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What Comes After User-Friendly Design? (fastcodesign.com)
Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan, writing for FastCoDesign: "User-friendly" was coined in the late 1970s, when software developers were first designing interfaces that amateurs could use. In those early days, a friendly machine might mean one you could use without having to code. Forty years later, technology is hyper-optimized to increase the amount of time you spend with it, to collect data about how you use it, and to adapt to engage you even more. [...] The discussion around privacy, security, and transparency underscores a broader transformation in the typical role of the designer, as Khoi Vinh, principal designer at Adobe and frequent design writer on his own site, Subtraction, points out. So what does it mean to be friendly to users-er, people-today? Do we need a new way to talk about design that isn't necessarily friendly, but respectful? I talked to a range of designers about how we got here, and what comes next.
When you read the article, there is a video at the bottom that autoplays. If you pause the video and scroll so that it is off the screen then scroll back, the video picks back up and starts playing again.
I guess the author is testing user hostile design on us to see what we will do.
Well, kinda.
A lot of what makes Photoshops user interface usable is that people are used to it.
If you jump into it as a new user it isn't really better than GIMPs.
OTOH change for the sake of change should be considered bad user interface design.