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The Decline of the User Interface

Software has never looked cooler, but user interface design and user experience have taken a sharp turn for the worse.

But things gradually got more sophisticated, and when the original Macintosh came out with its powerful graphical user interface, we started realizing that the process of interacting with a computer could matter to us. One of the things that the Macintosh, and later Windows, did was to make a lot of the computer interactions we take for granted today “normal.” The File menu, with options like New, Open, Save, and Exit, became commonplace. In the newer versions of Windows, I spend a dismayingly large amount of time trying to get the mouse to the right spot in the corner or edge of an application so that I can size it.

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