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points by quacked 3 days ago | 0 comments

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.

[–] criddell 3 days ago

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.

[–] gf000 2 days ago

Bit didn't it also feel bad back then, you just forgot about it and has a rose-tinted view of the past?

Like software used to crash, were single-threaded and constantly frozen. How many times did you have to issue Ctrl+alt+del vs today? Even UIs were constantly out of sync with the underlying data, I would even go as far to claim that reactive frameworks like react cut down a big category of software bugs.

[–] worble 2 days ago

For me I think the difference is that software never used to be actually important, it was either games or just otherwise hobby software.

Now when something crashes I actually need it for work, or to bank, or to navigate, or hell sometimes the only menu at a restaurant is a QR code but my damn phone is failing to recognise it again.

When you introduce technology into every facet of life, it's suddenly death by a thousand cuts when things don't work, or are a slow buggy mess.

[–] sloob 2 days ago

I agree. Though some software pain used to be more intense (blue screen of death, etc), our lives have become more deeply enmeshed into software, so we feel the friction more. I think we also expect a lot more from software in our daily lives than we did 20 years ago.

[–] gf000 2 days ago

Well, banking is digitalized for a long time (such a long time that they actually are using mainframes and cobol), and it's definitely not the epitome of good software, so I think it was always important, maybe we were just less directly reliant on it.

[–] johnnyanmac 2 days ago

Feel worse? No. Was it clunkier to navigate and figure out the workflow? Perhaps. But I rarely remember saying "this application feels slow" in the late 00's/early 2010's, on much worse hardware.

Websites are the obvious example here. Much slower speeds but pages loaded at acceptable paces. Now I'm on gigabit internet and webpages likely take longer to load. And we all know what it's loading in the background are not things that make the UX better.

[–] Insanity 2 days ago

This definitely plays a role, and depending on your use-case the “stability” of your software and system varies greatly. E.g Messing around with mods could leave your game in an unplayable state (to the point it just wouldn’t launch properly), whilst today you just download/install them from Steam workshop with 1-click.

[–] Buttons840 2 days ago

I can measure the number of times my computer blue-screens and just dies. It used to happen all the time, and now it never does.

[–] titzer 2 days ago

Yeah but they keep moving the buttons for no reason and somehow 34GB OS updates only result in rounded corners and less functionality.

[–] johnnyanmac 2 days ago

Do I blue screen? No. Does my computer regularly stall out, screen glitches out, or otherwise controls become entirely unresponsive, to the point I can't even bring up task manager? Yup.

I suppose sleep has never been great on Windows, but I don't know what it's doing these days.

[–] publlus_enigma 2 days ago

Now it just auto updates right in the middle of a task.

[–] hulitu 19 hours ago

> and now it never does.

For you. Sometimes one needs to restart the zombie Windows. (Graphics problems, file access problems)

[–] justonceokay 2 days ago

Funny to see this comment here. I was just thinking this morning whether the socratics or the sophists would be more alighted with conversational AI

[–] kranke155 2 days ago

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

[–] throw-qqqqq 2 days ago

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

[–] titzer 2 days ago

You're right. Better keep to not asking and just weirdly spy on them, concluding the emergency recovery buttons are never used, and remove them.

[–] throw-qqqqq 2 days ago

I think that’s a non sequitur…

[–] titzer 2 days ago

I'm saying I wish they did more user studies where they actually asked people what they wanted the software to do, instead of lacing it with creepy telemetry that tells them that less-often-used functionality is...less-often-used, and that they would stop removing said less-often-used functionality.

[–] throw-qqqqq 2 days ago

Ah okay, then I’m sorry.

I read your response as “okay then, if we can’t ask that question, we have to spy” etc. which I think did not follow from my post - I misunderstood you, thanks for clarifying.

[–] rlue 2 days ago

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)

[–] throw-qqqqq 2 days ago

1) Asking five years apart only confirms if the bias is stable/changing. It doesn’t correct anything.

2) Asking more people gives you an answer closer to the ‘truth’ (i.e. the true population mean; the mean answer if you asked ‘everyone’). It lowers sample error, not directional bias.

[–] andsoitis 2 days ago

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 2 days ago

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.

[–] cowlevel 2 days ago

Even better is actual testing.

They put windows 95 in front of users, asked them to perform tasks, and, at the end of the test, asked them to shut down the computer. Almost everyone clicked on the start menu first, so that's where they put the shut down button.

[–] andsoitis 22 hours ago

> A/B testing does not inherently lead you to good design.

Good design comes from product acumen, understanding the user, taste.

But A/B testing helps you confirm whether or not your hypothesis resonates or not.

[–] titzer 2 days ago

"I want a steak dinner." Yeah, but based on usage patterns, here's some cigarettes and beer. /s

[–] Larrikin 2 days ago

All of the pizza chains from my youth A/B tested their ingredients into a weird hill climbing problem. They are all worse tasting and more expensive but despite tasting very differently they are basically equal in how good they taste. You can't really say one is better than the other but they are definitely all worse than they were before.

[–] bigstrat2003 2 days ago

It has become very clear over the past decade or so that you cannot make truly good software just going off A/B testing. It leads to something which is tolerable to everyone, but not actually good for anyone, and which taps into the self-destructive impulses of your users (doomscrolling, etc).

[–] Eji1700 2 days ago

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".

[–] ungovernableCat 2 days ago

The business models have become more extractive robbing users of control and agency and herding them to places where the business wants them to be.

[–] marcyb5st 2 days ago

Amen to that. For the first time in my life terrible UX costed me money and I'm highly suspicious that fucked up UX is because of AI slop.

Basically, I tried to buy a train ticket on sbb.ch (it was an eurostar crossing the border, so I couldn't do it through the app).

I selected the day and start looking at the available trains. Before continuing I logged in with swisspass to get my halb-tax discount applied. Once done the page reloaded, I got the updated prices, I selected the train at the time I wanted and I purchased the ticket. Only when I got the ticket delivered on my app screen I notice that it was for the current day and I couldn't reimburse it.

Basically, the page reload after the swisspass login changed the date to the current one and, of course, I didn't notice. It is now fixed, but it costed me 90 bucks and couldn't really do anything because technically is my fault for not noticing it was on the wrong day.

[–] isleyaardvark 2 days ago

The worst UX I ever saw was a bunch of dates in a row of 5-7 boxes starting with Sunday (date), Monday (date), and so on. Now if you thought the “and so on” made the row look like SMTWTFS, you would be wrong. It was SMTTSMW. They had decided to only show the next available days, not showing unavailable days, but displaying it in the style of what a normal, sane person would think looked like a calendar.

[–] gf000 2 days ago

Yeah shit like this is/was always extremely common on any kind of app created in the last 30 years. It's not related to vibe coding.

[–] cowlevel 2 days ago

"We have detected that you used the browser back button. Please log out and log back in and don't use the back button." on far too many government and enterprise web apps.

[–] gf000 2 days ago

Even better are the bank websites that refuse to work on multiple tabs, logging you completely out after detecting that..

[–] thefz 2 days ago

That is because good UIs require a lot of work from very smart people, and both of these factors are lacking in today's software industry.

[–] Geof25 2 days ago

I agree with reliability of software getting so much better. I still remember Windows Millennium (Something between 98 but not Windows 2000) and it has been a mess.

Further more I still remember software developers in the 2000s who just refused to do any kind of testing on produced software, because it is just a waste of time. It compiles? It ships!

Not many people are such cowboys today.

[–] rafaelRiv 2 days ago

> Not many people are such cowboys today.

Now-day, it is the llm that write tests. Nobody look at it and verify if it is meaningful. If the test pass, ship it.

It still cowboys days

[–] renegade-otter 2 days ago

Sure, but last year I had to reinstall Windows because they did not bother to test USB input devices on their new "recovery" feature: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/discussions/windows11/th...

All it had to do was run Check Disk, but it kept going in a loop every 30 minutes checking their "AI" for solutions, finding none. There was no way to get out of it.

I am sorry, but even in the worst days of Windows, this would have been a huge deal. This was the last straw so I installed Mint to play games.

[–] ORDINAND_PIZZA 3 days ago

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

[–] quacked 2 days ago

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.

[–] cosmic_cheese 2 days ago

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 (e.g. print design) 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.

[–] tonyedgecombe 2 days ago

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 2 days ago

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.

[–] fcarraldo 2 days ago

> consider the movie Trolls World Tour

can you elaborate?

[–] johnnyanmac 2 days ago

The issue with the metaphor is that everyone feels like their own country's music is worse than yesterdecade. It's not taste in other music so much as "we have decided to play this music because it's more profitable", even if everyone hates it.

No one here is winning in particular unless you make money pushing [profitable music].

[–] faangguyindia 2 days ago

i was running into random crashes with fusion360