If you’ve dealt with computers or technology in general you’ve almost certainly had to deal with user interfaces and the problem of usability. Ideally you shouldn’t notice anything negative when using a program or a certain device since the whole point of usability is to reduce friction and make the interaction as smooth as possible. However this is, from my experience, not only often not the case, but it also feels like it has gotten worse. I’m not really sure what caused this and when it happened, but some of the reasons are most likely either trying to optimize usability for the worst case scenario, i.e. the absolute dumbest user you can think of. The assumption is that if that user can understand and use the software, anyone can. Another reason I can think of is just pure boredom. If you have a user interface that was designed years ago and seemingly works without any major issues you eventually start to make up problems or try to fix minor issues which in the end just make things worse. Lastly there’s always the ol’ reliable and that is blaming smartphones.
Let’s look at one simple example: A login screen. You see those fairly regularly and their purpose is pretty clearly defined. You have two text inputs for the username and the password as well as a button for accepting the input. Optionally there might be a link for registration or resetting your password, but that should be it. Anything else misses the point. There is absolutely no reason to make a user interface like this any more complicated or change the flow of it. It really shouldn’t be that difficult, yet there are some websites that for some unknown reason use different login screens, which really is astounding considering that there really isn’t much room for fuck-ups. As an example there’s Soundcloud. When you try to login your first three options are logging in with Facebook, Google or Apple. I never got this and I also really hate it. Sure it might be more convenient, but you’re also immediately reliant on these three companies just so you can log into some other service. But that part isn’t even the annoying part. The annoying part is that when you want to login with a username like a normal human being you will find out that there’s no password field. You first have to type in your email or username, then click “continue” and then enter your password.
So not only did the login process change from two inputs and one click to one input, one click, another input and then another click, it also hides the password reset option behind the second screen. It also breaks password saving with password managers, which is what annoys me the most. I really cannot fathom how anyone could come up with this shit. It has to be either malice or incompetence. Another cool way of fucking up logins I’ve seen is to never ask the user for a password in the first place. Instead you’ll receive an email with a link for logging in. Every. Single. Time. Now one could argue that this is more secure since most people use stupid passwords and also forget them all the time, but it stops being a good idea when your service suddenly refuses to send emails to certain domains or the emails just never arrive, not that that has ever happened to me, no sir.
Another unfathomably stupid development thanks to the endeavour of user friendliness is the normalization of useless or complete lack of error messages. I know that error messages are annoying and the best case scenario is that you never have to see them, but it’s absolutely idiotic to hide them or substitute them with useless information. I get that the average user does not care about detailed errors and will most likely not know what to do with them, but not every user is completely retarded. It doesn’t hurt to display helpful information, but apparently some developers think it does.
Once again this mostly pertains to websites or electron applications. I have on multiple occasions received messages ranging from “whoops something went wrong, try again later” to just being redirected back to the home page without any additional information. Most of the time this happens when signing up for a service and this is their subtle way of saying “We don’t like your browser and/or your IP address” because you’re either using a VPN, Tor or a browser that blocks trackers, but the problem is that there is no real way of telling that and so that is just my guess. I assume that this development is a mixture of laziness and the assumption that the average user is too stupid to deal with error messages.
Continuing the pattern of shitting on websites let’s move onto Google. You know the company whose namesake is all about search? Their search has been continually getting worse and not just Google. Try searching for anything YouTube that’s older than a year. On Google they removed the option to look for images of a certain size. Now you just have the choice between three meaningless options:
- Large
- Medium
- Icon
What the fuck is that? I get that some people have no clue what a pixel is and how large they want their image to be, but why not have a fourth custom option? Same goes for the time option, you only have last 24 hours, last week, last month and last year. While were already at it the image search has also gotten worse. Now if you use it it will always search with google lens, which is utterly useless. It’ll try to detect what’s in the image instead of searching for that image like it used to. You can still get to that, but only after you’ve started the search with google lens, which is once again absolutely stupid. Why do I have to go through one unnecessary step that I didn’t even want? Then when I finally manage to use the old reverse image search the results are also trash. Nowadays you are better off using yandex or maybe even bing, because google will filter half the results and the rest feels like it was seemingly picked at random. The Youtube search doesn’t fare any better:
This is the best that a company which built its empire on search can offer. Truly pathetic. Another cool new feature of the recent design change is that You cannot sort videos on a channel by oldest anymore. Now you only have the option for “Recently uploaded” aka. what used to be newest and “Popular” what used to be “most viewed. Oldest is just flat out gone for whatever reason. I would not be surprised if they justified it with some bullshit reason like that it will reduce bullying, because people used to sort by oldest and then make fun of people because of their old videos. The new design also made everything bigger and rounder once again, because the modern internet user is a mouth-breathing cataclysmically retarded inbred who can barely hit his phone screen with his fat fingers. As a result of that if you’re now on someone’s channel and looking at the uploads you can’t tell anymore if a video has subtitles because the “CC” icon is gone. Probably took up too much space or something.
There is so much more that I could rant about and maybe I’ll extend this post whenever I think of something. For now I’ll leave you with another post called “The Decline of Usability”, which you can read here. It talks more about the user interfaces of desktop applications but all points are just as valid and make me just as mad. I do however mostly limit myself to desktop programs that don’t have complete garbage user interfaces, looking at you Gnome.
While browsing around for this post I stumbled upon a few more issues that really activate my almonds. Opening Soundcloud I was greeted with this fucking annoying Cookie pop-up. That shit alone should suffice as an example that more legislation will not fix anything and that politicians usually make decisions for things that they know jack shit about. Anyways, after I closed that stupid dialog, which by the way blocked access to the entire site, there was another annoying banner at the top for some stupid limited time offer. The search bar was not visible to me without scrolling because some stupid image slideshow was more important. When I opened google for testing the search I obviously was also greeted with their version of the cookie pop-up. Then after trying to search I had to fill out a Captcha, which once again is one of the worst inventions. The last obvious things that piss me off to no end are sites with stupid newsletter reminders, tons of ads and javascript. It’s absolutely insane how much shit sites load just to display some text and images. And all of that just because it gives off the illusion of more convenience.