Dunno, I'm mostly missing the day when we had the technology to create responsive user interfaces. Like imagine we used to have progress bars that actually reported progress, not just some bogus animation.
It's amazing how often things break with absolutely no indication of why or what caused it. Load a page, get a completely blank screen or component. Why? No clue. Everything just silently fails and redirects you to a happy path, e.g. back to a home page or a starting screen. Maybe if you're lucky you'll get an "Oops, try again later or contact support for more help!"
The fashion industry is so rife with this. It seems like any URL that is more than a day old is going to 404 or silently redirect to the front page of the store.
Super frustrating if you read fashion-related reddits. 90+% of links on posts more than a few months old are dead. Only the ones that go to Instagram albums or something like that, are usually still OK. True even for companies that mostly sell "timeless" fashions.
Yep, my workflow is Find something cool in an MFA inspo album -> find it in the comments -> 404. I dont know why I even bother sometimes. It's literally every brand from small botique to the gap, so it must be 'working' somehow, right?
I just miss responsive desktop applications. I see USD10000+ tools running in the browser and I just wish we went back to how solid applications were built in 1990s or 2000s.
I've said it before, but I genuinely think Windows 95 is the pinnacle of UX. It is amazingly intuitive.
The use of depth and colors is streets ahead of the contemporary flat GUIs. You never have to guess the type or state of a widget, or where it begins or ends. Buttons typically have both icons and text. Icons to make it quicker to navigate, text makes it accessible without being fluent in Linear B ideograms.
Why do they need to be smooth? What they offer is an indicator of progress. We can tell that the computer is doing something. Maybe not when it's done, but if the bar inches forward, it's not stuck at least. spinner.gif does not tell you any of those things.
The issue is progress is difficult to report. If I've got Process A displaying my progress bar and Process B doing the actual work I've got to have some sort of bidirectional communication between the two. It's more difficult if B is calling independent processes in the background. They need to report their status/progress to B which needs to broker those updates and pass back up to A.
It's not an intractable problem, just tricky and annoying. If a progress bar is a tiny fraction of an app's lifecycle it's a lot of work to make it accurate for little payoff.
Implementing a progress bar that works for things like "bytes uploaded" or "number of tasks in the queue" on the frontend is fairly trivial. The hard bit is how to transmit a progress value from the backend to the frontend. Typically that requires setting up either a socket or a keepalive connection, or polling an endpoint from the frontend, which is enough of a pain that very few web apps bother.
Ultimately everything required for this sort of feature is right there in every browser. It's the backend that's usually lacking.
Biggest offender is a large OS upgrade on Mac and it sits on that black screen. It often doesn't even say how long is left, but when it does the 'remaining time' is laughably wrong. Not really excusable when Apple have such a small range of hardware configs.
I've seen some Windows installers 'x remaining' consistently count upwards instead of downwards...or the other classic, it sits at 10% for a while and then suddenly jumps to 100
Yep, now you just get a spinning disk, a frowny face and some inane message that "our elves broke something uwuuu" and asking you to contact their (nonexistent) support channels.
I think there's a significant shift from empowering users to controlling users.
Users have become an instrument, rather than ends in themselves. You're attempting corral them so they do something you want instead of empowering them and offering them tools they may need to do what they want to do.
The very notion of power users is deeply incompatible with this.
Yep, while the focus in the past was to appeal to power users (because they would bring in the regular users through word of mouth and recommendations), now that most users are already captive to a variety of platforms, the focus switched to dark patterns and deceptive practices to deepen the lock-in and increase switching costs.
Now power users are merely an inconvenience, since they usually advocate against dark patterns and prefer purely functional software.
I'm not sure how to really combat this. It might be too late.
Good times.