerce project. It was a series of small changes in the checkout process.
ozim 6y ago
I don't see any flaws that you mention when I read the article. "This doesn’t mean that we can expect 50% of all design projects will have an improvement score within that range. It’s possible your own impact could be a 500% or 5,000% improvement, but our data suggests that an improvement score that high is unusual."

GuB-42 6y ago

The UX of what? It looks like the article focuses on websites. But things can get very different if you compare desktop to mobile, web apps to "normal" websites, and web apps to native apps. The web seems to get all the attention, and one can argue that the UX is improving, especially on mobile. However, everything that is not the web, like desktop apps, or worse, special purpose hardware, is being shoved into the web model and with it comes a significant degradation.

zrm 6y ago

The UX improvement I most want to see in modern software is to optimize for reducing the amount of time I spend in your app. There are business models where companies are optimizing for the opposite ("engagement"), and that's unfortunate. But there are also apps and sites that have no need for that and are just cargo culting the same UX features, and that's avoidable.

mattgreenrocks 6y ago
Agree. Did you have a specific app in mind here? Just curious.
- zrm 6y ago
  It's a prolific issue, but Windows gets dishonorable mention for making things take twelve clicks that used to take three.
  - kumarharsh 6y ago
    I doubt that's because Windows wants you to use it more. It's the freaking OS! I think it has more to do with UWP and the Settings app itself. On the (slight) plus side, they have improved their search so much over Windows 7.
  - transcriptase 6y ago
    I'm convinced that Windows developers have perverse incentives tied to optimizing engagement or telemetry metrics that happen to be highly correlated with irritating power-users.
- Razengan 6y ago
  I'm not sure if it's intentional or incompetence but here's an example from Firefox: Count the number of actions it takes to delete specific cookies (say all matching "google", which I do every time I log into YouTube so it won't log me into Search etc.) Firefox's UI is just appalling in a number of ways.

sircastor 6y ago

This means we’re rapidly approaching LCARS, right?

joduplessis 6y ago

Other than stylistic improvements & UX optimisations, the next big "landscape" might be AR.

germinalphrase 6y ago
Context will be hard for AR. Fascinating and ‘the future’, for sure, - but my gut says it will end up being severely limited (in the way that there is only minimal personalization to the interactions with my Apple devices) or a total mess.
- joduplessis 6y ago
  I actually think this too. Sadly I think that the real good stuff will only start happening in a good few years (decades maybe) when hardware catches up with our ideas.

ineedasername 6y ago

I wonder how much of this is because of establishment of more well-known best practices and diminishing returns for incremental improvements. I'll use PC gaming as an example: go back a decade of more, and it wasn't uncommon to need to use a significant portion of the keyboard (or on a console, more awkward controls). These days things are much better in a lot of games. The use of contextual controls allows the use of the same button for multiple tasks. Tabbed menus mean you don't have to have a separate key for each thing, even if many games still provide that option. That's not to say all applications have better UX than in the past. The ERP system where I work is truly cumbersome. But there's still a certain commonality of UX "language" in lots of newer projects that mean software engineers aren't having to figure this stuff out from first principles.

MereInterest 6y ago
Interesting examples, as I see many of those as regressions in UI. The use of contextual controls means that you're never quite sure what action is going to result. For example, Mass Effect 2 had quite a lot bound to 'E' as "interact", which could be anything from calling an elevator, talking to someone, crouching behind a wall, or picking up an item. Try to talk to someone near a wall, and you might hide behind it instead. Similarly for the tabbed menus, they hide information several clicks deep, rather than showing you what you want right away.

sirspacey 6y ago

There is a gaping hole in this assessment. Logins. My workflow on any app is: 1. Attempt to register 2. Find out I already have an account / I wait for a registration link that never comes 3. Find the “Forgot password” link, often buried. Multiply this friction by 3X to 5x on mobile devices. It’s a challenge with many issues, but the go-to design patterns for the most impactful interaction a user will have with a platform is totally broken. Just this week my son had to drop a class and re-add it due to issues with his username. The issue? The one he had wasn’t recognized on login and when he went to create it he got an error message (unfriendly of course) that it already existed. Agree with the premise, but there are definitely sink holes in today’s UX/UI.

devmunchies 6y ago
I recently built a login where the user types in their email and it sends them a login link whether they’ve ever logged in before or not. Link expires in 10 minutes and cannot be used more than once.
- kumarharsh 6y ago
  That's positively the worst UX for logging in I've seen. Having to connect switch between apps and waiting for/fishing out the login email over 3-5 folders is so painful. And oh yeah - doesn't work in Incognito/non-default browser because the email app always opens the default browser in full cognito mode!
  - devmunchies 6y ago
    I said link but meant code.

scoot_718 6y ago

Every UX change is a negative to those who've already invested in learning your UX and a signal that nobody should invest further.

ksec 6y ago

I dont think that could apply to Windows at all. The same problem with Microsoft as they were in the 80s. That is 40 years now. They dont understand UX. They dont understand design. I am rather sad only Apple is really doing much in this field. Especially when I continue to loss faith in Tim Cook for some strange reason.