When a button
was a button

To be hon­est, I no long­er un­der­stand mo­dern web. I can still use it, but it’s more about guess­ing than know­ing.

Every web­site I open is fill­ed with con­trols that don’t look like what they are. But­tons look like plain text. In­puts look like but­tons. Drop­downs look like links. Check­boxes look like ra­dio but­tons — and vice versa. It’s mad­ness.

It’s okay when one appli­ca­tion doesn’t look like anoth­er. But there should be some un­writ­ten rule of de­sign: if you need a but­ton, you use a but­ton. Not plain text. Not an un­der­lin­ed text. Not a ghost of a shape. A but­ton.

Don Norman, in The De­sign of Every Day Things, wrote:

When simple things need pic­tu­res, la­bels, or in­struc­tions, the design has fail­ed.

And yet today I have to read every con­trol out loud just to guess what it does. Is this a field? A but­ton? A toggle? I miss the old Win­dows 95 days, when every but­ton was rough, grainy, angu­lar,... but un­mi­sta­kab­ly a but­ton.

Sure, I get why things are like this. “Clean” de­sign looks pre­mium. Pre­mium de­sign sells. But some­where along the way, that clean­ness turn­ed user ex­pe­rien­ce into some­thing else en­ti­re­ly.

It re­minds me of chi­cken sex­ing.

It’s very hard to dif­fer one-day-old male chicks from fe­males. But there are peo­ple who train­ed to do just that — to guess a chick sex right by look­ing at them. There is no other way to learn how to be a good chi­cken sexer but to try, fail, and re­peat.

The mo­dern web is like that. Its af­for­dan­ce is so low that you don’t learn it. You train for it. You guess, click, fail, re­peat... until your brain builds a “bad de­sign re­cog­ni­tion net­work.”

I’m not wor­ri­ed about my­self — mine is well-trained. But it hurts to watch some­one you love — a pa­rent, a wife, a friend — stare at a screen and feel stu­pid.

They’re not stu­pid. The inter­face is. And its authors who­ever they are.

I miss those days when a but­ton was a but­ton.