For some years now the UI design and interaction methods shown in sci-fi movies have become ever more abstract & complex, driven by minimalist aesthetics utilizing high-res graphics, a design philosophy based on total omniscient access, heavy information density and interactive realtime visualizations (and/or visual ways of browsing) to aid exploration & expose patterns/relationships, the use of layered/spatial layouts, capable of customization/personalization, programmability (of sorts), shared state with contextually morphing representations and relying on gestural/voice controls, all designed to empower people in changing (often urgent) situations and enabling them to manage/filter a large information space.
Whilst a lot of these fantasy UIs are also just that: eye candy, clichéd kitsch and completely nonsensical graphic design wanks, in the real world instead, mainstream UI/UX design has largely moved towards becoming a bastion of boring blandness, caused by a frequently encountered design attitude which outright patronizes potential users and rejects their agency by considering everyone to be part of an homogeneous group and designers only ever wanting to cater for the lowest most "simple" (but actually simplistic!) approach. Design by template (and I don't just mean the graphic parts). This is amplified by lack of user interaction research & testing, but also by designing for the lowest common denominators of mobile OS platforms, by the guidelines imposed by app store approval processes etc.
The same patterns are everywhere, from smart watches, to ovens, cars, even in a lot of games, but especially bad on mobile. Entire generations of _people_ (not "users"!) are being conditioned to interact with machines and information systems in the form of endless self-similar sequences of deeply nested menus, popovers/modals, lists & grids and a handful of standard widgets (mostly buttons of some sort) via which every single task, large or small has to be solved. Scrolling everywhere, and maximizing whitespace of course, because what else are all these modern high res screens really for? We expect so little by now, no wonder people are considering LLMs a magic breakthrough! Meanwhile, basic text editing on a phone is still unfathomably bad and a constant, impossibly fiddly source of frustration... A general lack of undo/redo too (not just mobile, also most web apps).
We have the most capable of machines ever, incl. sensors which could be used to augment mobile interactions for so many people. Yet for many in the current breed of "professionals" in UI/UX, the design space and horizon of imagination what's possible and/or acceptable has shrunk down to the size of a shoe box and it's being defended and post-rationalized for the most inane of reasons... Liquid Glass™ on one hand, "LLM-ing all the things" on the other, relying on planet-scale infrastructure to pull off some form of glossy "intelligent assistant/slave" is NOT a scalable or even desirable solution! These are the wet dreams of aesthetes, graphic & product designers who never seem to use their own creations even just once (else they would very quickly realize the error of their ways...)
It just doesn't have to be like that! It also wasn't always like that... As with politics, we've allowed the bad-faith and/or lazy players to take over and let them dictate their overly simplistic (and frequently inconsiderate, if not abusive) world view on everyone and everything...
"I still have a dream..."
#UI #UX #Interaction #Design #Technology
