I think the issue can be party broken down to this: UX != HCI.
I can't remember the last time I sat in a meeting with someone with the title "interface designer". Everyone in this realm today is a "UX something" and commonly it seems these people have never:
- heard the term HCI or know what it actually stands for.
- read and/or internalized the human interface guidelines for the platform(s) they're building for (there is a lot of overlap but still).
- thought in way that puts ease of use/discoverability/context dependence front and center, over anything else. How to do something seems often arbitrary/there seem to be no HCI-based guide rails by which decisions are taken.
That said, there are exceptions of course, but they seem rarer by the year.
One issue is that we now have a generation of young people that just grok stuff because they grew up completely digital and with apps that already have arguably crappy interfaces.
I.e. they can and will work with even the worst interface or something that shuns all standards/guidelines of the platform/OS it runs under.
When you then have people from this generation getting jobs as "UX something" you have self a perpetuating loop that inevitably leads to the increased enshittification of user interfaces.
I can't remember the last time I sat in a meeting with someone with the title "interface designer". Everyone in this realm today is a "UX something" and commonly it seems these people have never:
- heard the term HCI or know what it actually stands for.
- read and/or internalized the human interface guidelines for the platform(s) they're building for (there is a lot of overlap but still).
- thought in way that puts ease of use/discoverability/context dependence front and center, over anything else. How to do something seems often arbitrary/there seem to be no HCI-based guide rails by which decisions are taken.
That said, there are exceptions of course, but they seem rarer by the year.
One issue is that we now have a generation of young people that just grok stuff because they grew up completely digital and with apps that already have arguably crappy interfaces.
I.e. they can and will work with even the worst interface or something that shuns all standards/guidelines of the platform/OS it runs under.
When you then have people from this generation getting jobs as "UX something" you have self a perpetuating loop that inevitably leads to the increased enshittification of user interfaces.
And no one is really to blame for it.