Alan Kay (of Smalltalk fame) has a similar, related explanation: computing is a pop culture with little regard for the past (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bbm:978-3-319-90008-7/...). There are thousands, maybe millions, of developers who have little knowledge of the history of our field. I’ve found this true even of graduates from highly-ranked computer science bachelor’s programs. Think of all of the current-day LLM researchers and engineers who have never heard of Minsky, McCarthy, Lisp machines, and other aspects of the history of AI before we learned that attention was all we needed.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Apple’s UI/UX teams are staffed with people who have never heard of Don Norman, Bruce Tognazzini, Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Susan Kate, Larry Tesler, and other pioneering figures who contributed to Apple’s legendary 1980s and 1990s software.

It’s a lack of onboarding and knowledge transfer, combined with an Eternal September of thousands new CS grads being constantly produced annually, who are sadly not being taught enough history of computing at their universities.

My dream as a CS professor is to help rectify this, at least amongst my students.

I think new UI designers might mistakenly think that they are in the fashion industry, when actually they are in the ergonomics engineering industry, or should be.

The two things that pain me the most are:

(1) Clickable elements no longer visually signifying that they're clickable. Words aren't underlined or written in a special font, sometimes the profile avatar is the clickable link to the profile but sometimes the name is, etc.

(2) No more clean, compact directory trees. We used to have high-contrast compact UI design to look through nested ontologies. Now it's rounded-edges card-based, often without trace lines, and barely ever compact. RIP

>> This leads to overemphasis on the visual aspect of the UI and not enough on its functional and usability aspects.

Accessibility has been left in the dustbin as well. You go to all these sites extolling these beautiful, innovative sites and they're completely useless with a keyboard or screen reader.

We let the wrong sort of designers do the design. The designers that simultaneously made changes under the guise of "UX" just sort of made it up as they went along without any basis in reality. That's how we got stuck with the hamburger menu.

We can also lay some blame at Agile's feet. I've seen UX and UI designers genuinely struggle to fit their work into the sprint treadmill. 2 weeks' notice is not enough time to do any sort of serious usability design study.

The move toward fullstack developers, too. When everybody is a jack of all trades, nobody is a master of anything. Least of all UI design, which isn't worth thinking too much about because it's the least likely potential subject of pushback during code review.

FYI it’s Chesterton’s Fence, named after writer G. K. Chesterton.

> I think this and many other questionable UI decisions across the industry in recent years is the fallout of the old guard of UI designers having rotated out for younger replacements in the past decade with little transfer of knowledge occurring.

Not sure about that, given that John Gruber specifically lays the blame for a slew of recent shitty Apple design decisions on Alan Dye (cough liquid glass cough), and also the reversal of these shitty design decisions on changes made when Dye jumped ship for Meta. Gruber also says the Apple design team is much happier after Dye's departure.

Dye must be over 50, so I don't count him as a "younger replacement".