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ShatChat: How Facebook's Bizarre Obsession With Snapchat Is Ruining User Experience On Messenger (500ish.com)
Columnist MG Siegler writes: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." I often find myself pointing to this quote from Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park. It's just so succinctly perfect for so many things. This week's example: Facebook Messenger's new 'Day' functionality. [...] They've [Facebook] decided to weaponize all of these networks [Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram], user experience be damned. On Messenger, people have their list of contacts and/or groups that they chat with. The most recent conversations -- likely the most important -- are at the top of that feed. But if you're anything like me, you're often scrolling down a bit because you have many regular conversations. And so this screen real estate is insanely valuable. And Messenger puked up this new 'Day' nonsense all over it. Yes, people share photos on Messenger. Undoubtedly a ton. That's maybe how you try to justify this move to yourself if you're Facebook. But Messenger is fundamentally about chatting; it's a utility. Photos may be additive, but they're not core. You could try to pivot your service into making them core, but that doesn't mean you should.As of last year, Facebook Messenger has over a billion active users.
This is just a small example of the much bigger problem: Millennials, as a group, just cannot design and develop usable software UIs.
From the dawn of computing through to the mid-2000s, we saw an incremental progression in the functionality and usability of software UIs. New UIs were typically better than what preceded them.
Then between 2000 and 2010 we started seeing more and more Millennials get involved with software UI design as they started to enter the workforce. And everything went to hell.
This is a generation that has egos so big it makes the Boomers look modest! Millennials don't care about the past. They don't care about building on good ideas rather than bad. They don't care about what users want. They're so sure that their ideas are "right" that they force them on others.
So instead of continuing the work of previous generations, they just threw out all of this accumulated knowledge. They used their own self-proclaimed "great UI design ideas" and gave us awful UIs like those of Australis Firefox, of GNOME 3, of Windows 8 to 10, and of so many websites. Not caring what users actually think of these designs, they've never been responsive to feedback. It's just one bad idea after another with them.
Now before you start with the "shut up, gramps" and "get off my lawn" bullshit, I actually think that the generation after the Millennials may be able to rectify this awful situation. They've been victims of the Millennials shenanigans, but they also tend not to have the egos of Millennials. Many of them also have an interest in retro computing. It's an eyeopening experience for them when they use something like Windows 2000, and they find that its UI is actually more efficient and pleasant to use compared to the Windows 10 experience they're more familiar with.
This post-Millennial generation will be entering the workforce within the next 5 to 10 years. I hope that they can undo all of the nonsense that Millennials have done so that they can get back to what the generations before the Millennials were doing: steadily improving upon UIs that are functional and usable.