I often get the sense that every company with a large design org is doomed to eventually ruin its own user interfaces. All those designers aren't being paid to just sit around - gotta justify the headcount to the people approving budgets. If you aren't developing new products then they will instead be tasked with redesigning existing ones, whether or not this is necessary, beneficial, or was ever asked for by users.

I've seen it happen too many times with too many companies to not notice a pattern.

All the affordances and interface clues we used to have were made with users in mind that had low familiarity with digital interfaces. It’s different now. Children that grew up with iPhones don’t need them; just look at the Instagram app. It’s confusing the hell out of me: you can swipe everywhere, click things that don’t look clickable to me, there’s nested menus like five layers deep. And yet, every single teenager out there is navigating this mess easily.

So I guess this just means the world is changing in a direction many older people don’t like too much, and I don’t really know what to make of that yet.

I'll probably keep maintaining my existing macOS apps for the foreseeable future, but my next GUI project will be a Qt app on Linux.

Steve Jobs's words, “design is how it works” have been forgotten in more ways than just the visual style.