The Decline of Usability

Do you know it takes 3 or more states for Google Maps to load and start navigation from within it's own app? Try it. Count how many times you have to interact with the screen just to use the actual main feature of the app.

Here's another one: In Outlook, I want you to count the number of interactions required to attach a file to an email. You're free to use the drag-and-drop features, but you have to count every single individual action required to complete the task, including clicking Start, opening Explorer, navigating to a folder, etc.

These are critical tasks and features. And they require more work than using tertiary features. So, not only are these interfaces getting less and less responsive, accessing critical functions for routine/repetitive tasks are more convoluted than features no one uses, like the go offline feature in Outlook.

The biggest problem I see though is lost imagination. Usability concerns seem all but completely and generally forgotten unless a given framework deliberately provides a dedicated convention for a specific usability concern.

Worse still is that many developers reliant upon a giant framework absolutely cannot imagine developing anything that is not the exact same SPA as their last SPA regardless of any usability concerns or business requirements. It’s like when you’re a hammer and everything is a nail mentality meets the most myopically crippled tunnel vision.

I used to have great disdain for large frameworks because they result in degraded application performance with limited capabilities and substantial bloat. Now I primarily loathe them because they are the primary excuse for weak under developed talent to self qualify progression as a lack of career maturity under the perfection of inept disdain. The weakness and lowered maturity is self evident because their response to any negative mention of their favorite framework is contrived hostility often expressed by calling the target of that hostility arrogant without any consideration for the technical concerns present.

But for an average user IMHO best GUI design was in Windows 2000 - almost all changes done later made GUI look more modern (whatever it means), but less usable. And Linux GUI (GTK/QT) unfortunately follows this pattern.

Want to switch out of Slack to send an email to your boss? It SHOULD feel painful, so that next time you do it on Slack.

Want to set yourself a reminder? Well Slack can do that for you. No need to deal with the "foreign" Google Calendar UI.

VSCode is also somewhat weird, in that it married an IDE with a Terminal, a File Manager, a VCS, and tiling window manager.

One day there will be the "great merger", Slack + VSCode + GitHub + Spotify, the Dev Desktop.