All of these are examples of the physical performance of software or hardware limitations at the time. I find that software's reliability has increased a thousandfold in my lifetime, but its actual controllability/feel/UI-UX has been rapidly declining for about a decade.

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criddell 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think you and I align closer to Robert Pirsig's ideas on quality. It feels worse, so it is and you can't really measure it.

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kranke155 an hour ago | parent [-]

You can measure UX. Just ask 100 people "does it feel worse? did you like it better 5 years ago?"

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throw-qqqqq an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I would be careful with trusting the answers to those questions.

People remember things to be more positive than they were. This is an established bias in human psychology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection

	▲	rlue 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Fair point; to correct for this bias, ask n people to rate their experience with software reliability, then wait five years and do it again. The larger your n, the more you correct for individual variation (via the Law of Large Numbers)

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andsoitis an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Direction is right, but more rigorous is A/B testing to learn what people actually prefer.

Stated preference is very often different from demonstrated preference.

	▲	quacked 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		A/B testing does not inherently lead you to good design. If you A/B test what people want based on their revealed user preference, you get gambling apps and doomscrolling.

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Eji1700 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

To be a bit difficult, depends on the 100 you ask. Yes yes statistical sampling, but I think my point here is more about how generations are trained growing up.

A lot of people dislike change and sure as shit hate relearning a skill they didn't enjoy or have aptitude in the first place. I know exactly what kind of UX my dad prefers and he HATES all modern design patterns. I think several of them are great for information density and despise everything twitter popularized. Entire generations have grown up on twitter and they think it's basically the only way to display information.

Point being when we're discussing as large a surface area as "software" I'm not really sure you're going to get much out of asking 100 people except what decade they were born in and what software/patterns they grew up on. Clearly some things can outcompete others, but inertia and network effects drive adoption, and can turn people from "ugh I hate this" to "ugh why would you do anything other than this".

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ORDINAND_PIZZA 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

i think crafting software has turned into something like making music. consider the movie Trolls World Tour, where there used to be one way of making it, then it splintered off into a ton of different styles.

everybody only likes their own style, and has trouble dealing with other people’s style.

maybe that’s what you mean by the total net feel/experience decreasing. in my world, it’s still harmonious, but it’s possible queen barb hasn’t showed up here yet

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quacked an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I think there's a lot of truth to what you're saying, but a lot of software platforms just can't be customized and mastered like they used to. Things like reorganizing columns, setting shortcuts, menus being consistently organized and accessible using the same command, clickable text and elements looking visually different from unclickable, a wide variety of colors being streamlined to color/pale-color/off-white trios, etc. I use a lot of operational software and every platform just can't be mastered like the old stuff. (And animation lags, too!) And I can watch my younger coworkers on the new software packages, they're certainly not faster on the new stuff than I was on the old stuff.

A few months ago my dad and I roused out the old Windows 2000 computer we used from 2002-2010 and while it took about 6 minutes to boot up, once it booted up, the software was all astonishingly fast (no telemetry) and way, way more "commandable" than their modern equivalents. It was like a tool shop.

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cosmic_cheese 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I think there’s two separate things going on here.

One is that software started being designed in a one-size-fits-all manner for a “uniconsumer” that vaguely represents every user the software will ever have. Personally I think that analytics-driven development is largely to blame here; through those you don’t see user groups, just numbers going in whatever the product manager deems to be positive and negative directions. We don’t design for specific users, but rather to produce desired metrics.

Second is that professional UI design got flooded with designers from other disciplines who only really understand the visual half of software design. The functional, interaction, and user research parts completely fell by the wayside as the job became more focused on coming up with designs that would do numbers on Dribbble and look pretty in a product page or presentation and is driven mostly by vibes now.

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tonyedgecombe an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

What happened is ordinary people started using computers. In the early days of the industry developers could assume a reasonable ability in their users. As computers and smart phones became ubiquitous they could no longer continue with that assumption. You see reorganising columns as a feature, the average user is totally confused and stopped in their tracks when they do it by accident.

	▲	dhosek 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		In college during the late 80s, working at the campus computer lab, I remember telling one student that she needed to use the mouse to move the cursor. She lifted it up and waved it in the air. Not quite Scotty in Star Trek IV, but close.

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fcarraldo an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> consider the movie Trolls World Tour

can you elaborate?

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faangguyindia an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

i was running into random crashes with fusion360