I fundamentally disagree with the entire premise of this article.
Yes, usability has become less uniformly consistent within a single platform. But that's because the feature set of desktops, laptops, tablets and phones has increased exponentially, beyond what the classic desktop GUI could handle.
Not only can you access a huge percentage of the world's knowledge within a few seconds, but new UX paradigms such as search boxes and recommendation engines have completely changed the game.
Now when you're trying to build an app that has a modicum of consistency across sizes from phone to desktop, whether you're using a mouse, trackpad or touchscreen, whether you've got a hardware keyboard of software one or are using dictation, and so on...
...then you have to make tradeoffs. Yes, the purely desktop experience has become less consistent. But at the same time, an app can be more consistent across platforms, which is what many users want when they're switching between platforms multiple times a day.
And as an industry, apps really do seem to fairly quickly standardize on UX conventions like tabs, hamburger menus, autocomplete, drag-to-refresh, and so on, which aren't any less intuitive than right-clicks, keyboard shortcuts, minimizing, or drag-to-trash-to-eject (remember that?).
So relative to functionality I don't see any decline at all. Young children can pick up an iPad and learn to use it without instruction. I don't remember young children doing that with a Mac Classic or Windows 3.1.
> Now when you're trying to build an app that has a modicum of consistency across sizes from phone to desktop, whether you're using a mouse, trackpad or touchscreen, whether you've got a hardware keyboard of software one or are using dictation, and so on...
Maybe we shouldn't strive for uniformity across many different interfaces.
My office has switched to MS Teams, which is an abomination on the desktop. But would be perfectly fine on a tablet. I can't have multiple chats open simultaneously. If I open a shared document in a chat or team, then I go back to the chat, I have to click several places to get back to the document (rather than having it, you know, opened and in a separate window). A desire for "streamlining" the experience or some other such bullshit has produced one of the worst productivity/collaboration tools I've seen in 25+ years of using networked computers.
I wouldn't expect a remote server to present the same interface as a desktop as a tablet as a phone as a watch. It's absurd, acknowledge the distinctions and design for the system that it's executed on. I'd rather MS Teams on Windows be like, well, a desktop application:
Contact list, chat window(s), documents opened in the application that can edit them, all with multiple windows taking advantage of the actual capabilities of my system. I have two monitors at work, but with MS Teams I may as well just have one.
And that's just one of the more egregious examples, many others are like it and it's the result of laziness or hubris or ignorance on the parts of the designers/developers.
Microsoft even had MSN Messenger. The former commenter has no excuse, but lazyness and a great lack of understanding of 90/00's computing environment. W9x-w2k/KDE's paradigm were the best ever for a DE based multitasking.
This is a PC. Why does the parent commenter want to _downgrade_ its user experience to the one from a mobile user?
Select the main thing you want in the left column, select a sub-activity in the next column, then another, or interact with files/chat/whatever.
It actually works well as a model for how to do chat/collaboration with a tablet. It makes good use of space (the first two columns take up almost as little space as needed). It's touch-friendly. If it launched files into their own editors, it'd be a perfectly reasonable tablet application.
But on the desktop, I'd really like to chat with more than one person at at time. I'd like to view the files and chat with whoever sent it. The desktop computer offers one of the most flexible GUI systems we have, don't force users into a singular mode of use unless you're running on a kiosk.
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I'm picking on MS Teams, but look at Slack and Discord as the things it's imitating (or all are imitating each other). Restrictive single-window applications neglecting what makes the desktop so flexible/capable and distinct from tablets, which their present UIs are more suited for.
A touch interface for a chat application is the worst thing on usability happened on IT ever.
Physical keyboards as a cover should be a must shipped item on every tablet.
A tablet is a consumer/broadcasting device, like the smartphone. You are not producingwith it. You are either consuming media, or sharing it. It's the perfect ad device.
And zoomers are blindly embracing it as if it was better and more "modern". They are not right.
Yes, usability has become less uniformly consistent within a single platform. But that's because the feature set of desktops, laptops, tablets and phones has increased exponentially, beyond what the classic desktop GUI could handle.
Not only can you access a huge percentage of the world's knowledge within a few seconds, but new UX paradigms such as search boxes and recommendation engines have completely changed the game.
Now when you're trying to build an app that has a modicum of consistency across sizes from phone to desktop, whether you're using a mouse, trackpad or touchscreen, whether you've got a hardware keyboard of software one or are using dictation, and so on...
...then you have to make tradeoffs. Yes, the purely desktop experience has become less consistent. But at the same time, an app can be more consistent across platforms, which is what many users want when they're switching between platforms multiple times a day.
And as an industry, apps really do seem to fairly quickly standardize on UX conventions like tabs, hamburger menus, autocomplete, drag-to-refresh, and so on, which aren't any less intuitive than right-clicks, keyboard shortcuts, minimizing, or drag-to-trash-to-eject (remember that?).
So relative to functionality I don't see any decline at all. Young children can pick up an iPad and learn to use it without instruction. I don't remember young children doing that with a Mac Classic or Windows 3.1.