[rescue] tired of current GUIs / a rant about the daily

[Mouse]

>>> The bottom line is that the software world has gotten lazy.
>> Yes, and no.  We no longer optimize for the machine, because the
>> machine is cheap.  We instead optimize for the amount of time humans
>> have to spend making the machine do something useful, because the
>> human labor is now the dominant economic factor in producing
>> software.
> Then why do we produce so many utterly fucking ATROCIOUS interfaces?

There are other reasons, but there's one really big one that I have
very rarely seen mentioned:

Because there is no such thing.

There is no such thing as a good user interface or a bad user
interface.  There is only a good, or bad, user interface *for a
particular user* (or class of sufficiently-similar users).  One
person's dream interface can be, and occasionally is, the next person's
nightmare interface.

For example, these days I'm carrying a "smart"phone for work.  The user
interface is, no doubt, great for plenty of people - but for me it's a
barely-tolerable abomination.  Find me a smartphone that's documented
in enough detail I can replace all the software on it with my own and
I'm not looking back - well, unless it is outrageously pricy.  (As I
understand it no such beast exists at the moment, though I've seen it
said a few are in the works.)

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