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You can see this in venerable software which has lived through the times of "designing for the user" and is still being developed in the times of "designing for the business".

Take Photoshop, for example, first released in 1987, last updated yesterday.

Use it and you can see the two ages like rings in a tree. At the core of Photoshop is a consistent, powerful, tightly-coded, thoughtfully-designed set of tools for creating and manipulating images. Once you learn the conventions, it feels like the computer is on your side, you're free, you're force-multiplied, your thoughts are manifest. It's really special and you can see there's a good reason this program achieved total dominance in its field.

And you can also see, right beside and on top of and surrounding that, a more recent accretion disc of features with a more modern sensibility. Dialogs that render in web-views and take seconds to open. "Sign in". Literal advertisements in the UI, styled to look like tooltips. You know the thing that pops up to tell you about the pen tool? There's an identically-styled one that pops up to tell you about Adobe Whatever, only $19.99/mo. And then of course there's Creative Cloud itself.

This is evident in Mac OS X, too, another piece of software that spans both eras. You've still got a lot of the stuff from the 2000s, with 2000s goals like being consistent and fast and nice to use. A lot of that is still there, perhaps because Apple's current crop of engineers can't really touch it without breaking it (not that it always stops them, but some of them know their limits). And right next to and amongst that, you've got ads in System Settings, you've got Apple News, you've got Apple Books that breaks every UI convention it can find.

There are many such cases. Windows, too. And MS Word.

One day, all these products will be gone, and people will only know MBA-ware. They won't know it can be any other way.

Personally, I think the web is 200% to blame. It has wiped out generations of careful UX design (remember Tog in Interface?) and very, very responsive and usable native (and mostly standard-looking) UI toolkits in favor of bland, whitespace-laden scrolling nightmares that are instantly delivered to millions of people through a browser and thus create a low-skills, high-maintenance accretion disc of stuff that isn't really focused on the needs of users--at least not "power" ones.

I know that front-end devs won't like this, but modern web development is the epitome of quantity (both in terms of reach and of the insane amount of approaches used to compensate for the browser's constraints) over quality, and I suppose that will stay the same forever now that any modern machine can run the complexity equivalent of multiple operating systems while showing cat pictures.

Front-end dev is optimising for a different set of constraints than HIG-era UIs.

Primarily that constraint is "looks good in a presentation for an MBA with a 30-second attention span". Secondarily "new and hook-y enough to pull people in".

That said...

HIG UIs are good at what they're good at. But there is an element of a similar phenomenon to how walled-gardens (Facebook most of all, but also Google, Slack, Discord..) took over from open, standards-based protocols and clients. Their speed of integration and iteration gave them an evolutionary edge that the open-client world couldn't keep up with.

Similarly if you look at e.g. navigation apps or recipe apps. Can an HIG UI do a fairly good job? Sure, and in ways that are predictable, accessible, intuitive and maybe even scriptable. But a scrolly, amorphous web-style UI will be able to do the job quicker and with more distinctive branding/style and less visual clutter.

Basically I don't think a standardised child-of-HIG formalised UI/UX grammar could keep up with the pace of change the last 10-15 years. Probably the nearest we have is Material Design?

I also think the web is 200% to blame, but for a different reason: ad-tech in general and Google+Apple in particular taught users that software should cost $0. Once that happened they didn't go back, and it torpedoed the ISV market for paid programs. You used to go to CompUSA and buy software on a CD for $300; that can't happen now. Which would be fine, except adware filled the revenue gap, which by necessity brought a new set of design considerations. Free-as-in-beer software fucked us over.
I support your point but Tog was a blowhard
One example in MS Word is the ribbon. It is relatively recent invention, and when it was introduced, _at least_ they went to the effort of using telemetry to guess which features where actually often utilized versus which ones where not, and designed the ribbons in accordance.

Nowadays every new "feature" introduced in MS Word is just randomly appended to the right end of the main ribbon. As it is now you open a default install of MS Word and at least 1/3 of the ribbon is stuff that is being pushed to the users, not necessarily stuff that users want to use.

At least I can keep customizing it to remove the new crap they add, but how long until this customization ability is removed for "UI consistency" ?

> At the core of Photoshop is a consistent, powerful, tightly-coded, thoughtfully-designed set of tools for creating and manipulating images. Once you learn the conventions,[...]

Photoshop has a terrible set of conventions. I'd take Macromedia Fireworks any day of the week instead. But Adobe bought Macromedia and gradually killed Fireworks in 8 years due to "overlap in functionality" between it and 3 other Adobe products.

That action pretty much enabled enshi*tification of Photoshop which wrapped the terrible core of Photoshop with terrible layers of web and ads.

I still run Fireworks under WINE in Fedora. The only real pain point is that the fonts are stupefyingly small in comparison to other apps due to the way modern GUIs and resolutions have grown (this is fixable, but not everywhere).
Fireworks is great, still used today
I think you have a bit of rose tinted glasses, I remember back in the day how much people complained about every feature being shoved into the title bar menus of word and photoshop. Eventually growing the menus too long with a bunch of features no one cared about and obscuring the actual useful ones.
Yeah. This (and Fitt's Law) is actually why the ribbon UI came about. 80% of the most common stuff is right there, and you can customize or search for the rest.
> One day, all these products will be gone, and people will only know MBA-ware. They won't know it can be any other way.

Just like vinyl made a comeback 'real' software will come back as well, maybe running in an emulator in a browser. Yes, there will be copyright problems, yes there will be hurdles but if and when MBAware becomes the norm software will persevere. Free software for sure, commercial software most likely even if legally on shaky foundations. The tighter they grip, the more users will slip from their clutches.

> vinyl made a comeback

Well, at least one of us must be living in a bubble.

What a great description

We live the timeline where the Feringi were the ones who bootstrapped the Borg with their hyper-consumption-trade culture

All will be consumed into the financial market (Borg cube) eventually

> At the core of Photoshop is a consistent, powerful, tightly-coded, thoughtfully-designed set of tools for creating and manipulating images. Once you learn the conventions, it feels like the computer is on your side, you're free, you're force-multiplied, your thoughts are manifest.

It's funny that today there still isn't a free image editing software comparable with the Photoshop from 2000. Krita is close, but still cumbersome to use.

I’m sure that it is a complete coincidence that CS6, the last before they moved to a subscription model, is the last time it was mostly nonsense-free
I would love to jettison Photoshop/Illustrator and just use Affinity. Illustrator has recently gone from taking 30 seconds to over 2 minutes to launch on my M1. It's an atrocity. But Adobe software is so entrenched in printing that, even though print media is only 10% or less of what I do these days, it would just be an endless headache to deal with file conversions to and from other designers, print shops and publishers. And anyway I expect Affinity will go the same way soon, now that they're owned by Canva.
Windows has been annoying me with this notification that keeps popping up time to time "Hey want to use Adobe?" in the bottom right corner
> There are many such cases. Windows, too. And MS Word.

The current Windows and Word are a shitshow from an UX perspective.

My understanding is the old Photoshop was pretty bad. I went through a phase of being a student of file formats and the PSD format is practically a case study in how not to do it. (By my metrics, PDF was excellent for its time; they've been able to cram so much crazy stuff into PDF because the foundation is good)

When I first used it on a Mac circa '95 or '96, it felt like a legacy product when I was using it for web work because the color management features intended for print meant it would always screw the colors up if you output for the web [1] if you didn't disable color management, whereas the GIMP 'just worked' because it didn't color manage. [2]

To play devil's advocate, the old Photoshop was a huge lump sum which meant you'd buy one version and then go six years without updating it. The new one is more accessible to people. Also, I find the A.I. features in Photoshop pretty useful, it is easier than ever to zap things out of images: it took just seconds to disappear a cable in [3] for which the older tools didn't work so well. For [4] it removed a splotch and later I had it add a row of bricks to the bottom to improve the visual balance of the image.

Note people sure complained about Office in the '95 era, see [5]

[1] sRGB was new!

[2] Funny I do a lot of work for print now, some of which pushes the boundaries of color management, such as making red-cyan anaglyph stereograms

[3] https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social/post/3lh7qqbqra22y

[4] https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110607460518784045

[5] https://www.amazon.com/Office-97-Annoyances-Lee-Hudspeth/dp/...

I've written a short blog post "User is Dead" a while ago https://rakhim.org/user-is-dead/

> User is dead. User remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the developers, the designers, the growth hackers? What was holiest and the final judge of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our A/B-tests and new features. Who will wipe this blood off us? What garbage collector is there for us to clean ourselves? What conference of atonement, what disruptive technology, what sacred meeting shall we have to invent?

Tasteless, but I felt, and still feel, like the notion of a user is truly lost. Somehow, the only technology which technically allows direct 1-many relationships between a small group of builders and a vast number of users, managed to create an industry which actively prevents and disincentives such relationships.

> Somehow?

Oh no! Working with end-users is madness. It's tiring, exhausting, counterproductive. Users don't know what they want, and will demand the worst possible solution for them. They will resist and circumvent security measures in the program. They will make sure to use the program in an unintended way and then endlessly complain about it not working in the way it was never meant to work.

The day I transitioned from B2C to B2B my emotional well-being improved tenfold.

Now, on a more serious note: making an individual user facing product is more expensive. It's easier to pitch and sell the product to an organization managing multiple users because the organization will agree and compromise on many aspects of the product, and then will create internal organizational policy for its users to use the product only in permitted ways. It will make feedback and improvements requests expensive for the users and will serve both as the customer surveyor and as the first tier of the customer support for the software shop. It's a match made in heaven (and that's how Microsoft and the likes built their empire). There's nothing surprising about that.

See also: customers, and clients. Getting in the way, wanting things, causing chaos. Every business runs much more smoothly without them.
>Somehow, the only technology which technically allows direct 1-many relationships between a small group of builders and a vast number of users, managed to create an industry which actively prevents and disincentives such relationships.

Bean counters and social status games players came in and spewed money everywhere and said to the engineers: "do your engineer thing, we'll handle the money and the people".

I think this string of questions from the middle of the post really gets to the heart of it:

⁃ Does the “user” feel respected by the software?

⁃ How does this software affect the mental health of the “user”?

⁃ How does the software fit into the rest of the “users” lifestyle?

⁃ Does this software help the “user” perform a task/entertain them without coercion?

A lot of modern software looks really bad if evaluated through the lens of these four questions.

> How does this software affect the mental health of the “user”?

We need to talk about Jira...

Yeah… it’s awful.

The user is often not the end customer of any software, so it’s not optimized for their benefit.

This is why I predominantly use CLI tools where it makes sense. Two CLI tools are more alike than two AI tools, theh tend to respect the user and their intelligence more, there is no sign in, it works together with other software and it will work for decades.

I'd love if GUI applications were similarly stringent or even had the goal of creating an ecosystem, but they don't, they are competing against each others trying to grasp user attention, bending them to their wills, locking them in. Not all of them of course, but the mental overhead with CLI is much smaller.

CLI presently selects for users with reading comprehension, who are a hard sell for trojan horses. If the great unwashed ever took a shine to CLIs, CLIs would become just as bad. You can already see a bit of this in PowerShell (i.e. marketing & telemetry).
I’ve read a lot of articles like this over the past decade, and books, and papers. I agree with most of it: we need to bring technology back “to the people”. But everything I’ve read, including this, has two problems:

1. Consistently, people reminisce about older tech that they loved, and wishing they could have stuff like that again. But the reality is that people like us, on HN, are not the average person. The tools we adored were great to us because we knew how to wield their power and felt empowered to do so. What parts of those applications could the broader population use easily?

2. What should we be using to create personal/folk/situated software? How do we even accomplish this goal? Again, we (HN readers) know the tools and feel empowered. But for the ideas in this article to come to light, many more people need to be empowered to solve their own problems and tailor their tools to their needs. What technologies should they use? I never get a good answer to that one.

I’ve been coming around to a similar point of view that modern software technology removes human agency. Everything is being automated—we thought it would free up our time for other things, but to my eyes we’ve become less free. AI is only going to accelerate this phenomenon—robbing us of even higher levels of agency as well as our ability to think independently and deeply. All in the name of efficiency and engagement. I struggle with this daily since I work in and have been steeped in tech for decades. I used to love it. Part of me still sees the good that modern technology has enabled too. I’m not sure what the solution is here besides logging off the internet and returning to live in the real world with real human interaction and slower, more meaningful connections.
I like the sentiment but the article itself ought to be edited to be 1/3 the length, certain themes should be broken out. The story of 'cyborg software' should be told in depth, for those of us who live that dream it doesn't need a lot of explanation but for other people it needs to be spelled out.

There are some interesting business patterns such as 'investment than disinvestment' which is common in communications applications. An application like Zoom, for instance, needs a lot of engineering work to deal with old computers, new computers, people with four cameras attached to their computers, who have slow internet connections, etc. A 'just works' experience is essential and the money is there to support it. A decade later it will be in a harvesting phase, the money won't be there to fix funny little bugs, and now it 'just doesn't work'.

There are other problems around recurring subscriptions, for which Creative Cloud is hardly the worst example. See the gaming industry, which has moved away from experiences that are 20-120 hours to wanting to be the one game you play for decades

I got into interaction design and UX design because so much of it was so bad. At some point along the way it seems we got too good at it. Many of the points in this article frankly makes me feel somewhat embarrassed to describe myself as a UX designer. Maybe I should start to think of myself as a… personal computing designer? small software designer? dignity designer? (No, surely designing ”dignity” is somehow an even worse pretense than designing ”experience”.)
We lost the plot when interface design became UI/UX (and all the associated modern variants on this terminology).

The goal of an interface is clear: it is how a human interacts with a machine. Buttons, dials, latches, sliders - those are interfaces. We can reason about them, make taxonomies, determine what operations they are appropriate for (or not), and so on.

“User experience” tries to capture everything into a nebulous haze that exists not to serve a human with a task to accomplish that a tool will assist with - but a business and how it will capture “users” and guide them on the “journey” it deems most appropriate to reach its sales goals.

Design students won’t be able to formulate a cogent thought on what the properties of appropriate interface feedback are, but they’ll be great at cranking out “personas” and sleek landing pages that enumerate marketing points. Something’s rotten.

UX can be used and abused. The biggest sin is that instead of thinking about the big picture of someone sitting at their computer and trying to do a thing that requires multiple programs to work together, bad UX designers assume they start from scratch without any existing environment and have only to anseer to their own project.

Imagine if something like Command line pipes would exist for GUI applications and then ask yourself why it does not (the closest thing might be copy/paste).

If you as an UX designer try to empower your users and do that in a way that does not break all existing convention without a good reason, you will be fine.

A industrial designer can design medical injection systems for drug cartels with the goal of catching more sheep or for a medical non-profit with the goal of making actual medical help cheaper — design is not the problem, the business interest it might be used for is.

Designers aren't always in the position to make their decisions freely, but you can put your weight behind the right side and everybody in here will appreciate you for doing so.

> No, surely designing ”dignity” is somehow an even worse pretense than designing ”experience”

Much.

"Dignity" seems be be mostly used when it is missing — without any dignity, lost their dignity, helping others regain their dignity…

And Dignitas.

"Experience" seems still positive to me, at worst a bit cliché.

Based on my 25 yoe in the industry the article is extremely cynical but unfortunately very much spot on.

Today in the corporate world the MBAs are running the show and they need continuous, growth and engagement. All needs of the developer and they manifest themselves in the software as features that are only there to serve the needs of the developer, not the user often combined with (deliberate) dark patterns and confusing UX just drive up the KPIs.

What a load of BS.

And the user often has no choice but to eat their frustration due to lack of alternatives, corporate/workplace policies or the alternatives being equally bad.

Unfortunately I expect the whole concept of "PC" as in Personal Computing is going to go away and will be replaced by "locked down, you don't own shit computing".

All the major platforms today are more or less locked down, Android, iOS, MacOS and Windows is on its way. I expect in the next 5 years Microsoft will introduce mandatory app signing and will lock the platform down so that the Microsoft store is the only place for installing apps. They can shove all candycrush, azure etc garbage in the users face who have no choice but to eat it.

Linux but is the only bastion of hope but unfortunately that's still (on the desktop) alpha quality and will likely never move past alpha.

Hopefully I can retire soon.

> I expect in the next 5 years Microsoft will introduce mandatory app signing and will lock the platform down so that the Microsoft store is the only place for installing apps.

This is already the case in lower end hardware.

> Linux but is the only bastion of hope but unfortunately that's still (on the desktop) alpha quality and will likely never move past alpha.

I fear that a lot of mayor software is suffering from a similar issue. Targeting a fantasy “user” who is both literate enough to install, maintain and use Linux, but illiterate enough that displaying keyboard shortcuts or showing a menu when right clicking would confuse them.

There’s little effort to stabilise software. The priority is often “I want all apps to use my chosen theme”, and not “I want apps that work out of the box”.

And there’s a huge trend of “X for gnome” or “Y for KDE”. Portable software has a become a niche thing.

> Folk music is enmeshed in a particular culture. It is knowledge transmitted across generations, but which evolves to meet the challenges of the times and changing sensibilities.

This is a beautiful and unexpected connection. Drawing analogies between software and other forms of cultural expression is a long overdue mental shift. The use of linguistic expressions such "tech" and "engineering" highlights the prevailing desire to think of software as some sort of thing apart, less social, less political (and thus something we can profitably pursue with fewer moral qualms).

The switch from the original mentality of software as a product (literally shipped in a box), to the current business model of "user as a product" and software merely being the bait and hook is so profound that we are not really talking about the same industry anymore.

Not clear where the strange and twisted journey of software would lead. The infinite reproducibility at zero cost is not something current economic systems can handle. The enshittification might continue, further enshittifying society or open source becomes the norm.

This reminds me of the concept of “user” as presented in the 1982 Tron movie, where users were regarded as sovereigns with god-like powers by the software (“programs”). The notion of “user” in the article is almost the reverse. We should return to that older conception.
I like the idea of either augmented computing or calm computing. Either it is fitting comfortable on/in me, or it is seamlessly integrated in the ambient environment. The basic idea that we are a mechanistic factory line, where computing are industrial tools, and I have to master my role in the process, or get my hands malested is sicking.

I really hope the LLM wave makes this view realistic. We still mostly see tools that enhances our use of tools, but I believe LLM's strongest functionality is that it provides efficient translation between human needs and machine instructions.

What about just computing? Gving us tools and the manuals that comes with them. You bought a computer, you bought/get a set of software that helps accomplish some tasks and that’s it. Mac and macOS used to be that, but they’ve wrapped it up in harzadous “services” brought by MBA. Windows used to be that, more versatile and fragile, but they’ve destroyed it. Linux is that, but you have to learn CLI speak.
The shitshow that has washed over the internet is about to become a parched wasteland as human eyes turn away, towards AI ux. The internet will become a place for AI agents to search out services to provide to their users through their own UX , be it voice, audiovisual, text, or some kind of universal AI “desktop OS” interface.

API endpoints will be the new UX, and adversarial prompt engineering will be the new “dark pattern”.

The internet will become a place that your AI goes to discover and do things for you.

I wish I could call it cynicism, but it's just the unvarnished truth.
“Users” are a commodity, a hot one perhaps, but like any other commodity, can be bought and sold."

that reminds me of an ancient saying - change your mind and you change your world

Words tend to accumulate negative connotations, and then it's tempting to discard or ban them for synonyms. I agree with most of what's said in the article, but the theme that calling a spade a shovel will fix things is silly. Misaligned incentives have to be realigned, and that means stepping back from extreme crapitalism.
There were wiffs of it before, but I immediately knew the weiter was full of crap once he whipped out the communist-conspiratorial view of Taylorism. Talk about a red-flag!
Yes cyborg. The more you unite with the machine, the more you will be used like one. There are no free rides. No calculating or politicking your way out of the metaphysical toll.
One big problem, I think, is how big tech gained monopolies and now could live easily for years. This excites me about AI. It’s a disruptive technology that is likely to disrupt some of the big tech just like Google disrupted Altavista. Big tech will probably struggle to adapt whereas small teams will come out of nowhere with better solutions, see Cursor AI and DeepSeek as recent examples.