Some stuff has been solved. A massive number of annoyances in my daily life are due to people un-solving problems with more or less standardized solutions due to perverse economic incentives.

There's a similar amateurs-do-too-much effect with typography and design. I studied typography for four semesters in college, as well as creative writing. The best lessons I learned were:

In writing, show, don't tell.

In typography, use the type to clarify the text - the typography itself should be transparent and only lead to greater immersion, never take the reader out of the text.

Good UI follows those same principles. Good UX is the UI you don't notice.

Apple has the unfortunate burden of needing to shepherd millions of developers over to this new paradigm (AR) before it really exists, and so is shoving Liquid Glass onto devices that don't really benefit from it.

But in practice people are generally not happy about lots of new experimentation going on. By definition, most of the results suck. In retrospect we get to stand in awe of those that survived the evolutionary battle and say "wow browser tabs" and "wow pull to refresh" and forget the millions of other bad ideas that we tried.

There's no reason to "learn" a UI or use shortcuts on most sites, because they change everything around every few months.

I see people reminiscing about tabs in firefox, well today a majority of the top websites don't even allow you to open links in new tabs! The links aren't even real links anymore, and everything's a webapp. ( and by top websites, I mean social media, not the top sites used by the HN crowd. Sites like YT, FB, IG, and TT ).

I try to interact with the "UI" of websites as little as possible these days. I use RSS readers for as much as possible. Any time I get a popup on any site, I get mad. I don't care about news updates, software updates, or offers. Anything that pops up at me, or moves around before I can click it, looks like a scam to me. Even if it's "legitimate". The modern web feels like an arcade game that's trying to waste my time.

Why would it be funny though? Am I missing something?

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11177063-creating-cool-w... - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1097095.HTML_for_Dummies...

Designers decided that scrollbars that shrink to super-thin columns when not in use were better. Maybe... but often it results in shrunken scrollbars that require extra work to accurately hover over and expand.

Designers decided that gray text on gray backgrounds were easier to read, and there was even a study to "prove" it... which resulted in idiots picking poor contrast choices of gray-on-gray, without understanding the limits on this idea.

I will say that the current push for accessibility is forcing some of these "innovations" back onto the junk heap where they belong. I was annoyed the first time an accessibility review complained about the contrast of my color choices on a form once... but once I got over my ego, I have to admit they were right; the higher-contrast colors are easier to read.

[0] "small" in comparison to ChatGPT, but still a bulky download

Microsoft shoving LLMs into literally everything, including Notepad, is what people are currently hating, because it isn't quite ready.

- Use of analytics tends to replace user trials/interviews entirely, trading away rich signals for weaker ones

- Analytics can be used to justify otherwise unpopular or ill-advised changes

- When combined with certain changes (e.g. making features harder to access), the numbers can be “steered” in a particular direction to favor a particular outcome and better enable the last point (“Looks like nobody’s using that thing we hid behind an obscure feature flag! Guess we’re safe to remove it entirely now!”).

In theory telemetry/analytics have strong potential for improving software quality, but more often than not they’re just massaged and misused by product managers bent on pushing the software a particular direction.