Mistaking comfort for conformity. What if the UI canon was inherited noise all along?
Maybe modal dialogs are wrong. Maybe forms are wrong. Maybe tabs, breadcrumbs, side nav, settings pages, the entire vocabulary we’ve been treating as physics is actually just a set of conventions we never bothered to re-examine.
Maybe a lot of it is garbage, and we’ve just trained users on it.
Maybe we’ve been wallpapering over the same decisions someone made on a 320x240 screen in 2007, and dog-training users on it?
And, Material Design is a cult? 😱
Maybe. 🤷♂️
I came up in interaction design during the Flash era. Early web. We argued about affordances. We broke the box. We tried things that didn’t work, often spectacularly. There were no guardrails to follow, because nobody had built them yet.
In 2010, Microsoft released Windows Phone 7 (Metro design language). In 2013, Apple shipped iOS 7 and flattened everything. In 2014, Google answered with Material Design.
And then we just… stopped questioning.
A whole generation of designers grew up never having to invent affordances.
And it's not that some affordances are not... questionable. Right?
Norm Cox drew three lines on a Xerox Star in 1981 because he had a 16x16 pixel budget and needed somewhere to dump a contextual menu.
Maybe he ran out of time and went, “Ah, f*ck it, three lines it is”.
Then Facebook found it in 2010, someone named it "hamburguer", and somehow it became the default navigation for the entire internet for the last 15 years.
Did anyone seriously sit down and ask whether three stacked lines is actually the best way a human being can be told “more stuff lives here”?
I don’t think we did that. I really don’t think so.
“But, we tested it ON users.” Sure. Norm would be stoked.
Now AI is out there rolling like a Subway sandwich assembly line, combo’ing the hell out of those weird conventions we all agreed on.
Claude Design: A billion combination of UX's greatest hits.
Product managers can't help themselves but think they are in UI heaven.
But... are they, though?
Have we been mistaking user preference with control familiarity?
Comfort with conformity?
If we take a hard look at the practice, we may find out that what AIs are spitting out is not a function of Design, but a reflection of two decades of "designers on training wheels".
Maybe. 🤔