It's incredibly annoying, and i say that with a an interest art, the abstract, cool concepts etc. but i want to see sites and interfaces with "actual messy real life content" not just one big image or whatever idiotic whitespace hell everyone's doing with way too much scrolling on Awwwards, Behance, Httpster, Gsap etc.

It's relatively easy to make a big font, a big picture and a 3d effect look cool, much harder to present 15+ items on one page and create a cool visual narrative around it that both grabs attention and lets the user go solo if he wants to without scrolling two miles.

I feel like a few newspapers were okay examples of this 5-10 years ago, but now they've also gone whitespace crazy.

We need a site like "Real life UX" or "Actual usable design" inspiration.

There's no money in making a thing that works well, only in making things that look good. Effectively 100% of people who are using software are using it for things that fundamentally don't matter, so why should they care if the functionality is shit? Personal computers and phones are fashion statements, not useful devices. Business computers and phones exist to facilitate the bullshit jobs that employ the majority of the white-collar population. Follow the money; nobody with money cares.

I'd boil it down further and say it's a focus on short term gains over long term gains. If the pan flashes, that's a win, full stop. When the pan stops flashing and people don't want to use your software because it's confusing, that doesn't matter because they can just flash another pan.

I work in a company building vending machines and such and it's the other way around here. Most products are shipped with a pretty mediocre UI because it just isn't valued. The software has to run the machine, vend products to people and don't eat their money.

Amazon, AWS, Salesforce and anything Oracle entered the chat.

More seriously, I think it really depends. People will use and pay large amounts of cash for stuff that solves there problem and does not have a fancy looking UI.

2. Most UX design aren't probably taught. Especially Software User Interface.

3. A lot of Design in that era came from Web. And if we read this article we already know or could guess what web design were like.

4. It is my observation that Tech, or Silicon Valley historically speaking learns very little about history of their industry. Unlike many other discipline, things comes and goes like fashion industry. Combine with Hype machine and VC money. Apart from Politics or Finance there is no other industry that contains as much noise as Tech.

5. Conservatism ( Not politics ) is generally not well accepted. Finished Software is not appreciated. And if you cant improve, or remake something, there is no way you can move up the ladder. The fundamental of not doing anything hype or large changes is against Resume Driven Development model.

Prior to that, deviations from established standards (layouts, colors, logic) were seen as unprofessional and tasteless. Things like buttons with unusual colors made software look like a shareware hobby project downloaded from Tucows, and nobody wanted their product to trigger these associations. Premium software made for Windows wanted to have the look and feel of Word and Excel.

I'll tell you what happened.

Apple.

I've been saying for years now that Apple is not a tech company, they're a fashion company. Alternatively, they make tech fashionable, which means abandoning function in favor of form.

Actual UX is unimportant. It just has to look nice.

What infuriates me is when other companies then start to copy them. I'm looking at you, Microsoft. With Windows 11, it seems you have forgotten that many of your users stick with you because you're not MacOS. So why would you want to start imitating MacOS?

For decades, all the conventions had developed on desktop. By ~2013 it was clear that mobile required different conventions, and that it was important to also unify conventions to some degree across mobile and desktop.

Also, traditional desktop apps had largely limited themselves to the UX vocabulary provided by the OS's graphical widgets. But with the rise of high quality CSS and JS, websites and apps became more free to develop their own conventions, separate from anything coming out of Apple or Microsoft. Hamburger menus and pills and what have you.

So it makes perfect sense that Apple started to evolve more rapidly around that time. And good for them -- none of these rules can or should be set in stone.

(And please don't make this about generations, that's just silly. Trying to assign blame to entire generations is utterly meaningless. Generations are made of individuals who disagree with each other.)

Meanwhile, every person working on design systems should think about decisions like these deeply. Designers, engineers, accessibility specialists should all talk together and come to some common ground before doing something like this.

Sure, things regress and move in waves, but on the whole user design has been established as the primary of software development and that really was a not the case back when.

Take something like error handling in a form. In a lot of average software, it was not at all uncommon for a form to just say "Error" when something went wrong (or just not submit). Or lose all form input after unsuccessful submission. Programmers were unironically confused about why people would not just enter correct information. People then wrote books about how to design form errors. Now, basically every web framework includes at least some form of validation and error handling by default(-ish), and most people would be seriously confused if they saw something like the above.

If you find it easy to poke holes into this one, please consider the average across all the little things that go into not fucking up a form, which is still hard to get really good, but again I am describing something of an average expectation here.

I would pin this to two major developments:

1. Designers are increasingly everywhere. If you think "duh?", this is entirely not how software was made. Programmers, commanded by business people, made software.

2. Most programmers today are also designers, and I don't mean in the sense that they always were (designing the software), but as in "thinking about people using the product".

Again, this might feel like a comical thing to even say but in most places programmers were just not expected to do anything to make the users life simple, unless explicitly told so. That was the designers job. In fact, a lot of programmers considered it a holy duty to fight any feature that was merely a convenience, and were quite adamant that, surely, the user could simply be expected to suffer a little and work a bit harder to get things done, if that meant keeping the code base pristine.

And perhaps that's where the OP's question originated from?

As we've watched the despecialization of our field in testing and ops, we've seen that things improve, as ideas are introduced more widely, while also seeing them get mimicked and cargo-culted when the ideas are diffused.

Maybe the coders who were fighting against testing mandates or devops or design thinking were just insecurely admitting to their own ignorance on these topics and asking for assistance in being able to perform their new duties effectively?

One value in specialists is the freedom that comes with specialization enables them to do their job more completely. Fred Brooks's surgical team could not be more relevant.

Of course, this can also be credited to the fact that ui design for software was at a much different place in general.

2013 was when we first witness it in effect. It started a little earlier inside Apple. When Scot Forstall was forced out, the whole Software User Interface falls to Jony Ive and he basically ripped everything out and redesigned it with iOS 7. There is a huge different, or dare I say 95% completely unrelated field in Software UX and Hardware UX. Apple then spend the next 3-4 years walking back on all the design changes made in iOS 7.

Unfortunately a lot of UX learning was lost during that period. Including the Seniors of Human User Interface retiring during 2015 - 2020. The group has also grown rapidly in terms of numbers under Tim Cook. A lot of the Steve Jobs design requirement and "why" were diluted with more new members.

The design from Apple today may still look beautiful, but they are no longer as functional as they once were.

I'm not sure if I read all the way through it when I first got my copy but it -is- very good and I have it stashed for the next time I end up doing UI design.

Well worth a look.