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I see articles like this a lot and I haven't yet thought of a way to categorize them properly.

I think the author is simply being melodromatic and faulting companies like apple for not designing user interfaces that are perfect.

His concrete complaints against apple boil down to two points really:

* there's a lot of bloatware. / too many apps

* the apps/settings menus are hard to navigate.

My day job has me in the trenches right now trying to make good UIs and I can simply say that its hard. Moreover, if you ask the average consumer what they think of apple's UI I bet that most would praise it. If apple, the best company in the world at UI/UX can't make this guy happy, then I'm not sure who will.

His complaints against google have a similar tone. He complains that SEO has slowly eroded the quality of search results, which is true, but also SEO is an adversarial process. Given the value of being at the front page of search, people are strongly incentivised to game the system as hard as they can. It's a hard problem.

Not to be glib, but I'd like to see him try to tackle these problems before saying that big tech is "selling basic usability back to consumers".

Yes, the flaws he points out with usability of big tech products may be real, but I dont think it warrants the venom with which he writes the article.

Even to me, as a tech person, the level of SEO allowed to infiltrate google results seems way out of proportion to what they should allow. There are several obvious URLs that always come up with "top 10 lists" that seem wholly designed for SEO referral links for any type of recommendation you might be looking for. There's a reason everyone just ignores google and adds "reddit.com" to certain searches now to get real results.
Google isn’t, to all outward appearances, trying to do search well, though. I mean, you can want them to deal with SEO better/differently, but it’s clear the goal is to drive advertising and to do whatever it can to serve you more ads. We need more neeva/Kagi search tools, if we want companies incented to get away from blogspam/SEO.
I don't believe that Apple is the best at UI, from by limited experience with them. I have close to zero complaints about Android or Windows UI, besides pull to refresh.

Apple is the best at making tech not feel like it's actually tech, and creating a sense that it's just a transparent window to your content, the way that hand tools are transparent extensions of your hand, rather than interpreters that filter and alter your actions.

People who are already really good at doing stuff in the real world and comfortable in 3D space(The kind who probably gravitated towards skateboards and oil painting instead of video games) feel at home, and don't experience and loss of confidence which would cause them to give up.

It's not really easy to use, they have a ton of gestures and shortcuts. Windows/android is like doing what a screen says, Apple is like learning a dance.

If you have a very active mind that always tries to find patterns of logic, Apple gives you clarity and directness, but it doesn't spell things out and hold your hand as much as some stuff.

> Not to be glib, but I'd like to see him try to tackle these problems before saying that big tech is "selling basic usability back to consumers".

A problem statement is not invalid just because someone pointing it out can't solve it.

The tech industry has incentive ($$$) to improve click rates but very little incentive to improve UI beyond what A/B testing says makes the most money. The author was just claiming that from a consumer point of view.

> I bet that most would praise it.

Maybe so, but I curse it. It hides too much and is opaque and unintuitive. I can never really figure out how to do anything in it without doing a web search to get the answer.

> downloaded your favorite personal finance, social media and productivity apps,

The phone, as an interface SUCKS. Full stop.

Touch has limitations, voice has limitations, there is a reason that people who have to type still sit down with monitors and keyboards. There is a reason that physical switches still exist. (IF you touch input by rote on a screen that may be in some other state, you check before you start).

As for google, stop using it if you dont like it. Bing, DuckDuckGo Kagi all exist at a price point that works for you.

The phone is wonderful for a lot of stuff, especially for people who aren't naturally very tactile and don't usually do things by feel.

The design language is also far more indirect, high level, and automated. It forces people to make everything very obvious and very automated. Phones make it easy to tap a button and very hard to do complex "blank canvas" kind of work.

On desktop sometimes programmers build a UNIXy modular system and the UI is just a direct translation, so you have to do manual bookkeeping steps between parts of the program, like in old school KiCad, where modern apps just have everything unified and sync instantly.

Are the other search engines actually better? It seems like the problem is the AI generated trash content, not the engines themselves.

> The phone is wonderful for a lot of stuff, especially for people who aren't naturally very tactile and don't usually do things by feel.

There's tons of research on this, HCI, Airplanes... Even when you aren't tactile, something being tactile is how you can keep a plane in the air. Or NOT crash every time we adjust the heat, stereo, or turn signal when driving a car. It's how chef's can chop veg without looking and do it fairly uniform.

> Are the other search engines actually better? It seems like the problem is the AI generated trash content, not the engines themselves.

I broke down and spent the 10 bucks to try Kagi, best money I have spent in a long time! I had to go back to google today and was appalled.

Vehicles are a special case of a hard realtime interaction between a person and the world, which should probably not be done at all by people who aren't good with their hands. I'm still not exactly sure how drivers don't hit the gas when they mean to hit the brakes at least a few times a year.

If a UI is realtime outside of video games(Where people do in fact love tactile UI), most would probably hate it.

Most UIs are an artificial constrained world where we deliberately don't want the level of control a chef has over the knife, because that would mean our own dexterity affects the final product, like with handwriting.

Tactile would be nice, but it's not as necessary when the UI only has a limited number of possibilities and a confirm step for everything.

Which is probably part of why we spend all day staring at the dang things, they are so carefully designed not to challenge us that even staring at a wall feels like effort.

I liked t9 word and 9 key. Could type without looking.
While I agree with some of the article, I can't agree with all of it.

A lot of this argument is "This software isn't catered to the 10% I use, they should make it simpler", but the problem is we all have a differing set of needs, so the interfaces explode with options. This said, the needs advertising do make this worse by demanding eyeball attention over usablity.

What's "a lot of this argument"?

I would summarize it as "Apple/Google/Microsoft have made a labyrinthine mess of their products (I would agree), seek to use AI to make it less messy (probably also true)".

We all have differing needs, but we all have common needs too. Feature explosion is real, but the solution (organization) is something we've been doing for centuries without "modern" technology. Call it technical debt, laziness, corporate shortsightedness, or what you will, this is something the tech companies have done to themselves, and now are making worse under the guise of "innovation".

One may criticize usability in general without demanding undue attention on their specific use cases, and that seems to be what is happening here. Finding stuff is a common problem, and it does seem like there is a conspiracy to make things worse rather than better across basically all platforms (web/social search, mobile settings, even local files). It's deliberate sabotage of course.. We could provide least-surprise ux everywhere but corporations simply prefer to acclimate us to mediated experiences. Worst case users can't leave anyway, best case for corporate we learn to love the mediated experience we're given and shout down people who are saying simple common sense stuff (like wait, file search should show files, not websites).
>Finding stuff is a common problem

Finding stuff was a common problem 30 years ago too. The rate of change was much lower then leading people to memorize the interfaces better.

I do agree that much of it is deliberate sabotage, but in that case, it's not broken software at all, 'bad' may be in the eyes of the beholder. What it is, is greedy evil software attempting to maximize the amount of profit it can extract from you. They only way to can fix evil greedy software is by not buying it, and instead buying non-greedy non-evil software. But that doesn't even work because many of these platforms feed on attention and not cash. Again, none of this is a conspiracy, it's all out in the open. We have 2 cell phone manufactures, there is no completion there. Windows and MacOS aren't really much competition to each other. Social media is all about stealing as much as possible.

Oddly enough I don't blame the manufauctures. Us the consumer are willing to bend over and take this crap, so why shouldn't they shovel it to us?

> Oddly enough I don't blame the manufauctures. Us the consumer are willing to bend over and take this crap, so why shouldn't they shovel it to us?

Weird statement, having in mind that these same manufacturers likely used every dirty trick known to man to reduce competition just so they can eventually sheep-herd people into their closed ecosystems. Which is actually exactly what happened. Now there's no competition and they can feed us 2 features per year. It's not like there are alternative phone OS-es, or alternative smartphones for that matter. (And please don't mention FairPhone or SailfishOS; they are very much not up to the task.)

IMO every adult should take for a fact the assertion that corporations can and do work 24/7 to tilt the table and to rig the game. Doubting this is... a really alien view, one that does not align with our collective knowledge of what the human race is capable of -- and ignores numerous historical proof as well.

> Finding stuff was a common problem 30 years ago too. The rate of change was much lower then leading people to memorize the interfaces better.

Rate of change has certainly increased but that's not really the issue at all; it's just that hostility and exploitation has increased. These days you can take any phone app with a search feature, then watch it jitter/freeze/crash or otherwise get weird when you try to use it in offline mode. Do I need to be online to search my music or books? Of course not, it's just substring search over the local title/author/metadata library (which should be easily possible regardless of whether the asset itself is even downloaded). Corporate wants the callback so they can spy/advertise, so just watch everything panic if the cord is cut. Corporate also has the cash/engineering muscle to create software that spies/advertises if and only if I actually have an internet connection, and gracefully degrade to some kind of sane non-mediated behaviour when I'm offline. But they'd rather fake offline-capability and then punish the user for disconnecting.

Search is the original and best place to stick mediated-experience hostility along the lines of "you will look at what I give you, not what you wanted to find", because the user has already kind of admitted they are lost and unsure. But in off-line mode, even loading the home-screen for apps like spotify/audible/kindle takes 5-10s, and with a lot of smart TVs changes boot time to like 30s+. Or consider something like a shuffle or play-next feature. My "best songs of 2023" list features lots of stuff that I don't recognize at all, because they force-fed me something, gave no way to downvote, then concluded that I loved it.

Users can perhaps leave behind social media, but if one is a hardliner about receiving any modicum of respect from the interfaces that you use, it's starting to look like you'd have to leave behind ALL media/technology. And this observation comes in what is still the very early days of ubiquitous useless "AI" being jammed into literally every interface everywhere. AI is/will be the new reason everything has to be online all the time, all actions tracked, all experiences mediated. Software companies, telecom companies, governments all benefit. Most users won't.

We can quibble about exact word-choice but the conspiracy is this: the status quo for software UX quality is so consistently and completely degraded everywhere that it's been normalized. To the extent that exploited users routinely make excuses on behalf of software & corporations to other users who think this is unacceptable. Maybe it starts as Stockholm syndrome where we sympathize with our captors just to continue to function, but often ends with more active participation.

> Oddly enough I don't blame the manufauctures. Us the consumer are willing to bend over and take this crap, so why shouldn't they shovel it to us?

Normalizing or evangelizing bad behaviour is participation, and as you say I guess staying when one could leave makes one complicit. This assumes choice though, or else it's just victim-blaming. As you also said, it's not often that we actually have meaningful choices for most technology.

The tone is overly hyperbolic because I think the core argument is a bit flimsy. Yes, tech industry has made stupid design choices, but I don’t think it follows that AI is a band-aid over bloated features. In many cases AI promises completely new features or workflows. It’s just one new thing for profit motives to degrade the user experience on eventually.
My prediction is that LLMs are just going to add a new layer of confusing/hostile design decisions to what's already there.
> My prediction is that LLMs are just going to add a new layer of confusing/hostile design decisions

I agree: natural language UIs seem awfully convoluted.

To me, the real issue is that content in apps is temporal with a lack of visit history, unreproducible feeds, and a lack of deep links. This means I often lose my place when a momentary switch to another app causes a refresh on the first app. Even worse, sometimes switches are accidental from a push notification popping right before I click something else at the top of my screen. Websites have this unreproducible feed problem, too, but it generally isn’t as pronounced.
Isn’t this because everything today is designed to be mobile first? That means hiding everything in endless context menus, testing how deep down the rabbit hole your user can go. I long for the days when apps for work had a single page with tons and tons of settings, filling nearly every pixel. I miss that because once you got comfortable you can fly through whatever you’re doing, like a bartender slapping their fingers over the POS machine at Mach 2.
> Isn’t this because everything today is designed to be mobile first?

Yes, that's an enormous part of the problem. Mobile and desktop are two entirely different worlds, and you can't have one interface that can deal with both and do so well.

I think it's a disgrace that desktop UI has been made worse because of the existence of smartphones and tablets.

Weird, I got my first smartphone this year and I thought the iOS interface was significantly less bad than my wife's Android phone's interface. She agrees enough she's switching.

I can think of a lot of other things that "AI" is being used as a band aid of that are far more obnoxious than iOS.

Android has the same issue. I don't think this post is specifically anti-Apple.

How do you do anything on Android? Good luck, better know your Android version, phone version, check for updates, search the internet...

iOS is more consistent, by design, but pile on hundreds of apps instead of websites, its just as bad.

Android is knowledge in the world based. Apple is knowledge in the head based.

I'm not gonna remember how I did that setting change I made last year, do it doesn't matter if they have any consistency whatsoever, as long as I can find it with global search.

Consistent UI makes sense if you do a focused set of things often enough to learn them, but Android is meant to have a billion apps from 100 companies and control 20 IoT devices, none of which are interesting enough to motivate anyone to learn and master them, but all together they make life a easier by a small amount.

AI is certainly adding new layers of innovation to the interface but I don't think it will ever replace it. It does feel like we're entering a new era of simplifying all the "bloat" as referred in this article. I think the future of things to come will be starting to make sense of all the bloat in more innovative ways as more more apps just get added everyday while the main interface (phone, tablet, monitor) doesn't innovate or establish a better interface based on first principles.
That Spotlight is somehow the Final Boss of "artificial intelligence-based user interfaces" to the author is hilarious to me.
It's more like - we gave it a shot with natural intelligence, and now we are trying to see if what we call artificial intelligence can do better.
More like: we've used technology to create such a mess that humans can't un-mess it. So... let's use AI to sort it out.

Doesn't make sense. If things get out of hand: stop making things worse, reflect & perhaps take a step back. Back to a state where things were manageable.

If eg. there's too many apps, then the fix is to organize them better. Or provide user-settable filters. Not throw in profit-focussed, shady opaque algorithms (or AI) to present user with what user is 'supposed' to like.

Like search engines are a band-aid over bad, incomplete and outdated documentation.
this is like calling air travel a band-aid for the horrible choices of the automobile industry.

Powerful software is complicated. AI-assisted search allows it to continue to get more powerful without overwhelming usability.

Hmm, bad analogy. They aren't really even in the same category, it would be rail vs airplane not car.

"Powerful software is complicated." > you assume software today is somehow more powerful, its mostly not. Some Facebook engineer way back when stated as a senior engineer, a 1% improvement was a major deal. That was ~10 years ago, and 1% progress is not additive, it is multiplicative, so 1% of 1% of 1% ... etc. Quantitatively today's software is barely more powerful than anything ten years ago.

And most of it is just re-written to satisfy some ego/marketing/merger/etc.

In your analogy, this is like saying you're strapping wings onto someone's car because the car has trouble going 10 (mph/kmph) down the road, so you can continue loading the backseat with sand and skimping on the engine (because in 10 years they had to switch out the engine to save on costs).