Post #2680389

2026-02-09 13:45 UTC

@toxi@mastodon.thi.ng There's a well known design book called "Don't Make Me Think". I never read it, but the title has always infuriated me. Why would that be your call to action? For godsake, MAKE ME THINK! I know it's about not making confusing UI. I get it, but the sentiment has been carried out to its fullest, resulting in the kind of dumbing down you are talking about.

Replies (2)

@toxi@mastodon.thi.ng 2026-02-09 14:27

@bit101@mstdn.social I totally agree, and I think you may have mentioned that book already a while ago... Based on personal encounters in various places, I think part of the issue (in terms of reduced design/imagination space) in contemporary UI/UX is that a lot of the people working in this field now are only able to realize and illustrate their ideas in terms of Figma & co. I don't think many have any real coding skills to maybe prototype & illustrate some more intelligent ideas outside of these tools. And so any concept/approach is mostly seen through these predefined widget lenses and then auto-piloted/filtered down to what can be easily mocked up and presented in tools like Figma and maybe some extended functionality offered by some random plugin (or via vibe coding)... But to me this isn't really interaction or user experience design, or at least it's such a diluted interpretation... Somehow UX as a modern discipline and job description turned out to be this weird & shallow mix of information architecture and graphic design, everything heavily pattern based (to the extent that Christopher Alexander would probably turn in his grave) but often also lacking cognitive, compsci and humanist considerations. 20 years ago I found IxD was such a fascinating field to work in, even though many concepts were technically much harder to implement than they would be now, but at least there was some interest in improving and experimenting with things and a general... zest (for lack of a better word!? :) Re: the other aspects you've pointed at, "Don't make me think" really is an inversion of the idea of an active mind/user. And that's also what I meant earlier with "patronizing design attitude"... this uniform UX approach treats everyone as mindless consumer, even in contexts which are about active problem solving or organizing large amount of information, etc.

Open ##2680390
@skry@mastodon.social 2026-02-09 21:30

@bit101@mstdn.social Having been a usability pro for most of my life, I can agree with @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng’s points easily, but I need to say “It depends” on Don’t Make Me Think, a book I have read. I share the title discomfort, but the thrust is that we need parts of interaction to be muscle memory so we can use cognitive processing for important things. Don’t exhaust people by moving buttons on every screen, etc. It’s about consistency w/expectations (largely a pipe dream, but still a useful concept)& learnability.

Open ##2680393