It has been dispiriting to see computers get more difficult to use.

Despite being endlessly fawned over by an army of professionals, Usability, or as it used to be called, “User Friendliness”, is steadily declining. During the last ten years or so, adhering to basic standard concepts seems to have fallen out of fashion. On comparatively new platforms, I.E. smartphones, it’s inevitable: the input mechanisms and interactions with the display are so different from desktop computers that new paradigms are warranted.

Worryingly, these paradigms have begun spreading to the desktop, where keyboards for fast typing and pixel-precision mice effectively render them pointless. Coupled with the flat design trend, UI elements are increasingly growing both bigger and yet somehow harder to locate and tell apart from non-interactive decorations and content.

I wonder if part of the impetus to make computers hard to use is to push people to shitty smartphone experiences? That was explicitly the goal of Microsoft’s “Metro” disaster, so that’s quite likely.

Overall, designers of desktop applications seem to have abandoned the fact that a desktop computer is capable of displaying several applications and windows at the same time and that many users are accustomed to this. Instead, we’re increasingly treated to small-screen, single-app paradigms copied from smartphones. That’s a turn for the worse in its own right, but perhaps more troubling and annoying is the recurring sidestepping from the tried and true UI design that is so ingrained in many users it’s practically muscle memory by now.

This is something I’ve discussed with my partner. Even if you’ve actually found a better user interface or paradigm, forcing hundreds of millions of users to change their workflow and to learn new approaches wastes hundreds of billions of person-hours. So it must be really, really great to warrant such a change. In almost all cases this is not worth it especially considering that the new UIs are almost always far worse than the old ones.

Have there been any other industries that have deliberately destroyed so much time and value as this one? I want to understand more about what drives this.