I feel like Microsoft... well, basically everyone in tech really, hasn't actually given a damn about the user experience of their products for quite a while now. Personal computing used to be about enabling people to use technology to make their lives better and OSs like Win95 were focused on allowing the user to leverage the power of computing for themselves. Nowadays, computing is apparently about herding users like cattle so you can get them to look at more ads and harvest their sweet sweet data. Developers stopped caring about user experience because thinking of users as people would make their job of treating them like cattle harder.
Every once in a while I'll catch myself trying to read web content in the tiny window between the sidebar ads, the floating video, the cookie control panel and the "other content you might like" block... and I'll stop, pull back, and ask myself, "how did computing get this BAD?"
Especially in the web context, I think it's as you say: the real product has little to do with the task you came to the site for, so everything is trying to distract you away from that task. The end experience is as if the people who used to run warez pages with 9 giant buttons to download dodgy IE toolbars and one 20px link to get the actual file grew up and got jobs running mainstream news sites.
> Every once in a while I'll catch myself trying to read web content in the tiny window between the sidebar ads, the floating video, the cookie control panel and the "other content you might like" block... and I'll stop, pull back, and ask myself, "how did computing get this BAD?"
Seems pretty nice to me: I have control over my browser. I can simply elect to use any "Reader Mode" extension (or feature of the browser). Or use an anti-annoyances list on uBlock to avoid all sorts of cosmetic warts.
I can even configure my adblocker to remove entire parts of the layout like sidebars and navbars. It's amazing.
I don't have much choice when I'm using a poorly designed native app. And I'm thankful I am able to rely less and less on native apps. The computing experience is only getting better and better in my eyes.
They're a great example of the unintended consequences of regulation. I'm sure the original intent was not to have a huge banner where the options for managing what the site tracks were a one click "sure, whatever" or a multi-stage process of "no -> manage preferences -> categories -> reject all -> find the actual 'save' button, not the 'enable and save' one -> confirmation page where 'cancel' is lined up in the same place as 'save' was previously".
The regulation states that consent should be given freely so not only should tracking be opt-in but it the prompt shouldn’t be obnoxious nor pressuring you to opt-in.
The regulation is sane, you should blame the lack of enforcement that allows assholes to get away with being non-compliant.
I can't even read the article for more than a few seconds because I get redirected to one of those full page "Your computer has a virus" ads that won't let you hit the back button.
> the real product has little to do with the task you came to the site for, so everything is trying to distract you away from that task
This is really the biggest thing I had against the reddit redesign (and why I love the simple UI of Hacker News). It cleared away space for ads on either side, made the platform as a whole better suited to image- or video-content (dissuading users from using text posts on the site for discussion), and ultimately felt - exactly as you described - "distracting". It made it blatantly clear that the site was for upvoting pictures, getting inundated with political propaganda from whichever side is currently paying more, and ultimately wasting the user's time.
Facebook is feeling the same way.
I've literally gotten to the point where I separate "good content" from "time-wasting content" by browser - anything that I can consider educational, time-sensitive, or otherwise important (... I have a list of pinned tabs; Schwab, ThinkOrSwim, Financial Times, Bloomberg, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal) goes in Opera.
Anything that I save solely for my spare time goes in Firefox. All of my social media accounts go in firefox (google is the only thing I knowingly allow to track me between sites in Opera). Reddit and Hacker News go in Firefox (although sometimes I browse HN without logging in in Opera, so that I don't have to switch browsers to log into news sites with paywalls).
It makes it really easy to keep myself focused when I need to do something important, and it also makes it easier to live with some of the more annoying (but security-bolstering) browser settings I currently use.
Unfortunately it only took a few years for Apple to start sliding away from their own guidelines, and Windows was always less rigorous to begin with. And then the Web came along and blew the state of UX back to the Stone Age. Sigh.
The Mac is great and all, but I've used a 1984 Mac and I don't think I want to adhere to a guideline centered around running a single fullscreen application at a time.
That was more of a technical limitation than a design guideline, though guidelines may have been constructed around that. Many of the things those guidelines point out are still applicable today by virtue of the fact that Mac has stuck with its "Finder" system of interaction for 3+ decades.
That's an odd thing to say at the tail end of a decade that's seen very rapid and broad adoption of new interaction technologies - touch and voice, to pick a couple. The former in particular is a radical departure from the desktop metaphor. These things take substantial research and development efforts. The result is, in the industrialized world, not merely a computer in everyone's hand but a far more 'personal' and capable device than any Win 95 PC ever was.
> not merely a computer in everyone's hand but a far more 'personal' and capable device than any Win 95 PC ever was.
I don't know if it's just me, but my feeling is that a Win 95 PC is far more "personal" than any modern smartphone. With a smartphone, you are limited by whatever the mass-produced OS and apps allow (and it's getting worse - more recent OS releases allow much less access to the filesystem, for instance), while a Win 95 PC was wide open and could be customized the way you wanted - in the extreme, the whole operating system could be easily replaced.
That is: when I use my smartphone, I feel like I'm a guest at a Google-owned hotel. When I use my PC, I feel like I'm at my own home.
Well, in the extreme you can gut your phone to make it pretend to run Win 95. But that isn't really what I'm talking about, my point is the idea that there's been no work done on UI recently seems plainly inaccurate to me. The last 10 or so years of UI have seen more drastic and widely adopted changes in modes of interaction than the decade between the original Mac and Win 95.
