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

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 15 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)

▲

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 12 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.

▲

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".