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Can you go into some more detail as to how "UX has become universally terrible"? I'm a UX person, so I'm always intrigued when I hear people say that UX has bec

Can you go into some more detail as to how "UX has become universally terrible"? I'm a UX person, so I'm always intrigued when I hear people say that UX has become terrible.

sp332 3y ago
Not showing the interact-able parts of the UI. Sometimes buttons will have a large colored area, but only the text at the center is clickable. More often the opposite, a chunk of text with no indication of where the clickable/tappable area begins and ends. Even worse is when there are multiple options in a row with no way to see the boundaries between, or if there is any dead space. Fitt's Law has been a thing since before these designers were born! The worst example I encounter on a daily basis is Twitter. Each tweet has at least 8 sections that do different things when tapped. I never know quite where to long-press with my thumb over the tiny timestamp to open it in a new tab, or where the boundary is between the single line of text and the username.
andy81 3y ago
The rise of targeted advertising is the main culprit of bad UX. Everywhere there's dark patterns, performance overhead, mandatory updates degrading user experience, unnecessary JS and walled gardens breaking accessibility/compatibility, online-only etc.
- GenerWork 3y ago
  This mostly matches up with the "business > users" point that the author was making. Businesses have decided that degrading the end experience for users through dark patterns, mandatory updates, walled gardens, and online only services is acceptable because users either have to use their product (electric companies, as an example), or because they offer a genuinely compelling product that people want to use despite the terrible experience (another point the authors made). For performance overhead and unnecessary JS, that sounds like poor development practices that happens to also degrade the end experience for users, although some of that unnecessary JS could be some sort of tracking implementation that was included through business requirements.
- isleyaardvark 3y ago
  For example, this site went viral because it resonated with so many people: https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/ https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/
  - virtualized 3y ago
    real web sites are somehow still worse than this parody
  - gareve 3y ago
    omg, they cherry on top was hijacking the back button
TheCoreh 3y ago
I wouldn't say UX has become universally terrible, but the average experience has definitely gotten worse over the last couple years: - The introduction of several banners/popups/modals, either to shoddily comply with tracking consent laws or to drive up engagement (newsletter subscription, notifications, check out new feature X) - The display of several, sometimes even nested loading indicators all over the place - The adoption of "trendy" UI patterns that don't necessarily fit (e.g. "stories", a few years ago) - An obsession with reducing information density and making everything very sparse - Rejection of color as a redundant signifier for UI elements, particularly icons - An overall extremely hostile attitude towards the user, with dark patterns, disregard to preferences and privacy
GSimon 3y ago
From my experience the terrible experience is pretty often because of bloated features (and the bad UI that comes with it) that are shipped quickly in order to be first to market and capitalize on the novelty of some new technology. Move fast and break things. Then hardware technology improved so bloated UI etc got a pass because no one needed to optimize anything unless you're developing for 3rd world with outdated hardware and poor internet speeds.
noodles_nomore 3y ago
In the 90s people worked really hard to draft up universal standards of what makes UI usable and intuitive. Most of it tends to be ignored nowadays. Try teaching an old person how to use a smart phone some time. Just some bullet points: * Apps feel generally disorganized. Buttons are unlabled. Many things are hidden somewhere between layers of unlabled buttons. In the past you could count on the menu bar giving you quick access to anything. * Lack of functionality / composability. Avoidance of the file system. Tunnel menus that you have to take one step at a time. * Every program has UI that works and looks differently, made worse because even the same programs redesign their own UI periodically. * Flat design. Lack of 'affordances'. Buttons don't look like buttons, draggable things don't look like they're draggable. E.g. scroll bars in the past had this serration to suggest interaction. This leads to hidden features and surprises, where things that seem like static images suddenly hide important functionality. * Lack of configurability. Configurable Toolbars, arrangeable view panes, tabs etc. And unnecessary limits even when you can configure things. Like, Firefox only has a list of preset zoom levels, to get finer zoom levels you have to go into about:config. Or the fact that it limits the size of tabs to a rather large minimum. For no reason at all. * Lack of consistent (or even discoverable) keyboard navigation. Rebinding short cuts is not a thing anyone seems to care about anymore. * Readability, use of space. This applies more to the web, but grey text, ultra-narrow columns, inconsistent scaling.
- seydor 3y ago
  > Try teaching an old person how to use a smart phone some time Also, try to teach a young person to use an old program, or an older version of an office program
  - hedora 3y ago
    My kindergartener definitely picked up conventional linux desktops faster than iPadOS. (It's whatever Manjaro defaults to. It looks like xfce, but I'm pretty sure it's KDE. The point being that I don't know because it's not configured terribly out of the box like modern gnome.) The minecraft launcher does regularly bring him to literal tears though. :-(
  - 3y ago
usrbinbash 3y ago
Not the author of the above post, but happy to answer: - Essential functionality shoved into some sub-hamburger-menu because it "didn't fit the design". - Low information density - Pointless cruft like animated menus and hero images + resource intensive pseudo-minimalism, where the app/page/whatever, despite the low information density, somehow still manages to load ungodly amounts of data, or eats tons of resources, or both. - The latter point contributing to the situation where we have apps that run worse on 2022 hardware, than apps in the early 90s did on a Pentium I. I know that design isn't solely to blame for this, but it certainly played a part. - Circumventing OS or browser default functionality. Example: Webpages that hijack the onscroll event. I use my mousewheel to scroll, not to advance through whatever the designer thought was a must-see presentation about their companies "values". - Smooth UX breaking down the instant the user leaves the happy path. Trying to setup an account? Easy. Trying to change the auth method to MFA? A hellride. - Modals. Modals everywhere - Everything trying to look like a smartphone app, no matter the viewing device. I have a high resolution screen and a high precision pointing device in front of me. Why are half the webpages and many apps presenting buttons the size of texas? - Super smart designs causing the page layout to change after it's loaded. Nothing more fun than to accidentially click the wrong thing and then having to reload the previous page because the layout changed under my thumb. - Next to zero configurability. Apps are tools. Webpages are tools. I am not starting a program to look at it's amazing design, same as I don't pick up a hammer to marvel at the color choice of the handle. I pick up a hammer to hammer at nails. If I get the impression that the process of picking the handle-color was getting more attention than the process of making a good, sturdy, serviceable and reliable hammer, then I will not use that hammer.
- Torwald 3y ago
  > - Circumventing OS or browser default functionality. Example: Google search bar breaks macOS keybindings eg. option-arrow doesn't work as expected.
  - karlshea 3y ago
    This was somewhat recent and it’s incredibly irritating.
red-iron-pine 3y ago
"Lets optimize for mobile" with the implications that come with it, e.g. extra snooping and dark patterns, while simultaneously leading to a shit desktop experience. the need for "new", when in most cases something vaguely similar to WinXP or OSX is fine for 90% of things.
- GenerWork 3y ago
  >the need for "new", when in most cases something vaguely similar to WinXP or OSX is fine for 90% of things When you say that being vaguely similar to WinXP or OSX is fine for 90% of programs, is that in terms of looks, journey path, or something else?
  - hedora 3y ago
    I’d guess it is in terms of user experience, which is hard to achieve if you are optimizing for looks or journey path. The article mentions this in the Business > User section, saying (removing euphemism and double negatives) the prevailing wisdom is that you will probably be fired unless you actively worsen the product, and provide metrics to explain how you did it. I’d think that companies with customer bases that don’t actively hate them are less likely to have big layoff rounds, but I am not a UX expert.
  - EdiX 3y ago
    AFAIC all of those have degraded.
- rikroots 3y ago
  My favourite website that was designed "mobile first" is the English Cities Fund site[1]. Why? Because the site is supposed to be the primary site for a Government-supported fund distributing millions of £££ to English towns and cities to help them regenerate (or "level up" in today's political Jargonese). The primary audience for such a site should - one assumes - be people who want to gain access to that funding: town planners, local authority CFO staff, etc[2]. People who are most likely to access the site while at work, viewing the site on their out-of-date workstations or non-touchscreen laptops. Maybe some out-of-work UXRs would like to offer views on how to fix the site? [1] - https://englishcitiesfund.co.uk/ https://englishcitiesfund.co.uk/ - though when I just revisited, it appears to be broken for both mobile and desktop. [2] - my (very personal) view is that the site was in fact designed to showcase work done, so it could be referenced in the Annual Reports of the Fund's partner companies, allowing them to check whatever corporate checkboxes they needed to check that year during their AGMs. Though people tell me that I am too cynical so I could be wrong.
rileymat2 3y ago
I half agree, UX seems to be being optimized for the new user and common workflows. This is great, because every user starts as a new user, so it makes onboarding easier. It does not seem to be optimized for experts and novel ways of completing tasks that were not explicitly thought of. Consider the power of piping a few unix commands together, this is an advanced task that enables power users, but is nearly impossible for a new user. tldr; For the common cases and beginners UX has improved, but dropped off for users that go beyond that.
the_other 3y ago
- poor text contrast - content areas that truncate half a sentence - expanded content that reveals in a different part of the screen from the place where the teaser lives - cookie notices - when then problem is not cookies but data exfiltration - opt-in by default instead of opt out - accept data exfiltration or don’t use our site - images with rollovers that hide the image when rolled over - text content that changes when you toll over - headers that change size as you scroll so content jumps u predictably - sticky headers - sticky footers - footers with useful content that you can’t read because there’s also an infinite scroller above it - hamburgers on desktop sites - landing pages that are 70% negative space - poster/hero images so large there’s no actual content above the fold - newsletter subscription modal popovers - any kind of modal popover that appears mid-way through reading the content - images with CSS that causes them to shrink when you use screen zoom (amazon product images) - mistimed animations - logins with the username and password on separate pages - password fields you can’t paste into - “repeat your email” fields - carousels with differently sized panels so the content below shuffles ip and down whilst you’re reading it - auto-play videos - ads every fucking where - social share buttons
- hedora 3y ago
  - Daily essentials / safety-critical stuff that requires an account and/or doesn't work reliably anymore (pay for parking, pay to charge car, call 911, etc...)
- hulitu 3y ago
  > - content areas that truncate half a sentence Haha, this seems to be a "design guideline" in both iOS and Android.
seydor 3y ago
lots have been pointed out - infantilization of interface to treat everyone 'like a 5 year old' - removal of functionality , homogeneous bootstrap-like interfaces with rounded corners everywhere, to the point where you no longer recognize which system you re using - "mobilification" of the desktop - no more rational organization: no hierarchical menus, only the top 5 buttons survive
danielrpa 3y ago
It has become terrible. My best guess is that there is little else to do, and UX professionals keep changing things to justify their jobs. Nothing personal, maybe your job requires you, but we don't need a brand new UX every 3-4 years on every product. Incremental improvements, rounded edges, some smoother animation and better accessibility. But not changing everything, one gazillion new buttons and features. We need simplicity and stability - the latter being the most important for user interfaces.
zmb_ 3y ago
Let me give a concrete example: I have had iPad Pro for years now. A primary use case for me is to watch a lecture and take notes, or read a book and take notes. The way this should obviously work is that I have my iPad in portrait orientation, split the screen vertically so that I have the video playing or the book open on the top half and notes on the bottom half. This was solved perfectly by the original Macintosh. It is still not solved by iOS (even though I've had tickets for years in Radar). For some reason I cannot comprehend, I can split the screen horizontally, which results in two thin strips side-by-side that are useless for anything that I can think of. It is not possible to split it vertically so that I would have two reasonable aspect ratio apps on top of each other. Now they added a convoluted "multitasking" mechanism that kind of lets me solve this for reading, where I can have two 3/4 sized apps overlapping each other, but I still cannot just split the screen or have freely resizable apps (which, again, is a problem solved already in the original Macintosh). This type of terrible UX has become endemic, and is even worse in non-Apple products. The root cause I believe is "authoritarian simplicity", where some UX designer or team thinks they know the best and force a single, over-simplified, over-specified solution on everyone.
hulitu 3y ago
1 px borders on 4k screens. Bad contrast which you cannot change because colors are not configurable. Need to scale my monitor (Windows) because i cannot use custom fonts. Titlebar cluttered with other GUI elements. Ribbon using a good amount of vertical space. Unusable scrollbars - too small/no scroll buttons at end - good luck scrolling through a 500 pages pdf. Settings resetted with updates. Automatic updates which change the way the programm works. And so on and so fort.

Can you go into some more detail as to how "UX has become universally terrible"? I'm a UX person, so I'm always intrigued when I hear people say that UX has become terrible.

sp332 3y ago

Not showing the interact-able parts of the UI. Sometimes buttons will have a large colored area, but only the text at the center is clickable. More often the opposite, a chunk of text with no indication of where the clickable/tappable area begins and ends. Even worse is when there are multiple options in a row with no way to see the boundaries between, or if there is any dead space. Fitt's Law has been a thing since before these designers were born! The worst example I encounter on a daily basis is Twitter. Each tweet has at least 8 sections that do different things when tapped. I never know quite where to long-press with my thumb over the tiny timestamp to open it in a new tab, or where the boundary is between the single line of text and the username.

andy81 3y ago

The rise of targeted advertising is the main culprit of bad UX. Everywhere there's dark patterns, performance overhead, mandatory updates degrading user experience, unnecessary JS and walled gardens breaking accessibility/compatibility, online-only etc.

GenerWork 3y ago
This mostly matches up with the "business > users" point that the author was making. Businesses have decided that degrading the end experience for users through dark patterns, mandatory updates, walled gardens, and online only services is acceptable because users either have to use their product (electric companies, as an example), or because they offer a genuinely compelling product that people want to use despite the terrible experience (another point the authors made). For performance overhead and unnecessary JS, that sounds like poor development practices that happens to also degrade the end experience for users, although some of that unnecessary JS could be some sort of tracking implementation that was included through business requirements.
isleyaardvark 3y ago
For example, this site went viral because it resonated with so many people: https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/ https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/
- virtualized 3y ago
  real web sites are somehow still worse than this parody
- gareve 3y ago
  omg, they cherry on top was hijacking the back button

TheCoreh 3y ago

I wouldn't say UX has become universally terrible, but the average experience has definitely gotten worse over the last couple years: - The introduction of several banners/popups/modals, either to shoddily comply with tracking consent laws or to drive up engagement (newsletter subscription, notifications, check out new feature X) - The display of several, sometimes even nested loading indicators all over the place - The adoption of "trendy" UI patterns that don't necessarily fit (e.g. "stories", a few years ago) - An obsession with reducing information density and making everything very sparse - Rejection of color as a redundant signifier for UI elements, particularly icons - An overall extremely hostile attitude towards the user, with dark patterns, disregard to preferences and privacy

GSimon 3y ago

From my experience the terrible experience is pretty often because of bloated features (and the bad UI that comes with it) that are shipped quickly in order to be first to market and capitalize on the novelty of some new technology. Move fast and break things. Then hardware technology improved so bloated UI etc got a pass because no one needed to optimize anything unless you're developing for 3rd world with outdated hardware and poor internet speeds.

noodles_nomore 3y ago

In the 90s people worked really hard to draft up universal standards of what makes UI usable and intuitive. Most of it tends to be ignored nowadays. Try teaching an old person how to use a smart phone some time. Just some bullet points: * Apps feel generally disorganized. Buttons are unlabled. Many things are hidden somewhere between layers of unlabled buttons. In the past you could count on the menu bar giving you quick access to anything. * Lack of functionality / composability. Avoidance of the file system. Tunnel menus that you have to take one step at a time. * Every program has UI that works and looks differently, made worse because even the same programs redesign their own UI periodically. * Flat design. Lack of 'affordances'. Buttons don't look like buttons, draggable things don't look like they're draggable. E.g. scroll bars in the past had this serration to suggest interaction. This leads to hidden features and surprises, where things that seem like static images suddenly hide important functionality. * Lack of configurability. Configurable Toolbars, arrangeable view panes, tabs etc. And unnecessary limits even when you can configure things. Like, Firefox only has a list of preset zoom levels, to get finer zoom levels you have to go into about:config. Or the fact that it limits the size of tabs to a rather large minimum. For no reason at all. * Lack of consistent (or even discoverable) keyboard navigation. Rebinding short cuts is not a thing anyone seems to care about anymore. * Readability, use of space. This applies more to the web, but grey text, ultra-narrow columns, inconsistent scaling.

seydor 3y ago
> Try teaching an old person how to use a smart phone some time Also, try to teach a young person to use an old program, or an older version of an office program
- hedora 3y ago
  My kindergartener definitely picked up conventional linux desktops faster than iPadOS. (It's whatever Manjaro defaults to. It looks like xfce, but I'm pretty sure it's KDE. The point being that I don't know because it's not configured terribly out of the box like modern gnome.) The minecraft launcher does regularly bring him to literal tears though. :-(
- 3y ago

usrbinbash 3y ago

Not the author of the above post, but happy to answer: - Essential functionality shoved into some sub-hamburger-menu because it "didn't fit the design". - Low information density - Pointless cruft like animated menus and hero images + resource intensive pseudo-minimalism, where the app/page/whatever, despite the low information density, somehow still manages to load ungodly amounts of data, or eats tons of resources, or both. - The latter point contributing to the situation where we have apps that run worse on 2022 hardware, than apps in the early 90s did on a Pentium I. I know that design isn't solely to blame for this, but it certainly played a part. - Circumventing OS or browser default functionality. Example: Webpages that hijack the onscroll event. I use my mousewheel to scroll, not to advance through whatever the designer thought was a must-see presentation about their companies "values". - Smooth UX breaking down the instant the user leaves the happy path. Trying to setup an account? Easy. Trying to change the auth method to MFA? A hellride. - Modals. Modals everywhere - Everything trying to look like a smartphone app, no matter the viewing device. I have a high resolution screen and a high precision pointing device in front of me. Why are half the webpages and many apps presenting buttons the size of texas? - Super smart designs causing the page layout to change after it's loaded. Nothing more fun than to accidentially click the wrong thing and then having to reload the previous page because the layout changed under my thumb. - Next to zero configurability. Apps are tools. Webpages are tools. I am not starting a program to look at it's amazing design, same as I don't pick up a hammer to marvel at the color choice of the handle. I pick up a hammer to hammer at nails. If I get the impression that the process of picking the handle-color was getting more attention than the process of making a good, sturdy, serviceable and reliable hammer, then I will not use that hammer.

Torwald 3y ago
> - Circumventing OS or browser default functionality. Example: Google search bar breaks macOS keybindings eg. option-arrow doesn't work as expected.
- karlshea 3y ago
  This was somewhat recent and it’s incredibly irritating.

red-iron-pine 3y ago

"Lets optimize for mobile" with the implications that come with it, e.g. extra snooping and dark patterns, while simultaneously leading to a shit desktop experience. the need for "new", when in most cases something vaguely similar to WinXP or OSX is fine for 90% of things.

GenerWork 3y ago
>the need for "new", when in most cases something vaguely similar to WinXP or OSX is fine for 90% of things When you say that being vaguely similar to WinXP or OSX is fine for 90% of programs, is that in terms of looks, journey path, or something else?
- hedora 3y ago
  I’d guess it is in terms of user experience, which is hard to achieve if you are optimizing for looks or journey path. The article mentions this in the Business > User section, saying (removing euphemism and double negatives) the prevailing wisdom is that you will probably be fired unless you actively worsen the product, and provide metrics to explain how you did it. I’d think that companies with customer bases that don’t actively hate them are less likely to have big layoff rounds, but I am not a UX expert.
- EdiX 3y ago
  AFAIC all of those have degraded.
rikroots 3y ago
My favourite website that was designed "mobile first" is the English Cities Fund site[1]. Why? Because the site is supposed to be the primary site for a Government-supported fund distributing millions of £££ to English towns and cities to help them regenerate (or "level up" in today's political Jargonese). The primary audience for such a site should - one assumes - be people who want to gain access to that funding: town planners, local authority CFO staff, etc[2]. People who are most likely to access the site while at work, viewing the site on their out-of-date workstations or non-touchscreen laptops. Maybe some out-of-work UXRs would like to offer views on how to fix the site? [1] - https://englishcitiesfund.co.uk/ https://englishcitiesfund.co.uk/ - though when I just revisited, it appears to be broken for both mobile and desktop. [2] - my (very personal) view is that the site was in fact designed to showcase work done, so it could be referenced in the Annual Reports of the Fund's partner companies, allowing them to check whatever corporate checkboxes they needed to check that year during their AGMs. Though people tell me that I am too cynical so I could be wrong.

rileymat2 3y ago

I half agree, UX seems to be being optimized for the new user and common workflows. This is great, because every user starts as a new user, so it makes onboarding easier. It does not seem to be optimized for experts and novel ways of completing tasks that were not explicitly thought of. Consider the power of piping a few unix commands together, this is an advanced task that enables power users, but is nearly impossible for a new user. tldr; For the common cases and beginners UX has improved, but dropped off for users that go beyond that.

the_other 3y ago

- poor text contrast - content areas that truncate half a sentence - expanded content that reveals in a different part of the screen from the place where the teaser lives - cookie notices - when then problem is not cookies but data exfiltration - opt-in by default instead of opt out - accept data exfiltration or don’t use our site - images with rollovers that hide the image when rolled over - text content that changes when you toll over - headers that change size as you scroll so content jumps u predictably - sticky headers - sticky footers - footers with useful content that you can’t read because there’s also an infinite scroller above it - hamburgers on desktop sites - landing pages that are 70% negative space - poster/hero images so large there’s no actual content above the fold - newsletter subscription modal popovers - any kind of modal popover that appears mid-way through reading the content - images with CSS that causes them to shrink when you use screen zoom (amazon product images) - mistimed animations - logins with the username and password on separate pages - password fields you can’t paste into - “repeat your email” fields - carousels with differently sized panels so the content below shuffles ip and down whilst you’re reading it - auto-play videos - ads every fucking where - social share buttons

hedora 3y ago
- Daily essentials / safety-critical stuff that requires an account and/or doesn't work reliably anymore (pay for parking, pay to charge car, call 911, etc...)
hulitu 3y ago
> - content areas that truncate half a sentence Haha, this seems to be a "design guideline" in both iOS and Android.

seydor 3y ago

lots have been pointed out - infantilization of interface to treat everyone 'like a 5 year old' - removal of functionality , homogeneous bootstrap-like interfaces with rounded corners everywhere, to the point where you no longer recognize which system you re using - "mobilification" of the desktop - no more rational organization: no hierarchical menus, only the top 5 buttons survive

danielrpa 3y ago

It has become terrible. My best guess is that there is little else to do, and UX professionals keep changing things to justify their jobs. Nothing personal, maybe your job requires you, but we don't need a brand new UX every 3-4 years on every product. Incremental improvements, rounded edges, some smoother animation and better accessibility. But not changing everything, one gazillion new buttons and features. We need simplicity and stability - the latter being the most important for user interfaces.

zmb_ 3y ago

Let me give a concrete example: I have had iPad Pro for years now. A primary use case for me is to watch a lecture and take notes, or read a book and take notes. The way this should obviously work is that I have my iPad in portrait orientation, split the screen vertically so that I have the video playing or the book open on the top half and notes on the bottom half. This was solved perfectly by the original Macintosh. It is still not solved by iOS (even though I've had tickets for years in Radar). For some reason I cannot comprehend, I can split the screen horizontally, which results in two thin strips side-by-side that are useless for anything that I can think of. It is not possible to split it vertically so that I would have two reasonable aspect ratio apps on top of each other. Now they added a convoluted "multitasking" mechanism that kind of lets me solve this for reading, where I can have two 3/4 sized apps overlapping each other, but I still cannot just split the screen or have freely resizable apps (which, again, is a problem solved already in the original Macintosh). This type of terrible UX has become endemic, and is even worse in non-Apple products. The root cause I believe is "authoritarian simplicity", where some UX designer or team thinks they know the best and force a single, over-simplified, over-specified solution on everyone.

hulitu 3y ago

1 px borders on 4k screens. Bad contrast which you cannot change because colors are not configurable. Need to scale my monitor (Windows) because i cannot use custom fonts. Titlebar cluttered with other GUI elements. Ribbon using a good amount of vertical space. Unusable scrollbars - too small/no scroll buttons at end - good luck scrolling through a 500 pages pdf. Settings resetted with updates. Automatic updates which change the way the programm works. And so on and so fort.