I've increasingly found that as technology marches on they become ever
more frustrating, disorienting, and complex to use
Everything just seems so needlessly difficult. Everything is hidden, obfuscated...
I've found this to be increasingly true in recent years, too.
It seems like a lot of things try so hard to "be helpful" that they make them more tedious and difficult. For example, you mention gmail, so I went to gmail just now to check. It happens that multiple gmail accounts are accessed from the the computer I'm on, and apparently gmail now does this new thing where it remembers previous logins...so to sign in with an account other than one previously logged on, it wants to me to click "sign in with a different account" and then "add an account" to add the account I want to log in with to some list so that I can log on with it.
What, am I supposed to "add account" on every computer I check my email on? Every time I do that is my account going to be added to the list so every other user of that machine can see it? Why? What's the benefit of adding this extra step? The whole point of web-based mail is the ability to access it from anywhere. What was so terrible about the old method of, you know...enter user name and password to log in?
Software design is recent years reminds me a lot of the old pc vs mac debate. Before the "I'm a PC and I'm a mac" commercials. For example, used to be that the power button on a pc was a hard power button. As in, you push the button, power to the computer was physically cut. Whereas on a mac, the power button was a
request to the computer to turn off...if it wanted to. PCs and pc software design has gone that route in many ways. Want to look for a file? Haha, no. System files and anything the OS doesn't want you to see is hidden by default. Want to delete a file? Haha, no. Windows is notorious for not letting you delete things. Go to a command prompt to manually remove the read-only attribute on the file? Haha, no. Need to access elevated administrator access first. Sometimes even that doesn't work. Access tour process list and try closing processes you don't like sometime. Routinely it won't let you.
So much design now seems to come from the angle of "the user is an idiot. You are the user. Therefore you're an idiot and in need of hand holding." Very often that's frustrating. I come from a command line background. I'm used to be able to simply do what I want to do. Not having to "issue requests" to a computer that it will maybe consider doing if it feels like it.
Add to that, like you say, there's been a huge trend in obscuring even things that users reasonably should be expected to want to do. For example, hotmail. To login, I click the obvious "sign in" button. Used to be if you wanted to log off, basically it was the same thing: click log out. Now, no...there's my account name seamlessly merged into the interface bar in such a way as to look like plain text, and even if I mouseover it it still doesn't show up as a menu. I have to
click on my account name to bring up a drop down menu to find the logout button. I used to administer networks for a fortune 100 mortgage company. I worked with dozen million dollar databases. And yet it literally took me
minutes just to figure out how to
log out of youtube recently after they switched to their new design.
Why? Why do things work this way now? Why so many extra step? Why don't computers
do what we tell them to instead of interpreting "commands" as mere requests to be ignored?
There's been a massive move in recent years to less user control, less user feedback, and having the software do and decide what it's willing to allow to happen. I could give so many examples of this. I agree. I don't like the trend.