1. It costs willingness and money to do so.

2. Tech is saturated with complexity bias.

3. Let’s face it. Most companies and management are “superior” to users; little Musks and Thiels, just with less power to make people feel inferior. It’s the Curtis Yarvin syndrome, and it’s getting worse, not better.

AI “could” help but AFAICT, general purpose AI, without the guardrails that Thiel and Musks paid boatloads of money to prevent, is just plain dangerous. Witness suicides and more.

I’m 77 and tech was my entire career. I keep up daily via HN. And MY gripe is that I KNOW what’s going on, and how to make it better, at least conceptually, and I see it getting worse. One of my “funnest” little projects was writing up a little app (in Hypercard) for a division director who didn’t know computers from a ham sandwich, and it was just right.

So, when will people

1. Give a damn and spend money to make things usable?

2. Invite “real people” into design discussions?

3. Try to keep things simple?

4. Have a heart instead of a “supremacy” complex?

1. Some people give a damn, but decision makers won't give them money and resources to fix. Good enough is enough, lets work on next project.

2. Inviting "real people" is expensive, A/B testing is cheaper

3. Complicated 150 page, 120 tab ERP or B2B SaaS can be funded, simple things -> investors are worried that it can be replicated by 1 engineer with Claude Code/Codex at hand

4. Have a heart --- this makes me think, unfortunately we lost it to capitalism. We are even ready to ruin our kids life and their mental health, if it makes money to us

Sad sad sad

You’re on your laptop, now go to your phone, find your banking app, enter your PIN code (no not the same one as your ATM card), find the tiny grey scanner icon, scan the QR code on the screen of your laptop, press confirm. Now put down the phone and switch back to the laptop.

Fails 100% of the time.

The Netherlands has a centralized system for signing into all government related web sites. It’s especially egregious. You want to log in? Do NOT press the Login button, press the one saying “connection code”. For “first world” countries that should have no problem understanding the concept of an aging population it should be a criminal offense to roll out this kind of “solution”.

I wonder how we got so low from standing on the giants shoulders in the early days (I still miss my Sony Clie Palm OS organizer as being superior in its main goal organizing than any ios app I've tried after that).

Were we working for too long inside our comfy IT bubble echo chamber?

Or is it just a general quality problem and 2% law? With design just being more sensitive and more overlooked area (there is not much opportunities for innovation there to hype and inflate your CV with).

My take is that design stopped being for the user. It's a rat race on who will make it look the most fancy or closest to whatever new trend AirBnB starts as quickly as possible. More animations, more colors, darker, lighter, let's make this transparent. Noone really thinks about UX anymore, it's all just portfolio-driven-design.

Did end users ever had any leverage or it was always like this, I wonder

The modern UIs are awful, since buttons sometimes look like links, scrollbars randomly disappear (and their direction for mouse scrolling is opposite to what they were for decades), interaction requires gestures that are not obvious at all, and all of this is even worse on a touchscreen where you are reduced to groping and fumbling around with it - who would know that swiping left or right on a list element means "delete"??

Poor show all round. It is an endemic problem where modern OS manufacturers change interactions every couple of releases, marginally enough to make the object irritating and useless to use.

Now she's supposed to open her email while keeping the web page open. It took 5 minutes to do that, find the email, copy down the code, close the email ...

Web site has timed out.

Just one of many examples.

And then around 2012-2013 we collectively decided that looked "dated" and replaced it with flat rectangles that may or may not be buttons, text that may or may not be links, and scroll areas with invisible scrollbars that appear only on hover — which of course assumes you know where to hover. The entire visual vocabulary got stripped out in favor of... cleanliness?

What's genuinely perverse is that this happened simultaneously with the web becoming mandatory infrastructure. You can't opt out of paying your electric bill online in a lot of places now. So we took the interface that 80-year-olds had finally learned to navigate, ripped out every visual clue that made it navigable, and then told them the alternative was a phone tree that also doesn't work.

- Is it me, or is the "modern UX design" meant to maximize frustration?

- What happened to QA?

- How do "normal" people even get by at all these days?

Your post, while a sad read, reassured me that I'm not crazy.

At this point, I truly fear that if we don't inject more humanity into the tech sector, ya know, kindness, empathy, appreciation for those in an increasingly degraded cognitive state; we're definitely building ourselves a hell we 100% deserve for the hubris on display.