The Decline Of Usability

I think Prime misses the point. The common UI paradigms of the 90 (when everything used the same UI libraries, visual language, and guidelines) meant that familiarity with one program made other different programs easily discoverable and instantly usable. For example, menus where all in the same place, all programs had them, and you expected all commands to be there. Modern paradigms (both in the terminal and in the GUI) do not translate well between different programs.

"past wasn't great" -said while doing everything in commmand-line and a souped up vi.

After faster hardware comes out: Expectation: Existing software will run faster Reality: More bloat is added that makes software run the same or slower on newer hardware

speech bubbles represented chatting in comics before computers

I had a recent conversation: "It looks old" -- "its data shown by tables, how fucking 'new' do you want it?

Low density layouts are optimal for scrolling. When you scroll, you are not sure of what lies below. The more you scroll, the more ads you see. That's why websites stopped using ads in sidebars: because users developed blindness to that section of the page. Moving everything to a scroll hell "fixes" this from the business point of view

If you don't understand that google sheets is super simple compared to Excel, you've never used the complicated shit in excel before.

The #1 issue for me is indistinguishable active and inactive title bars. JFC. The very subtle dimming conveys absolutely nothing. Mine is a bright blue when active, gray when inactive (where supported). This is especially important on very large screens or multi-monitor. And yes it's at odds with "pretty" - that's exactly the point. Usability often is, but developers choose "pretty".

3:54 aktually 🤓, "satisfying" is in the ISO definition of usability. (ISO 9241-11)

The chat icon is just talk bubbles from comics and cartoons. It's been around for a very long time.