“I have an hour and a free trial of Apple Fitness+, let me try it out.”

*30 minutes later*

I’ve managed to sign in and redeem my trial, but can’t figure out how to take a class. I have no business being a computer professional and will be submitting my resignation on Monday.

— Tara Vancil (@taravancil) April 18, 2021

Tara, it’s not just you. There are numerous applications and even entire OSes these days that are created and released into the world with no cogent design principles and no seeming understanding that they actually must be used by humans.

I’ve wondered how the situation got so dire but alas I don’t have any sort of unified account for the degeneracy that is UX/UI these days. Do the application and OS makers not realize they are harming themselves? Do they just not care? Maybe the user pool is just so large now that it doesn’t matter, and it’s the case that most people are such propaganda victims that they actually do buy the BS about how it’s “more convenient” to spend 45 minutes doing something we used to be able to do in five minutes flat.

There have been a number of applications I’ve attempted to use and I literally could not figure out how to do the main task they were supposed to allow me to achieve (as with Tara here) so I just gave up. And it’s not just commercial stuff — open source is just as guilty, as with modern Gnome and many others. I don’t think it’s just because I or she is getting older. It has been a complete regression in design principles that is glaringly obvious if you’ve been in the computing space for a while, as we both have been.