Personally, I think the web is 200% to blame. It has wiped out generations of careful UX design (remember Tog in Interface?) and very, very responsive and usable native (and mostly standard-looking) UI toolkits in favor of bland, whitespace-laden scrolling nightmares that are instantly delivered to millions of people through a browser and thus create a low-skills, high-maintenance accretion disc of stuff that isn't really focused on the needs of users--at least not "power" ones.
I know that front-end devs won't like this, but modern web development is the epitome of quantity (both in terms of reach and of the insane amount of approaches used to compensate for the browser's constraints) over quality, and I suppose that will stay the same forever now that any modern machine can run the complexity equivalent of multiple operating systems while showing cat pictures.
Front-end dev is optimising for a different set of constraints than HIG-era UIs.
Primarily that constraint is "looks good in a presentation for an MBA with a 30-second attention span". Secondarily "new and hook-y enough to pull people in".
That said...
HIG UIs are good at what they're good at. But there is an element of a similar phenomenon to how walled-gardens (Facebook most of all, but also Google, Slack, Discord..) took over from open, standards-based protocols and clients. Their speed of integration and iteration gave them an evolutionary edge that the open-client world couldn't keep up with.
Similarly if you look at e.g. navigation apps or recipe apps. Can an HIG UI do a fairly good job? Sure, and in ways that are predictable, accessible, intuitive and maybe even scriptable. But a scrolly, amorphous web-style UI will be able to do the job quicker and with more distinctive branding/style and less visual clutter.
Basically I don't think a standardised child-of-HIG formalised UI/UX grammar could keep up with the pace of change the last 10-15 years. Probably the nearest we have is Material Design?
> walled-gardens (Facebook most of all, but also Google, Slack, Discord..) took over from open, standards-based protocols and clients. Their speed of integration and iteration gave them an evolutionary edge that the open-client world couldn't keep up with
Seems to me to be a combination of things, none of which indicate that the new products are implicitly better than the old. The old products could’ve incorporated the best elements of the new. But there are a few problems with that:
- legacy codebases are harder to change, it’s easier to just replace them, at least until the new system becomes legacy. slack and discord are now at the “helpful onboarding tooltip” stage
- the tooling evolved: languages, debuggers, IDEs, design tools, collaboration tools and computers themselves all evolved in the time since those HIG UIs were originally released. That partially explains how rapidly the replacements could be built. and, true, there was time for the UX to sink in and think about what would be nice to add, like reactjis in chat
- incentive structures: VCs throw tons of money at a competing idea in hopes that it pays off big by becoming the new standard. They can’t do that with either open source or an existing enterprise company
I'm not arguing that the new products are better, just that they were evolutionarily successful.
I think the issue was less one of legacy codebases, and more that getting consensus on protocols and so on is _always_ slow and difficult, and that expands exponentially with complexity. And as the user-base expands, the median user's patience for that stuff drops. "What the hell is an SMTP Server and why should I care what my setting is" kind of stuff.
Meanwhile the walled gardens can deliver a plug-and-play experience across authentication, identity, messaging, content, you name it.
And this against a background of OS platforms (the original owners of HIGs) becoming less relevant vs Web2 property owners, and that strict content/presentation separation on the Web never really caught on (or rather, that JS single-pagers which violate those rules are cheaper and sexier). Plus a shift to mobile which has, despite Apple's efforts, never strictly enforced standards - to the extent that there's no real demand from users that apps should adhere to a particular set of rules.
I also think the web is 200% to blame, but for a different reason: ad-tech in general and Google+Apple in particular taught users that software should cost $0. Once that happened they didn't go back, and it torpedoed the ISV market for paid programs. You used to go to CompUSA and buy software on a CD for $300; that can't happen now. Which would be fine, except adware filled the revenue gap, which by necessity brought a new set of design considerations. Free-as-in-beer software fucked us over.
It even happens in the FOSS world. Open Source theorists tell us all the time that "free" only means "free-as-in-freedom". That we can share the code and sell the builds.
But whenever someone actually wants to charge users money for their own FOSS apps, even if it's only a few bucks to pay for hosting and _some_ of the work, outraged users quickly fork the project to offer free builds. And those forks never, ever contribute back to the project. All they do is `git pull && git merge && git push`.
Maybe the Google+Apple move was a strategy against piracy. Or maybe it was a move against the FOSS movement. And maybe the obsession with zero-dollars software was a mistake. Piracy advocates thought they were being revolutionaries, and in the end we ended up with an even worse world.
We need to get back to Native Software aka "Apps". As I have said before we have these powerful machines, with cheap storage. Why do I need to connect to a remote host through a bloated web interface just to read a document, it would be better, faster, and smaller locally.
When I was learning embedded design, the general rule of thumb was to aim for 10ms polling for user input, because human tolerance for delay is around 100ms so 10ms appears instantaneous. Then I see products like Nest come out, with big endcap displays at home improvement stores, and I'm like how do people not just immediately write this off as janky trash.
Then again maybe the extra lag (and jitter!) is gets a pass because its part of these products positioning themselves in the niche of "ask the controlling overlord if you may do something" rather than "dependable tool that is an extension of your own will".
I know that front-end devs won't like this, but modern web development is the epitome of quantity (both in terms of reach and of the insane amount of approaches used to compensate for the browser's constraints) over quality, and I suppose that will stay the same forever now that any modern machine can run the complexity equivalent of multiple operating systems while showing cat pictures.