Productivity software, computer maintenance tools, creative software suites, integrated development environments, habit trackers, language learning apps, video games, video streaming libraries, pretty much anything that involves a screen feels bad. It's so odd that every bit of software's UI/UX feels both overly designed/bloated but also simultaneously barren and empty. Software design seems increasingly unable to fulfill its basic functionality. So many of the bits of software that we interact with feel identical but also somehow feel distinctly bad.
I can't articulate how capitalism is to blame but if any of you could help I would appreciate it.
You’d think that there would be some sort of universal visual/technical language we can all agree upon but it seems that there is no real driving aesthetic philosophy for systems we use every day. Aside from getting users to interact with a payment system/outlet all of the software we use has dreadful UI/UX.
Paying for something is very easy. Simple and intuitive (most of the time), it’s usually one to four clicks/taps but actually using a thing is seemingly more difficult. Using a common feature of a product can be somewhere between two to nine clicks/taps. I don’t think everything should be command-line interfaces (CLI) of course, but I will say that CLI at least usually allow users to get what they want.
I know it’s usually answered with “because money”, but how and why are UI/UX so universally bad for pretty much every bit of software we all use? It feels kind like how every car (fuck cars) had the same weird amorphous shape that is both considered “normal” must also universally unappealing.
What happened?
I think some of it is grooming people over time to difficult, unintuitive interfaces so that eventually the user finds competing software "unusable" since the sunk cost to learn an interface is real. I believe this was what happened to WordPerfect back in the day. Businesses were lobbied to use MS products and the interfaces are different, I heard from people that they didn't use WordPerfect because the interface was "harder". I think it's just intentional sunk cost to encourage monopoly.
This is interesting as a theory because adobe internally accepted certain levels of piracy because they recognised that the piracy was giving them market domination. People were learning photoshop via piracy, and that would inevitably mean that's the tool that everyone knows therefore it would be purchased for business use. They were outwardly pursuing anti-piracy because that's what the system demands with respect to protecting your brand while internally they were actually leveraging it.
Bit different as no matter what graphics editing is always going to have a sunk-cost associated with learning. But your theory makes sense.