My pet peeve nowadays is when apps or websites just crop the names of stuff (like files for example) and add “…”, so that you have to hover every element to see the full name in a tooltip.
Information density has decreased even as screens have gotten bigger and LCDs have higher and higher resolutions.
I dont know why designers feel the need to use such large margins, padding and whitespace everywhere.
Biggest example of this is to go to any news site or blog, and scroll through in a browser (without adblock if you're feeling frisky). How long did you have to scroll, and how dense was the text?
Then open a TUI browser like Lynx and go to the same page. Now look at how much text there really was. Usually it will be about a page or so without the need to scroll at all.
Doing this opened my eyes to just how monumentally bad modern web design has gotten at conveying information.
Yes, mobile-first design has greatly accelerated the decline of usability in interfaces, but that decline also began before mobile-first really became a thing.
All I know is that usability keeps getting worse as time goes on. Where is the floor?
mIRC is very powerful, but most '90s, Windows power-users needed some explanation of how to use it, whereas Slack's design language makes it install-and-play for even basic users.
Mobile design isn't just a response to the limitations of its hardware; as technologies become more prevalent, intuitiveness to increasingly inexperienced users has to be prioritised over everything else and this is a major trend that dates right back to the beginning of the computer industry.
Usability is much better today than it was in the past; it's just no longer targeted at us.
I currently ship a web app, which among many things contains an 'excel grid clone'. My earlier team collaborators, who by now have jumped ship to other greener pastures, styled the grid in 'that modern way', so on a huge ultra-HD resolution monitor, you could view maybe 9 columns at a time, if you squeezed them a bit :-/.
Soon after the CSS guru was gone, I changed that grid CSS to instead honor the spirit of Excel, and it is now possible to view more than 9 columns of data, and more than 7 rows :-/.
I still in vain try to fathom the mindset that would make you turn 'excel' into a bottleship-scrolling-microscope-hell.
Yep, god forbid you can see more than the 10 first characters of a filename - it's a homage to the old 8.3 limitation!
And your files were created 'about 7 months ago', not on april 17 in 2023.
If you need more details than that, you are probably a lowly work-slave.
Information density has decreased even as screens have gotten bigger and LCDs have higher and higher resolutions.
I dont know why designers feel the need to use such large margins, padding and whitespace everywhere.