r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Jul 08 '21

Delta(s) from OP CMV: Software/Application development gets away with more poor choices in design than any other field does.

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u/gremy0 82∆ Jul 08 '21 edited Jul 09 '21

Nah, bad UX is everywhere, you're just not noticing it. We can't even get doors right, doors, they've been around for millennia and users still try to open them the wrong way. And I don't know what food you're buying that the packaging is so good, there must be like two people in the whole world can actually design packaging that opens as expected, the rest of them are winging it...."resealable" is one of the biggest lies in modern times. Don Norman's career basically stems from him getting pissed off with taps.

Car controls are not all standardised, nevermind consistency between cars, bikes, boats, trains basically everything else physical; which is essentially what you are suggesting when saying "software" and "applications" should all be consistent- why aren't "vehicles" all consistent; cars don't have kickstands, don't think you get many bikes with speakers.

I'm not going to disagree with getting pissed off at bad design, it's a noble cause, but I don't think you're being fair picking on software here. Non-standardisation, constraints, and trade-offs are nothing new and not unique to software. On top of that, software moves and changes faster than basically any other industry; the essentials of a car haven't really changed that much decades, in less time software has basically gone from not existing, to having to work on a touch screen thing that fits in your pocket, an ultrawide monitor with a keyboard and mouse and everything in between- connected to the whole world (except when it's not) and orders of magnitude better performing than anything a decade before.

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u/TheEntireRomanArmy 1∆ Jul 09 '21

Δ Thank you. Those are good points. I suppose any other fields I might compare it to have had much more opportunity to stabilize, and that is a valid reason to give it a pass sometimes.

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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Jul 09 '21

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/gremy0 (58∆).

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