There is a non-trivial number of people who get an adverse reaction to anything technical, including the language of technical - numbers. Numbers are the language of confusion, not getting it, feeling inadequate, nerds and losers, stupid math, and the "cold dead machines".

The thing is that people who are fine with numbers will still use those products anyway, perhaps mildly annoyed. People who hate numbers will feel a permeating discomfort and gravitate towards products that don't make them feel bad.

And so the assertion here is that "when a message was sent" is too technical?

I think we need to give people slightly more credit. If this is true, maybe its because we keep infantalising them?

Well the infantilization is directly in the sentence "regular people". Distinguishing the big brains from the plebes.

I can see something along those lines being why so many things designed for everyone have drifted towards soft "three weeks ago" dates.

So you're claiming people are annoyed by... clocks? Prices? Sports scores?

I genuinely can't tell if this is sarcasm or not.

An adverse reaction to equations, OK. Numbers themselves, I really don't know what you're talking about.

It's something extremely pervasive in modern design language.

It actually infuriates me to no end. There are many many many instances where you should use numbers but we get vague bullshit descriptions instead.

My classic example is that Samsung phones show charging as Slow, Fast, Very fast, Super fast charging. They could just use watts like a sane person. Internally of course everything is actually watts and various apps exist to report it.

Another example is my car shows motor power/regen as a vertical blue segmented bar. I'm not sure what the segments are supposed to represent but I believe its something like 4kW or something. If you poke around you can actually see the real kW number but the dash just has the bar.

Another is WiFi signal strength which the bars really mean nothing. My router reports a much more useful dBm measurement.

Thank god that there are lots of legacy cases that existed before the iPhone-ized design language started taking over and are sticky and hard to undo.

I can totally imagine my car reporting tire pressure as low or high or some nonsense or similarly I'm sure the designers at YouTube are foaming at the mouth to remove the actual pixel measurements from video resolutions.

It's all rather dumb, but your examples are really counterexamples, because a watt is sadly not something most people understand. One would at minimum need to have passed a physics class, and even that doesn't necessarily leave a person with an intuitive, visceral understanding of what a watt is, feels like, can do. I appreciate my older Samsung phone that just converts it into expected time until full charge. That's the number that matters to me anyway, and I can make my own value judgment about how "super" the fastness is. But I do agree with your point and would be pissed if they dumbed it down to Later, Soon, Very Soon and Super Soon.

Speaking of time and timestamps, which I would've thought were straightforward, I get irked to see them dumbed-down to "ago" values e.g. an IM sent "10 minutes ago" or worse "a day ago." Like what time of day, a day ago?

Most people can understand "bigger number better". They don't need the full theoretical derivation of the watt as a unit of power for that.

And just through exposure over time they'd learn "my phone usually charges around X" and be able to see if their new cable is actually charging faster or not.

In US, washing machines have "cold", "warm", "hot" settings. In Europe, you have a temperature knob "30C", "40C", "60C".

Like you, I don't buy the argument that people are actually too dumb to deal with the latter or are allergic to numbers. People get used to and make use of numbers in context naturally if you expose them.

I have a machine which has cold/warm/hot because it doesn't heat water by itself, it just takes whatever hot water there exists in the house (and "warm" means 50% hot water and 50% cold).

Practical.

I still think anyone who grew up with such a machine would be able to graduate to a numerical temp knob without having a visceral reaction over the numbers every time they do laundry.

At the start of 2025 I stopped buying Spotify and started buying Apple Music because I felt manipulated by the Spotify application's metrics-first design.

I felt that Spotify was trying to teach me to rely on its automated recommendations in place of any personal "musical taste", and also that those recommendations were of increasingly (eventually, shockingly), poor quality.

The implied justification for these poor recommendations is a high "Monthly Listener Count". Don't mind that Spotify can guarantee that any crap will have a high listener count by boosting it's place in their recommendation algorithm.

I think many people may have a similar experience on once-thriving social media platforms like facebook/instragram/X.

What I mean to say is that I think people associate the experience of being continually exposed to dubiously sourced and dubiously relevant metrics with the feeling of being manipulated by illusions of scale.

Most people are dumb as rocks and ux/ui is built around that fact.

It was in the past, but very little effort is being put into UX these days.

Well, that's obviously an exaggeration, but in any case, there's a choice here. Historically interface designers expected users to read a manual, and later to at least go through some basic onboarding and then read the occasional "tip of the day", before finally arriving at the current "don't make me think" approach. It's not too late to expect people to think again.