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Free software scares normal people

(danieldelaney.net)
917 points cryptophreak | 17 comments | 30 Oct 25 15:07 UTC | HN request time: 1.152s | source | bottom
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squeedles ◴[30 Oct 25 16:12 UTC] No.45761639[source]▶
Good article, but the reasoning is wrong. It isn't easy to make a simple interface in the same way that Pascal apologized for writing a long letter because he didn't have time to write a shorter one.

Implementing the UI for one exact use case is not much trouble, but figuring out what that use case is difficult. And defending that use case from the line of people who want "that + this little extra thing", or the "I just need ..." is difficult. It takes a single strong-willed defender, or some sort of onerous management structure, to prevent the interface from quickly devolving back into the million options or schizming into other projects.

Simply put, it is a desirable state, but an unstable one.

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DrewADesign ◴[30 Oct 25 16:23 UTC] No.45761787[source]▶
Overall, the development world does not intuitively understand the difficulty of creating good interfaces (for people that aren’t developers.) In dev work, the complexity is obvious, and that makes it easy for outsiders to understand— they look at the code we’re writing and say “wow you can read that?!” I think that can give developers a mistaken impression that other peoples work is far less complex than it is. With interface design, everybody knows what a button does and what a text field is for, and developers know more than most about the tools used to create interfaces, so the language seems simple. The problems you need to solve with that language are complex and while failure is obvious, success is much more nebulous and user-specific. So much of what good interfaces convey to users is implied rather than expressed, and that’s a tricky task.
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1. LtWorf ◴[30 Oct 25 23:46 UTC] No.45766812[source]▶
> Overall, the development world does not intuitively understand the difficulty of creating good interfaces

Nor can the design world, for that matter. They think that making slightly darker gray text on gray background using a tiny font and leaving loads of empty space is peak design. Meanwhile my father cannot use most websites because of this.

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2. hn_acc1 ◴[31 Oct 25 00:30 UTC] No.45767073[source]▶
As I age, this x1000. Even simple slack app on my windows laptop - clicking in the overview scroll bar is NOT "move down a page". It seems to be "the longer you click, the further it moves" or something equally disgusting. Usually, I dock my laptop and use an external mouse with wheel, and it's easy to do what I want. With a touchpad? Forget it.. I'm clicking 20x to get it to move to the top - IF I can hit the 5-pixel-wide scrollbar. There's no easy way to increase scrollbar size anymore either..

It's like dark patterns are the ONLY pattern these days.. WTF did we go wrong?

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3. BobbyTables2 ◴[31 Oct 25 02:01 UTC] No.45767575[source]▶
What pisses me off is that the “brutalist” style in the 1990s was arguably perfect. Having standardized persistent menus, meaningful compact toolbars was nice.

Then the world threw away the menus, adopted an idiotic “ribbon” that uses more screen real estate. Unsatisfied, we dumbed down desktop apps to look like mobile apps, even though input technology remains different.

Websites also decided to avoid blue underlined text for links and be as nonstandard as possible.

Frankly, developers did UI better before UI designers went off the deep end.

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4. BobbyTables2 ◴[31 Oct 25 02:03 UTC] No.45767587[source]▶
Indeed.

Win95 was peak UI design.

I don’t understand modern trends.

5. fragmede ◴[31 Oct 25 02:06 UTC] No.45767597[source]▶
With a touchpad? Use two fingers to scroll (also works horizontally). Who's managing to hit a tiny scrollbar that disappears with a touchpad‽
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6. DrewADesign ◴[31 Oct 25 02:35 UTC] No.45767727[source]▶
The dozens of people I know that design interfaces professionally can probably recite more of the WCAG by heart than some of the people that created them. You’re assuming that things you think “look designed” were made by designers rather than people playing with the CSS in a template they found trying to make things “look designed.” You’re almost certainly mistaken.
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7. mjevans ◴[31 Oct 25 05:13 UTC] No.45768648{3}[source]▶
They just aren't as good at detecting real physical contact as a nice physical mouse is at responding to movement and pressure.
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8. sjamaan ◴[31 Oct 25 05:48 UTC] No.45768790[source]▶
I was ranting exactly the same just yesterday. Nowadays UI designers seem to have forgotten all about affordances. Back in the day you had drop shadows below buttons to indicate that they could be pressed, big chunky scrollbars with two lines on the handle to indicate "grippiness" etc.

A few days ago I had trouble charging an electric rental car. When plugging it in, it kept saying "charging scheduled" on the dash, but I couldn't find out how to disable that and make it charge right away. The manual seemed to indicate it could only be done with an app (ugh, disgusting). Went back to the rental company, they made it charge and showed me a video of the screen where to do that. I asked "but how on earth do you get to that screen?". Turned out you could fucking swipe the tablet display to get to a different screen! There was absolutely no indication that this was possible, and the screen even implied that it was modal because there were icons at the bottom which changed the display of the screen.

So you had: zero affordances, modal design on a specific tab, and the different modes showed different tabs at the top, further leading me to believe that this was all there was.

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9. eviks ◴[31 Oct 25 06:22 UTC] No.45768951[source]▶
> can probably recite more of the WCAG by heart than some of the people that created them

That's part of the problem, they'll defend their poorly visible choice by lawyering "but this meets the minimal recommended guideline of 2.7.9"

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10. LtWorf ◴[31 Oct 25 07:56 UTC] No.45769369[source]▶
I created localslackirc to keep using IRC and not have to deal with slack :D
11. LtWorf ◴[31 Oct 25 07:59 UTC] No.45769391{3}[source]▶
I've had long discussions at work with our designer, who thinks that people on desktop computers should perform swipe actions with the mouse rather than the UI reacting to mouse scroll events.

99% of the users are not using the mobile version.

12. fragmede ◴[31 Oct 25 08:49 UTC] No.45769746{4}[source]▶
I mean, maybe but the question wasn't what is the superior general pointing device (trackball ftw if you ask me) though, but how to scroll using a trackpad without tearing your hair out.
13. zeroc8 ◴[31 Oct 25 09:20 UTC] No.45769948[source]▶
The brutalist style also meant that I didn't need a UI designer for my applications. With Delphi I was able to create great apps in a matter of days. And users loved them, because they were so snappy and well thought out. Nowadays it seems I need a UI designer to accomplish just about anything. And the resulting apps might look better but are worse when you are actually trying to accomplish work using them.
14. pseudalopex ◴[31 Oct 25 15:44 UTC] No.45773344[source]▶
No. I worked with designers who designed low contrast and low density interfaces. I read articles written by designers. I used products of companies like Apple.
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15. DrewADesign ◴[31 Oct 25 20:23 UTC] No.45776304{3}[source]▶
Find a validator and try to make a text color selection that meets wcag guidelines which doesn’t have contrast high enough to read it perfectly easily. The criteria are not ambiguous and they’re not scraping the visibility barrier.
16. DrewADesign ◴[31 Oct 25 20:25 UTC] No.45776326{3}[source]▶
Examples? Are they interface designers? Are they qualified? The existence of shitty designers is no more an impeachment of any design field or designers as the existence of shitty developers is an impeachment of development or developers.
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17. LtWorf ◴[01 Nov 25 01:20 UTC] No.45778472{4}[source]▶
I think at this point the existence of good designers is what needs proof.