Modern UI Makes Me Sound Dumb

The software industry has gone too far trying to make computers user-friendly. Only scientists could use computers at first. Then they became friendly to the general public as well. All we had to do was reading a help file and spending some time playing around with the interface. Then I don't know what happened--maybe the developers wanted to make their software friendly to a newborn baby, or they simply ran out of ideas and still wanted to make their products look "evolving"--computers have become unusable to both humans and nerds today.

For one thing, I no longer know which one is a button and which one is a label. The only way to know is to "tap" on them. If it's a button, something will happen. But you have to wait, because many apps are so bloated that it'll take a while for the action to take place.

Text is always replaced with icons, the universal language, but they are oversimplified to the point that everything is a circle, triangle or a rectangle (Euclid must be proud).

Now, look how instructing over the phone has become:

Then: Open the Applications menu, move your mouse to the System Tools submenu, and click on System Monitor.

Now: Move your mouse to the top-left corner of your screen and wait for second. Did a new screen just appear...? Okay, you'll see a picture with nine dots on the bottom-left corner... Click on it. Now scroll through the list... Can you spot a picture that looks like a hostpital equipment that shows your pulse while you're about to die...? Yeah, click on it. What, now you want to know how to use that app?

I mean, what if you are writing a book? Don't tell me you don't need books to learn computers these days. People still do, but we'll have to invent a new langugae for that.

Read more from Nandakumar at nandakumar.org/blog/