Today, it seems we’re on another track completely. Despite being endlessly fawned over by an army of professionals, Usability, or as it used to be called, “User Friendliness”, is steadily declining. During the last ten years or so, adhering to basic standard concepts seems to have fallen out of fashion. On comparatively new platforms, I.E. smartphones, it’s inevitable: the input mechanisms and interactions with the display are so different from desktop computers that new paradigms are warranted.
Worryingly, these paradigms have begun spreading to the desktop, where keyboards for fast typing and pixel-precision mice effectively render them pointless. Coupled with the flat design trend, UI elements are increasingly growing both bigger and yet somehow harder to locate and tell apart from non-interactive decorations and content.
I doubt anyone here will disagree with the premise of this article, even if you might disagree with some of the examples. These past few weeks I’ve set up virtual machines of all the old Windows releases just to remind myself of just how good the graphical user interface introduced in Windows 95 was perfected over the years, culminating in the near-perfect Classic theme in Windows XP and Server 2003.
Later iterations of the Classic theme, in Vista and onward, would sadly retain some of the Aero UI elements even when setting the Classic theme, ruining the aesthetic, and of course, the Classic theme is gone altogether now – you can’t set it in Windows 10. Similarly, Platinum in Mac OS 9 is still more coherent, more usable, and more intentful than whatever macOS brought to the table over the years.
We can find solace in the fact that trends tend to be cyclical, so there’s a real chance the pendulum will eventually wing back.
Hi. As a personal opinion I think there had been an abuse (or misconception) of the term “Less is More” which has referred as a minimalism approach on computer software and it also applied on the GUI. It started as a way to simplify the GUI for users, but at the same time you take away customization options. Later with Phones and Tablets there was a need to simplify the apps, but some people thought that the same OS GUI and web site design should be standardized with phones, tablet GUIs to reduce design and development efforts. And finally it all ended in a mess.
Cascading menus have been largely replaced by two level search: 1) type in what you’re looking for in the taskbar search window and see if the OS finds it; 2) google what you’re looking for and hope a stackoverflow discussion with a product version (nearly) matching yours, appears in the first few hits. In the latter case, you often find that the contents of the old menu hierarchy are still around, but have been tucked away to make the UI look sleek.
That’s progress (?)
I also get the impression that real UI/UX research has been all but abandoned, and not just with computers. Consumer electronics interfaces are getting dumber and dumber as time goes on. The biggest reason I didn’t want to go from Windows 7 to Windows 10 was that the Classic theme is no longer available (too sophisticated, I suppose) and all this flat UI nonsense just makes the screen a jumbled mess of rectangles. I get the impression that UI is now thought of as the realm of art majors rather than HCI experts.
I agree the current state of UI is a mess and largely due to a misuse of ‘less is more’. But I don’t think it’s for lack of customization.
For me, the realization of this came when Microsoft Office switch from traditional menus to the Ribbon.
One of the best things about traditional menus was that they were excellent from a ‘discoverability’ stand point. You may not know where to find an exact command, but you damn sure know how to navigate menus. Could menus grow to an unmanageable state, of course, so I don’t begrudge Microsoft for trying something new.
But here’s where the UI failed miserably for me. When I first switched, I was trying to do the most basic of functions. Something that has been easy to find and almost a universal rule in virtually every single Windows program. File-Save As. I wasn’t trying to find an obscure menu item. Yet, I could not find a save-as button anywhere on the ribbon. I was cursing.
Eventually I did find it. For those unfamiliar, here’s the ribbon bar documentation.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/cmd-ribbons
Do you see that circle in the top left, that’s some new ‘Application Button’. At the time I had no idea what that was. It wasn’t labelled. Nothing drew attention to it. I never thought to click it. I did eventually figure it out, but it blew my mind. How did MS expect me to know about this mystery circle. There was no text on it, nothing… just a cool design.
Imagine if when Windows 95 introduced the ‘task bar’ they did something similar. Instead of the ‘start’ button, they had some cool looking circle with no text. Would you know to click on it? I bet a lot of people would just think that task bar was decoration and look around for desktop icons and be confused. Instead back in the days of Windows 95, Microsoft knew they had to transition users to the new interface. They labelled the start button ‘start’. If I recall right, they even had some scroll text along the task bar that said something like ‘click here to start’ with an arrow pointing to the start button. Someone at MS was actually thinking about discoverability instead of just making this look nice and efficient.
Far too much today, we have really nice looking UIs. But where they fail is discoverability. Far too often there are mystery menus, mystery gestures, mystery buttons, which you just need to ‘know’ or your users will be frustrated. Yes, once you know of them, you can get things done and if often looks a lot better and cleaner.
Even something as wildly successful as Google’s simple search bar suffers from this. Yes it is beautiful and simple.
Yet, there are some magic keywords that are not easily discoverable that make Google much better. Not even a simple link on Google’s own home search page. WTF! I was sure Google must have something on the main page to document things like the “site:” keyword. But nope. I legit had to search and the first result was actually a non-google page.
https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/
It’s not like the google homepage is short of space. Yet ponder that… not even a prominent link to a webpage to list all the search options available on Google. Let that sink it…
Oh definitely, desktop UIs turned into a horrible mess in the last couple of years, but hopefully we’ll get out of it soon.
I have a strong suspicion that the problem stems from having graphical designers on the forefront of designing user interfaces, not usability engineers. Usability is not art, but science. You design something initially, but then you test the heck out of it with real users and real tasks, you measure everything they do, from the time they take to accomplish to the tracking of the mouse locations. Then you analyze the whole thing and work with graphical designers to improve things that were proven to be less optimal. This requires skill and takes time and money.
Case in point: the transition from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3. I loved GNOME 2, I loved how Red Hat and Sun Microsystems poured a ton of resources into usability research back in the day. I remember the backlash from the transition between GNOME 1 and GNOME 2 and how they made it better. GNOME 3 took all of that and threw it out the window and the results are there to see. It was a huge launch failure and 9 years later they’re still talking about trying to improve things that aren’t good and slowly starting user testing and research. UX hackfests are great to put new ideas on the table, not to set them in stone. Without user testing and without science you can’t have usability, period. Data-driven engineering should judge UIs, not the gut feeling of artsy folk. Why oh why does GNOME hide the keyboard shortcuts by default? Discoverability is a great indication of good UI, but they choose to shun it instead. There are many other examples.
I’ve used GNU/Linux for over 20 years now and I’ve probably tried every DE and WM out there. I do use GNOME 3 on my day-to-day, and I’ve been doing it since it launched. I love the underlying technology and how I can change the UI with extensions to make it more usable to me.
Anecdotally, I remember a time where, without even trying, I converted a bunch of people to GNU/Linux because Ubuntu and GNOME 2 were just so nice to use. I was actually told by a non savvy person: “Linux is weird… it’s so easy”. With Unity on one side and GNOME 3 on the other I actually stopped endorsing any GNU/Linux distribution for a number of years. Fortunately the new releases of Ubuntu with a sane-ish GNOME have been OK so far.
Sodki,
I generally agree. I’m really not sure why Canonical was going down a path no users were asking for, but I thought it was unfortunate. It wasn’t just the linux world either, microsoft was going down the same path of abandoning UX foundations. It was their “we hear what our customers are saying, we’re just not listening” phase where everyone was trying to outdo each other’s efforts to tear down the traditional desktop. I didn’t like microsoft’s plan to kill off traditional software, but at least I understood their motivation to replace legacy software with new software that locks everyone into their app store. Microsoft wanted to repeat apple’s success with the highly restricted IOS platform.
I do have a theory why Canonical (and also MS) choose that path, and attempted to ditch the traditional desktop paradigm.
Let’s go back in time 10 years. Back then, iPhone and Android where stealing all the fuss, and developers, from desktop. Suddenly, nobody wanted to divert resources to keep desktop applications. Everything related to desktop stalled (and still is, unfortunately) and became boring and repetitive, true innovation went away to be never seen again. To make matters worse, Steve Jobs just announced the first iPad, and nearly everybody became convinced that this is the future, desktop is dead.
People dealing with traditional desktops, from Microsoft and Canonical to GNOME and KDE teams, became convinced that traditional desktops days where numbered. And they came forth with these big “convergence” plans, since it looked to be a matter of survival: it looked to be that nobody would spend effort anymore to develop “desktop only” applications. So they began to screw up all their excellent UX paradigms that contained decades and decades of effort and polishing in favor to rushed “convergent” UIs with little to none real studies of how to do it.
Now, jumping back to present day: tablet failed, 2-in-1 laptops are inconvenient contraptions just above a minor sales gimmick, and we have companies like Microsoft and Canonical, and also big open source projects that can’t go back to their former paradigms because they either lack manpower, money, political unity and are too invested in this crap from 10 years ago.
To be fair, KDE kind of began to backtrack from their convergence efforts in favor of traditional desktop from Plasma 4 to 5. The Canonical pretty much sidelined their efforts in favor of IoT and Server, and Microsoft threw Windows 8 under the bus. But GNOME is still insisting on that.
CapEnt,
Yeah, I do remember when they were clamoring about the death of the desktop. Of course mobile did go on to grow a lot, but it was never going to be a good substitute for businesses and serious desktop users.
It’s probably no coincidence that my favorite right now is KDE and XFCE – they both emphasize a more traditional UI, and that’s good IMHO.
I am also a fan of KDE. Of course, KDE went through their own disaster, but that was more of a “let’s start over from scratch and pin a dot oh version on the alpha.” It took them years to recover from that fiasco. But that’s more of a general software development story than the wild abandonment of common sense that’s plagued the UI world.
GNOME 3 seems to suffer from the same problems as Microsoft. It’s somewhat flexible, but the defaults are all really stupid (disclaimer: I haven’t used it much). The Windows DE has consistently gotten less flexible and uglier every release since Windows 2000, with a slight upturn when Windows 7 came out.
I could forgive all of this if I could just get the Classic theme back. I’ve heard you can if you kill WDM, but that sounds like a kludge that would cause endless amounts of hassle.
I think there was a lot of compatible motivations back around 10 years ago that coalesced. Desktop vendors (Microsoft, Red Hat, Ubuntu) desperately wanted a piece of the App Store craze and journalists and tech bloggers were desperately beating off to the idea of covering another computer renaissance era like early and mid 90s were.
Microsoft, Red Hat, and Ubuntu all got very clear, unmistakable feedback during respective betas that every user thought everything they were doing was total shit and these companies and organizations were shit for even thinking it wasn’t shit. But then those journalists started giving these failed desktop initiatives a free pass as they beat off to ideas like “post-pc” and “flat design”, which those companies and organizations took as affirmation that people actually liked their pieces of shit even though those journalists were clearly fabricating literally everything good they were saying about all that Gnome 3 Metro flat design Unity bullshit.
Gnome 3 is still infested with untalented true believers, Ubuntu has long since stopped caring or spending money on their Unity initiative, and Microsoft has started resolving all outlying issues that were previously ignored because until then they still were thinking UWP was still going to be a thing. Microsoft was probably the worst affected out of anyone because they spent massive resources into rebranding two distinct failed initiatives (Metro and UWP), but they’re also better posed to come out of this stronger by going back to win32 and saving it from bitrot they previously desperately wanted to do in.
Many journalists should have been fired and publicly tarred for underserving their readers like that, but then they all got distracted by Trump winning the presidency and have since reformed into an intra-company frat party where they circlejerk who can come up with the coolest Trump dig in an article regardless of how little it has to do with politics.
Can someone care How To Get Gems In Dragon City Fast to explain to me what a QT is ?
I fail to see a point in this stupid rant.
Community-driven projects like Gnome as free to choose their own path and follow their own vision. Sure, some mistakes were made in the initial concept but that’s because an open source project cannot pour millions into testing something that is not yet released. Whining about these issues is retarded.
Commercial projects such as the iPhone OS have to re-design every now and then to avoid making consumers bored. But even Apple had some science behind the initial drive to change, albeit the end result is mostly hideous to my eye.
Back to the whine about Gnome: what’s the problem with hiding keyboard shortcuts before Alt key is pressed? It does not make “discoverability’ any lower.
Besides, to even acknowledge the keyboard shortcuts you’re already leaning towards becoming a power-user who will eventually memorize all the needed shortcuts anyway.
Making tiny visual optimizations like these are great improvements in making the DE more eye-friendly with almost zero downsides.
But Gnome is not a community-driven project like KDE, Xfce or Mate. It’s de facto controlled by IBM (Red Hat) and that’s also the reason it is forced onto users as the default desktop on most distros
The thing is, though, Sun and Red Hat did pour a ton of resources into usability testing, which they then used to modify Gnome2 and make it more usable.
Then, the Gnome core team threw out all that research and user-driven data that was used to polish the UI, and threw out other well known best-practices, and created Gnome 3.
Yes, 1000% its the designers that think they are ux engineers. What looks pretty and like eveyrone else’s design? O that old one that obeyed fits laws and had clear differentiation between actionable buttons and just descriptive text: OLD => BAD=> DELETE!!!!! Now you must randomly click/tap on text or graphical color changes to discover functionality! Wheee! Oh and swipe with a mouse or an unpredictable number of fingers. undo? No, why look back to old problems? Just make ten more problems and enjoy the journey of invisible errors and sea of colors!
User interface design these days is an unmitigated disaster. The only sane thing left on Linux these days is XFCE, which I use exclusively on all my machines, but how long before some idiot screws that up? Even now, how do you restored arrows on scroll bars which some GTK moron decided were no longer needed? I only use Windows via a terminal server, but the latest iteration is a bog stupid mess. Screen is littered with icons of which 99% are useless, and I have to use a disappearing scroll bar to locate the few that I actually need. Didn’t used to be that way. How do you log out? You click on the “power off” button, then have to click yet another button. The previous iteration (Windows 7 based) was a breath of fresh air by comparison.
The problem is that each user is different and there is no free lunch.
Consider Apple’s marketing for the “one button mouse”. Yes, it has only one button, but you have the beginning of gestures – click and hold, long click, double click, shift-click, control-click, alt/option click control-shift click, etc.
You end up with a dozen button mouse, with the other 11 on the keyboard.
The largest problem I see is nonconfigurable buttons. My RSS aggregator puts buttons that I have NEVER used even once over the last decade on top, but has a … menu that exposes the ones I use. At least it is at one level.
And I wish to kill whomever at Google decided to put immovable (+) or other icons where it covers up data. Often I NEVER wish to press them, but it blocks the view. It is never clear what and why. They still have the “hamburger” menu. Buttons DO NOT BELONG ATOP THE IMPORTANT DATA WINDOW.
Another problem is sometimes the device is busy, so you tap something and when nothing happens for 3 seconds, you tap again and do something different as it is a double click, or it accepts the event for whatever happens after the first thing has disappeared. I have to remember to tap an odd number of times.
Even that is screwy. The simple Wifi icon. If I tap quickly, it toggles it. I rarely want to do that. If I hold (and don’t slip – why I need a keyboard/mouse/stylus – it will go to the configuration.
Beyond that, if you can’t configure, you have a junk product. I like my ultra-compact Palm, but keep accidentally (no idea how) putting it in airplane mode, but I can’t relegate that button to somewhere it won’t be accidentally hit. There is a palm mode button I never use that is just clutter. Like any other bloatware.
Another useless annoyance is animations. Instead of switching, it shows the captured windows for the apps scrolling by like the metro / subway for a few seconds, and only then finishes switching. Or “smooth scrolling” to the next text match. Or anything else that wants to give me a dazzling video movie experience when I just want to get to the damned thing I asked for.
I will give kudos to Samsung, at least its internet browser, which does so many things right, especially in the beta version and has been responsive. It can now default to desktop mode and I can configure which buttons appear on top. And many other things.
tomz,
Well, one really doesn’t need a dozen button mouse to be productive, yet it’s hard to argue that apple’s puck mouse was not inferior to just about every other mouse on the market. Many PC applications and games made great use of right clicking since early on, and the scroll wheel was another good innovation. Apple standardizing on one button mice (with a button that was physically awkward at that) never made any sense to me, it was all cons and no pros. I attributed it to form over function.
Can you clarify what you are referring to? The “new tab” button in web browsers?
My peeves are UI elements that are non-discoverable and disappear. Controls went from clearly visible to clickable buttons going flat and non-distinct or hidden, and title bars being taken away for no good reason other than to check a box for minimalism. Users don’t benefit from such changes, but alas designers and managers aren’t able to justify their work unless they keep making changes, which is why we keep getting them.
He’s talking about the compose button in Gmail I suppose.
Absolutely agree! I neither need nor want a song & dance every time I change windows, or request a list, or need to go menu diving, or practically anything! It’s not just the GUI acrobatics, it’s also all the fading in & out. I’m not a fan of the flat UI’s that look like a toddler with a box of 16 different colored crayons design it. There’s nothing wrong with a UI that has a little `luxury` to it. I just don’t need to see a performance every time I want to do something. The faster I get to what I want, the better.
> Another problem is sometimes the device is busy, so you tap something and when nothing happens for 3 seconds, you tap again and do something different as it is a double click, or it accepts the event for whatever happens after the first thing has disappeared. I have to remember to tap an odd number of times.
Ugh. This happens to me all the time on my old Fire tablet, or my Samsung J7 when running Google Music. I feel like all the UI/UX people are 20 years old and never learned the hard-won lessons of 70s and 80s when UI was invented and perfected. Microsoft has more resources than half the countries on the planet, but they seem to have all their UI work assigned to art school drop-outs… you know, the people who saw DuChamps’ urinal, and spent their entire careers imitating it.
I don’t see any winners in this debate, the problem is there is a clear difference in the meaning of usability between, IT professional, hackers, home users and office drones. In forums like this we basically get one dominant perspective, which is assumed to be true. Perhaps this is where the term “your own truth” comes from, but that is by definition a variable, tailor made reality.
The professional solution is to then either simplify and standardise, which hobbles performance and affects usability, or make things more and more configurable to tailor the experience, which exponentially increases complexity reducing the very usability they are working towards.
This will always be a tightrope developers walk, there is no solution because the problem is humanity.
cpcf,
I disagree, but only because of the word you chose: “usability”. You’re kind of implying that the studies done in the development of the WIMP UI model can’t be objective and scientific, which I disagree with. I think you make a valid point if you’re talking about aesthetics or pleasing appearances, which are inherently subjective. To the extent that usability is subjective, it is significantly less subjective than appearance. I will concede that some people may prefer to focus on appearance over usability though.
I’m really confused what you mean by this. The industry DID collectively evolve professional standards that increased usability across many operating systems even. While UIs have always gone hand in hand with stylistic elements, modern designers seem to have a greater willingness to reject professionalism & usability in favor of embracing artistically unique interfaces that are less familiar. It’s kind of been a counter-culture movement.
I do agree with this, I’m pretty sure it has more to do with style than usability. To put this all another way: engineering work tends to converge to standards over time, whereas with art the goal is often to diverge away from norms.
Alfman,
And that is the problem we have on many places right now, people assuming that everything is relative, that there is no practical answers, except that they do exist and people should be aware and use them if they just put enough effort to learn, instead of relying on their “instincts” or “gut feelings”.
It is something that stupefy me how, in our current age and with all knowledge vastly available, we are back to the early stages of philosophy, when thinking was considered more valid than experiments and results.
Give me buttons clearly visible, instead of something I have to hunt, give me scroll bars that hint there are more to read, give me menus that organize possible actions instead of let things perpetually in semi-organized mess state.
As already commented here, aesthetics took over without many realizing the drawbacks of it. Perhaps, it is done on purpose, as it make us compelled to start searches.
May be, books with the same hard covers make them look more pleasant when together, but does anyone think that a library made with them eases find a particular one?
Usability is way more than something revolving around aesthetics and personal taste.
I bought WindowBlinds 10 to get back some consistency in the UI aesthetic. It’s not perfect (there are many quirks in WindowsBlinds) but jeez, it helps a lot just to see what are buttons and what are not. Or a better contrast in scroll bars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OGOwzGbnFw
Yeah, I bought it, too, and it’s a valiant effort, but I think they are trapped by the fact that the Windows DE is so much less flexible than it used to be. The so-called “themes” for Windows now seem to be limited almost entirely to changing the title bar color. I tried in vain to duplicate the Classic mode, but it was still hopelessly marred by the “flat” UI, an idea that makes no one happy except the arrogant hipster who came up with it, and thinks that artist who pooped in a can in the 60s was the most brilliant person ever.
Windows 2000 had way more flexibility (which you didn’t need because the defaults were almost perfect). I mean, I like the “dark” mode for Explorer, but I didn’t want that at the expense of _everything_ else.
My best UI overall remains QNX Neutrino’s Photon in its 6.1 – 6.4 era. A mix between NextStep and BeOS, everything super clean, clear and elegant…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXLSlin7org
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuXys6doip4
Kochise,
I’ve never used it, but your videos of it look pretty good!
Ultimate Windows Tweaker
No I’m not trying to spam the thread.
I’ve been crying foul about that for years.
It all started with Windows 8/Gnome 3 and has gone downhill from that point.
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/01/27/1425205/ask-slashdot-a-point-of-contention—modern-user-interfaces
Gnome 3/KDE 5 default UI: horrible as hell.
Windows 10 UI: horrible as hell.
Android 10 UI: horrible as hell.
iOS UI: probably the worst of them all.
Most websites nowadays: horrible unusable mess: links and text are randomly formatted and often have exactly the same formatting. Buttons do not look like buttons. Checkboxes are impossible to understand (which position is on and which is off). Etc. etc. etc.
The best computer UI was Windows 95 – Windows 7 for me.
The best mobile UI was Android 4.0
Oh, the last usable Linux DEs were KDE 3.5 and Gnome 2 both of which were brilliant. KDE 4 started to turn into utter crap and completed the transition with with KDE 5, while Gnome 3 has been nothing but crap all along.
HTML was never meant to do what people want to do with it. It’s a markup language; not a UI specification language. We really need to let it be and move on to something designed for creating UIs.
Black text and blue links were perfectly understood by 100% of people out there. Nothing complex.
Then HTML3.2 controls were all designed by human begins after Windows 95 and again were quite intuitive.
Don’t know what you mean by “was never meant to do what people want to do with it”.
Most top websites before 2005 were very well made.
Have you tried to build a modern web app (ex: Slack) or web page (ex: SPA, PWA) recently? It’s a mess. Layers upon layers of junk with lots of boilerplate crap. It can be scaled down, but that’s not what people will pay for.
HTML had a very specific purpose in being an alternative to typesetting systems like LaTeX designed purely for computers with low res displays. As it turns out, people want pixel perfect designs which can translate to lots of formats, digital and physical, which typesetting systems are really good at, and instead of turning HTML into something it’s not, we should let it be good at what it’s good at. We need to move on and build something that translates better between all of the formats while lowering the bar.
People need to admit the desktop builders from last century knew what was going on.
Ironically, what’s happening is the opposite: standardized widgets made for desktop applications are falling out of favor to new toolkits, and extensions on top of traditional toolkits (like qml) that copy a lot from html/css/javascript trio and exposes only primitives shapes and text labels that can be made interactive with lots glue code and animation graphs.
And that’s how you got these abortions of a GUI that you see all over the place in desktops these days. Plain, dull, shapeless, non standard, no accessibility for the disabled, full of out of place and needless animations, low to none contrast, diverging colors…
All the uphill battle from late 90 to mid 00 for customizable consistency when down the drain. Now everyone does as it please, nothing fits with nothing and that’s it.
That reminds me of the absurd trend that Microsoft started in the early 2000s of making their desktop apps look and act like web pages. I guess we’re still suffering from that in a sense. If they would just bring back the Classic theme, I could forgive a lot.
My view: in Windows, UI should be just like Windows XP “Classic Mode” , and in Linux, Gnome 2 which is now Mate.
It astounds me that the Windows DE is so sophisticated it can’t do what it could do 20 years ago. Thanks for nothing, Microsoft.
Microsoft used to be among the best UI experts, but they started throwing it all away in the late 90s, and now they are among the worst.
The “decline of usability” can substantially be attributed to the primary use case of most personal computers and devices: passive consumption.
The GUI or user interface is now part of the architecture of the new shopping mall where you are both product and customer — steering you around all the stores in the mall, driving you toward the next upgrade in the mall itself in a hurt and rescue operation where things are deliberately screwed up so they can be fixed for you.
As well, the user interface has become instrumental in collecting information about how you passively consume and can be marketed to — there’s some highly correlative data that comes out of this that marketing loves.
Many interfaces aren’t remotely intended to do anything other than look like useful tools for you, they are tools for manipulating you.
You don’t have to believe any of this, you can do your own diligence and discover that wonderful marketing companies like Hill+Knowlton (instantiated by the principles of MK Ultra) have invested billions in interface design research and do a lot of business with Microsof et al…
This is a recurring theme for the 17 years or so I have been on OSNews. I have a feeling this isn’t going to change any time soon 🙂