The toyification of the user interface
Sep 12th, 2025 - scudoModern operating systems have garbage UI, and also garbage UX.
What they all have in common is that they simplify the interface so that even people that are not very smart can figure out how to do what they want to do. This is not inherently wrong, if not for the fact that they make the life of anyone else much worse.
Not only options are removed because "the user can fuck up" - which is a pointless idea, just hide advanced stuff behind an "Advanced options" menu - but certain actions that some more tech-savy people tend to want to use (like changing permissions, or privacy settings, or advanced personalization) are made so they are a pain in the ass (if not plain impossible) to do.
An example is Windows' Settings app. That thing sucks.
There are only simple things you can do here. It's very much "look but don't touch". What, you want to enable Internet Connection Sharing? Sorry, that is not available in the Settings app. Go figure it out yourself in the Control Panel (which we conveniently "forgot" to restyle and looks extremely out of place on post-Frutiger Windows).
Android is guilty of the same thing. It has so many settings, and getting to them sucks major ass, especially if you need to get to stuff that's considered "advanced", like apparently manually setting the time; it used to be much easier to change the date and time of your device, because not everyone had Internet connectivity on their phone and not everyone could "just use NTP". Now, at least on MIUI, it's buried amongst other random settings. Thanks.
Now, why do I think all this is happening? I have some explanations:
- Many, many
more people have "smart" devices today that simply didn't exist 10 years ago. So, there is a need to make the interaction with said devices much easier to understand for someone that's never done that before - for example, grandparents getting a smartphone because their relatives use WhatsApp or iMessage and they want to keep in touch. So, UI/UX designers need to figure out a way to make an inexperienced user not fuck up and do something they didn't intend to because they knew no better.
This is a noble goal, and quite understandable, but that makes lives worse for experienced users that want to personalize more their device. Since the interface is simple, they can only do simple things. - Having a simple and good-looking interface means more people see it and think "this is easy to use + it's new so it's automatically good/better + it looks cool, so I HAVE to get it". Plus, an aestethically pleasing UI can (and often does) hide major UX problems.
- Making certain "advanced" actions possible means users can mess with their own stuff. You can control what the user can do even without actually removing the setting that does the thing you don't like the user does; just make it a pain in the ass to change that setting, and most people won't touch it. Basically making your settings app an incomprehensible mess.
Just likexorg.conf!
