I think it's more that people are designing things with the intention of never creating documentation. The analogy with books doesn't really work for me because of that. Books aren't user interfaces that are learned.

The main UI parts of books to learn are page numbers, tables of contents, indexes and glossaries. They're not necessarily intuitive but they are pretty universal and standardized.

> Books aren't user interfaces that are learned.

They definitely are! We just learn them so young that we forget that we had to.

I see your point but the implied perspective of this take is that being an adult means consistently interacting with systems that are designed explicitly to be difficult to use. I, as an adult, appreciate interfaces designed to be simple and easy to use, not because I need it, but because it is efficient and respectful of my time. Accepting the status quo that systems are expected to be explicitly difficult to use (in a way that does not reflect domain complexity) is in my opinion learned helplessness and complicity. I won’t comment on the cultural observation about music, except to say that might be a practical constraint of content designed for mass appeal. If you want high brow and sophisticated taste you have to accept that your audience shrinks, as a matter of practicality.

Yeah, I don't really see the point in difficulty for difficulty's sake. But sometimes there is inherit difficulty: democracy requires us to be informed, and distilling complex topics to a 30 second short might not give the nuance a topic enough; exercise requires us to move, there is no magic pay-to-win.

Studies indicate that tech literacy is dropping, what does that entail for those moments where the more user respecting (as in more secure, preserves privacy, gives autonomy) software is inherently more complex than "user-friendly" alternatives?

I don’t have a comprehensive answer to your question. I agree that “user-friendly” is often a euphemism for “non-technical” or “low code”. I don’t think that supposition is fair, but it is not escapable as an individual. That being said to the extent that the functionality available is useful regardless of the user’s expertise, I think that is valuable. Granted, you will never avoid inherent complexity, for example the task of being an informed citizen does not become easier with better tools, but the inefficiency can be reduced. The user still must participate, however the unnecessary impediments can be removed. I think the value here is not in reducing complexity, but in removing un-needed complexity so that essential complexity can be studied more efficiently. I appreciate your point that “studies have shown…” and that may be correct, however anecdotally studies rarely are relevant to the specific circumstances discussed, and when I hear that phrase I immediately discount the following advice as generic and ill-considered. Authority does not imbue value, and a study is not inherently valid in any other context. I think the most pressing challenge is that the sources with the resources required to publish their perspectives are, rarely, if ever, acting in the interest of their audience… they have an agenda. Realistically speaking, even if complex systems were made easier to use, the vast majority of people who could benefit from adopting them would choose not to do so simply because of their own lack of awareness of the “why” or justification to do so. Usability is necessary but not sufficient. Improving efficiency is only possible when the need for that improvement is firmly appreciated, which in IT is rare.

Big fonts are not for kids. They are for adults with worsening eyesight, which is considerable amount of population over 40. And I assure you there was parade of super simple popular music 20 years ago, 100 years ago or whenever.

also, accessibility legislation has come a very long way, and in the US no one wants to deal with an ADA lawsuit.

I would put another spin on it: We place more value on not being hostile to readers and users in general. For example, I noticed that the good papers are less horribly written now then they were in the past. In academia, being difficult to read and understand used to be a sign of sophistication (but more realistically serves as a way to cover up bad thinking and overall slow down progress). Today, people are actually willing to point it out and treat it with the little patience this nonsense deserves.

That is not to say that complexity does not have merits, but I say let the pendulum swing. I think we could do with a lot less in most areas still.

I find papers nowadays contain way less content than before, yes the writing is easier to read, but the page count didn't increase, that means that there is less information per page now.

A scientific paper is written for a specific audience, experts in that field, and when you read many papers, it's very annoying 'easy writing' because you need to rapidly understand the meat of the paper, not being introduced again and again to your subject. Now it's more difficult to find the details that you need, if they're even written.

It makes maybe the job of a PhD easier when he start studying in the field, but I think we lost something there..

Not all fields are equal, deep learning papers are very easy to read, but also very annoying to read, too many repetitions of something that is explained in another paper, I don't need to read for the 100th time what NeRF is, only what is different in this paper compared to the previous ones. While many mathematical papers are way more dense and target the intended audience.

Increasing the page count is not really a solution either, it is a burden for the writer to continue writing easy things, and for the reader to never find the interesting parts.

On the other hand, when I read a paper that is not in my field, I appreciate the easy to read paper.

I think papers should return to dense readings by experts, but authors should also maintain blogs where the paper is simplified, and those blogs should be included in the evaluation for a PhD. In this way, if you are an expert, you get the interesting parts, and at the same time, if it is not your field, you can be introduced with many good blogs to the field.

> It does feel like modern designs are treating everyone like children. UIs have immense spacing and big fonts, icons always accompany text, company branding tends to have strong bold contrasty colors.

While those might all be things 7-year-old children appreciate, they are also things my 70-year-old parents appreciate.

Yeah I intentionally said it a bit provocatively, but I don't necessarily think it is bad. I personally increase the font sizes on my phone as well.

Though while some designs are necessary for accessiblity, some design decisions seem to be cultural preferences: Japanese UIs tend to be information dense, and they tend to prefer it whereas some westerners would probably scream if they had to interact with it.

There should be an age of "supermajority" where a bunch of rights revert to being similar to the age of minority.

And yes, I too have parents of that age, and yes, they're still mentally sharp.

Which of my rights do you want to take away without caring if I'm impaired or not?

The rights of minors are taken away without caring if they're impaired or not. At completely different ages across different territories, showing how it's comparably arbitrary if so.

Voting should be weighted compared to average remaining life expectancy, for one.

All minors are impaired to some degree since their brains are still developing.

https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Fam...

> It does feel like modern designs are treating everyone like children

I read TFA because I thought some of it because some of it could be applicable to attention-deficient adults, victims of the pandemic that started before the pandemic.

Wasn't disappointed. The first observation of FTA is that children don't read, and so are adults; they don't read the docs (and forget about putting helpful info in tooltips and dialogs, they don't read them either), they read every other line in emails, etc. Unless they asked for those texts, and that may be one of the reasons why conversational AI is successful.

> Doesn't have to be bad, but I worry we lose discipline and our cognitive abilities decline when everything is spoon fed.

I think TFA is about apps with unforgiving users, so the author has to perfect the UI; he is a bona fide UI designer. I think the vast majority of applications out there don't have one. As a result the UX is generally passable at best, which adds artificial cognitive overload. You can't really blame users for taking shortcuts such as not reading. I do that, you do that, we all do that.