I mean… in the 90's, software didn't harass me to update every 15 minutes or pop up extraneous notifications that are irrelevant to my interests. Interactions

I mean… in the 90's, software didn't harass me to update every 15 minutes or pop up extraneous notifications that are irrelevant to my interests. Interactions were, in general, far more discoverable. You could come to rely on simple, consistent design cues to understand how something might work. A whole new piece of software was instantly usable because it adhered to the expected interface guidelines[0] defined for the OS. In recent years, a lot of this has gone out the window and each dev house seems to invent their own paradigms and complete UI toolkits, so while there are similarities, they are few. The cohesive, simple nature of software UI is generally a thing of the past, that most of us who experienced it are quite nostalgic for. Generally speaking, most application UX problems were "solved" ~30 years ago, and every time someone tries to reinvent the wheel, they miss subtle, important aspects of those earlier solutions. Like the importance of consistency across time, and "principle of least surprise", and things like that. I can really go on and on ad nauseam about this because it's a huge pet peeve of mine. I cannot stand having to relearn major aspects of how to use the same software, the same OS, every 6mo because some company decided it's time to completely overhaul their design/UI, for Reasons™. [0] http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf