This trend of design fashions negatively impacting usability has become so blatantly visible across the web (and apps, and desktop interfaces) during this century that I've become quite curious what psychological/organisational effects are at force.
Are there historical examples of the same tendency that can be examined? Tools, signage, forms or public spaces becoming a progressively more difficult and less usable mess under the aegis of "making things easier for users"?
Surely somebody has done a study of this effect. In web and software design it's particularly hilarious (in an I-want-to-cry way) since so much good sense has been written (Tufte etc) which is completely discarded by these trends. I expect the same is true in architecture, only I'm less familiar with the literature of that domain.
It discusses how Gropius started off with more of a continental arts-and-crafts outlook, but that increasing competition for the intellectual and political purist high-ground lead to what we call, despairingly, the international style.
A similar dynamic has played out with software UX: people were producing garish (but usable) UX with drop shadows, etc. and along came the anti-bourgeoisie puritans. They had a point, of course (they always do) but their solution was worse than the original problem.
This trend of design fashions negatively impacting usability has become so blatantly visible across the web (and apps, and desktop interfaces) during this century that I've become quite curious what psychological/organisational effects are at force.
Are there historical examples of the same tendency that can be examined? Tools, signage, forms or public spaces becoming a progressively more difficult and less usable mess under the aegis of "making things easier for users"?