Scrollbars. Ever heard of them? They’re pretty cool. Click and drag on a scrollbar and you can move content around in a scrollable content pane. I love that shit. Every day I am scrolling on my computer, all day long. But the scrollbars are getting smaller and this is increasingly becoming a problem. I would show you screenshots but they’re so small that even screenshotting them is hard to do. And people keep making them even smaller, hiding them away, its like they don’t want you to scroll! “Ah”, they say, “that’s what the scroll wheel is for”. My friend, not everyone can use a scroll wheel or a swipe up touch screen. And me, a happy scroll-wheeler, even I would like to quickly jump around some time.
UX design got better and better for many years…but it has definitely been regressing over the past few years, IMO. It’s weaponized minimalism at this point. Because it “looks cool, bro”.
It’s a variant of enshittification.
The overuse of the word enshittification drives me crazy.
Enshittification of “enshittification”
/s
Yeah, it has a very specific meaning, and people are now using it to mean “things becoming shitty”. Just because “shit” is the base word doesn’t mean that’s what the whole word means.
Enshittification doesn’t mean “thing gets shittier”? Who knew?!
No, it doesn’t.
From Wikipedia:
From the guy who coined the term itself:
Being a pedant is never a good look. You’re missing the larger point. The same corporate impulse that drives platform decay ripples out to things like UX design. And that impulse is: the customer doesn’t matter anymore, we already got your money, only what we want matters.
Being intentionally ignorant is never a good look.