I genuinely cannot tell if I've reached my old man phase of "no I won't learn new things, I want the old things to keep working like they did" or if we've reached a genuinely new hell of UI designers taking turns on who gets to move an icon randomly in the programs I use on a daily basis.

Feels more and more like the load-bearing programs and websites I use to interface with the world are getting annually redesigned so they can keep their designers employed rather than making things more usable. Discord dropped a truly heinous redesign to their mobile app which essentially made it two apps with one for DMs and one for servers only to roll its key design change back a few weeks ago.

This isn't to say anything about dark patterns, ad placement, or UI customization/ accessibility! It feels like everything is built on sand and every day there's a new mediocre-at-best change to deal with!

Am I old or is this real?????


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in reply to @SPNKr's post:

I feel like the thing is, programs used to have distinct "versions". So you'd get a new version when you upgraded to something with a new big version number, and that happened on some kind of schedule. Now that most "programs" are websites, and even desktop apps like Discord just update on a rolling "latest version" thing, there's nothing to prepare you for expecting big changes - and no chance to wait a bit and choose to pick the new version, or not. It just comes when it comes.

The fact I'm old enough to remember "how it used to be" means I can't really tell you if it's worse or if I'm just set in my ways. But I do think there's something to programs living on schedules you can predict and understand, and changes happening in a way that give you some agency.