Turfster

i have to think the toggle switches are ambiguous on purpose at this point given they keep showing up in the "we legally have to have some sort of switch for us to not keep all your personal data" popups

You post all the UX complaints I would post except I don't have the energy to make them, godspeed

Part of my theory is that 80s and 90s UIs were designed by people who grew up before computers existed. They understood that other people would need to learn how to use these interfaces, so they designed them to be legible and consistent. They spent the time and money to do focus tests with actual people on the other side of a one-way mirror, and when an idea didn't work they fixed it.

Today, UIs are designed by people who grew up around 90s and later UIs. Ideas like buttons and checkboxes and fields have always existed for these people; they do not believe these ideas need to be taught. As a result, they feel comfortable riffing on their appearance simply to try a new fashion. Focus tests are expensive, A/B tests are cheap, so they don't do focus tests anymore, and the only metric for a design "working" is coarse statistics like page visit counts and bounce time. Analytics can be made to tell whatever story is desired.

i often feel like i'm the only person who actually gets upset about some of this stuff and i don't get it.

i hate this stuff too but i pre-gave up a long time ago. too tired to be loudly mad at this point

i feel this way all the time and i am increasingly of the opinion that i need a new hobby

It's extremely infuriating that "is this thing actually intuitive to use?" is a question NOBODY considers anymore, that you're supposed to just guess that this thing with zero indication of anything is the thing you're supposed to click on to do something useful

Orthogonal to your very reasonable complaints (most or all I share) I thought you might find this project interesting: https://jdan.github.io/98.css/

our walls totally do have some featureless white rectangles that respond only to weird gestures, but we did have to put them there ourselves

Oh I do get frustrated at how companies constantly make software worse, and how in a lot of cases there's no choice in whether you update or not

hell, mobile discord is such a good example, it's just broken half the time when I open it, or christ, android itself, it always updates, changes little things along with whatever fixes they do and it doesn't even tell me when it does, the only update I have any control over is whether I move to android 11 or not, and even that's not permanent, it's always "later" and never, well, "never"

I went on an entire rant like a week ago (on discord) about the Microsoft store app, starting with how it's impossible to set per-app restrictions on updates. I gave the example of how No Man's Sky on steam has an update every couple weeks or whatever (it's probably more like every month or two but I don't recall), and every update is as large as the entire game even though the size of the game seems to stay nearly the same, and how with steam I can set it to not update until I say to (or until I try to run it), but the Microsoft store does not have this functionality, as far as I could tell. It has an option to turn off auto updates for every app, and that's it. And mind you, I failed to even find that option, because I didn't find any settings buttons anywhere. Someone informed me about that option and I was like "where did you find that, because I couldn't find an options thing anywhere in the store app" and they responded "I just clicked my profile picture and clicked Settings" - and that set me off on an even longer rant about what an awful UI/UX design decision that is. That profile picture button doesn't look the other buttons, which all have wireframe-looking icons, doesn't highlight on mouseover like they do, how it's a shit UX design having settings for a program hidden in a submenu that you open by clicking your Microsoft account avatar, how even if it looked like a button that would be a shit place for the app settings because you wouldn't expect it to contain anything other than account-level functions. And how none of the buttons even look like buttons - they're all borderless and just look like text which you're just supposed to guess is clickable, apparently. Also Google play does the same bullshit with hiding actual important shit behind your avatar as a button, as of the past year or two or whatever. Which doesn't make it acceptable. It just makes it worse. Everyone doing the worst UX decisions they can think of is bad, even if some people react to complaints about bad UI/UX design by saying things like (actual quote) "lots of programs do that these days deal w it"

God yes, ranted in here about having to "upgrade" my phone because they make it impossible to fix your own stuff, and the new phone is worse in every way

Also touchscreen "gestures" are the worst bullshit that we all have to live with and accept as normal or functional