> Me: "I don't like smartphone UIs. Everything is flat, nothing indicates where you can touch or not. I have to randomly try everything on the screen." Response by non-tech person: "Well, yeah, of course you have to try everything? How else would this work?" I think this goes deeper than many tech people realize. From what I understood from talking with "nontechnical"(*) friends, relatives, etc, for a good potion of…
My parents never had any problem understanding where they can click on Windows 3.11. They never could understand how to interact with DOS GUIs. Nowadays they have decades of experience with computers. They still can't predict what part of a web-site they can interact with, but they have memorized all the actions they can make on the phone apps they use.
Because Microsoft, after spending millions to recognize that labeling the button "Start" was brilliant, removed that label.
There was no justification for abandoning the millions of dollars of research that multiple computer companies produced for good UI design decades ago.
It was all just thrown away because some design asshole somewhere wanted to swing their dick around.
Millions of the same people who had no issue migrating from Windows 3.1 to Windows 2000 systems have been fucked over. People who knew how to use computers were given a huge middle finger at everything they learned. They were handed a system that was objectively harder to use than the previous one.
For some "designers" wet dreams.
People are bad with computers because "Designers" have been objectively value negative for decades. Instead of paying attention to the reams of scientific data that tells you exactly how to make a UI better, they smoke crack and make things transparent.
Clear buttons with obvious intent have been replaced with a goddamned inscrutable "Hamburger" menu. Decades old metaphors and systems that made sense to people who were born before computers were abandoned. Reliable and predictable functions that you could trust across applications have been eschewed in favor of hacked together javascript trash that screws up basic things like scrolling and copy/paste and drag and drop. Even though such functionality is often provided directly by the browser, they override it and fuck it up.
And people call these idiots "The best of the best"