The Decline of Usability (2020)
The past decade or so, I&#x27;ve found myself in a constant battle with UI&#x2F;UX team members.<p>A big part of the battle seems to be a shift from power&#x2F;tool user to consumer design paradigms. 20 years ago, most software was tools for professionals, now most software (on a usage level at least) is consumer software (literally consumers of video, social media etc.)  Designers can&#x27;t seem to switch modes and keep trying to apply &quot;content consumption&quot; rules and techniques to &quot;jobs to be done&quot; projects.<p>A favourite is removing visible tools with 3-dot menus in the name of &quot;cleaner&quot; or &quot;more intuitive&quot; user interface that turns one-click actions into two clicks:  2 clicks hundreds of times a day for the tool users.   Tables that show 10 items with 4 details each in the same screen real estate that used to show 20 items with 6-8 details.  Dashboards that show 4 graphs instead of 10.  Menus that take up the top 10-20% of the app.   Massive H1 titles.<p>One of my aunts changes around her furniture constantly, not because she has an idea of a better layout but because she&#x27;s bored with the current layout.  This seems to be a common personality trait in PMs and&#x2F;or UX people.  Adding a 4th table view to the product? ... &quot;we should use this entirely different style&quot; not because it&#x27;s &quot;better&quot;.  Since COVID, I&#x27;ve run a weekly Google meet with friends ... it changes in some way pretty much every time we get together, most recently the request to join process has changed, again, and not for the better.