Ever since Snapchat exploded in popularity I’ve decided bad UI is a gen z feature. They flock to difficult to use interfaces that become an insider feature for young folks to keep their parents out.
> Snapchat’s UI Receives Backlash From Users for being too complicated. However, Snapchat’s user experience is not bad. It’s actually an incredibly smart design. Their challenging user experience is what keeps them relevant to their primary target audience: teenagers and millennials.
> It keeps the adults out..Snapchat is a safe place for teens. They intentionally made the user interface challenging to grasp in order to make it difficult for adults to use. Most adults would not bother putting up the effort to learn how to use the app, leading to its abandonment. All content is ephemeral with strict limitations on editing. Most content is sent privately, and no content can be publicly rated or compared. Adults would not bother putting up the effort to learn how to use the app, leading to its abandonment. This limits Snapchat’s user base to teenagers.
Interesting, after reading your comment I've decided bad UI is subjective. I'm gen z, and never found Snapchat's UI to be confusing, and none of my gen z friends have ever complained about it, either.
> They flock to difficult to use interfaces that become an insider feature for young folks to keep their parents out.
This part might be true on a subconscious level (or it might be part of Snapchat's design philosophy), but do you think younger generations really choose apps for this reason on purpose?
Every interface convention was novel at some point. Breaking them doesn't necessarily make a UI bad, just as following them doesn't make it good. It depends on your skill as well as your audience, their expectations, and how experienced they are with the current interface patterns.
But certainly the vast majority of products should not create new or novel interface patterns just as they shouldn't "roll their own" cryptography -- it is almost always unnecessary and unless it is your primary focus it is very likely that what you come up with will be significantly worse than the status quo.
Not that I agree with GP but this comment doesn't make any sense. I don't think any serious software product was made specifically to be difficult to use for young people and I'm certain such an endeavor would fail or otherwise be difficult to use for anyone. Young people are the ones who will try to^W^W get DOOM to run on their smart toothbrush.
I had a German boss who said that Germans who designed the DB interface often had meetings to discuss where users were most likely to click onscreen to perform whatever action, and then move that button to the opposite side and if possible under 3 layers of menus.
Or more likely explanation for this phenomenon is that for Gen Z people:
1. Snapchat has relatively more people that they want to interact with.
2. The cost of learning a difficult UI is relatively low since they have more spare mental bandwidth since they aren't working full time, raising kids, etc.
So for a younger person, it's worth it to fight a bad UI to get to the social network, but for an older person the trade-off may not be worth it.
Very interesting. Yeah I think bad UI could be a way to gatekeep. 4chan for example has its mostly-unchanged now old-school interface, with its own quote/reply system, which some call an IQ barrier. That plus all the lingo.
It typically gives out outsiders (journalists, govt agents, new users etc)
> 4chan for example has its mostly-unchanged now old-school interface, with its own quote/reply system, which some call an IQ barrier
I doubt it would be an IQ barrier, considering the apparent intelligence of many of the posters there. I would rather call it a "normie filter" - the UI is so old-school ("ugly") that "normies", who usually dwell on fancy UI sites like Facebook, Reddit, etc., will consider it lame and avoid it.
I also think this site employs the same filter, whether intentionally or not.
I haven't looked at 4chan in ages, but my conclusion was trolling by smart people evolved in to ideas enthusiastically spread by dumb people. You can see evidence of this in the anti-vax community where the line between devious trolling and just really idiotic behavior is.
A better analogy for Snapchat and UI design is fashion. Fashion is basically an invisible circle of inclusion. Clothing styles don't go out of fashion because they are old, they go out of fashion because people outside of the circle begin to wear them.
There are arguments here about about gatekeeping or whether changing UI conventions are good or bad. There is some parts of truth to all of this.
I would make an important distinction. UI/UX design can be quantitatively good or bad. It is measurable if UI sucks or not. That measurement can be, perhaps mistakenly, only taken by new users: how fast did they learn the UI? I would argue it's the advanced users which are more important: how much can an experienced user get done?
To make matters more difficult, most of the UI design we are experiencing is commercial. It is, in fact, not there to improve our output, it's there to make their owners more money. The move toward cloud software has really fucked up the UI/UX of stuff that worked for a long time, like Photoshop. New stuff is continually introduced breaking known workflows.
On the business side I was always very pro-active about building our tools and systems on open source software or at least in a way we could always easily migrate our data to something else. Now I'm in the process of doing it on the personal side. I have minimal interest in using new tools that aren't interoperable, that I can't control the UI/UX workflow. Even something like Signal, that should be open source, really falls flat on this one. Imagining using something (like Snapchat) where the UI is going to switch so they can increase their engagement and increase ad revenue is just horrible. Internet users don't deserve this and don't need it.
Edit: hn's UI is fantastic, and a major reason I'm still here many years later (I don't use reddit)
