I wonder how many billions of human hours are wasted because of interfaces trying to be friendly instead of effective? Because some designer only thought of initial users and not long-term users? Users who would like to accomplish effective work in as few clicks and presses as rapidly as possible?
"oh but that's one or two seconds" -- over one to three THOUSAND per day for a single user in even a single week. That's nearly an hour per DAY. SIX AND A HALF HOURS PER WEEK.
The enemies of workflow are: 1. Task dissociation (forgetting or not knowing your connection to the output, collapses agency & learning) 2. Task delay (time spent waiting for things to happen) 3. Task holes (mental energy and time subtracted from task planning used incorrectly on poor design)
This is one of the reasons I can't stand AI. Its literally public enemy #1. It is not a tool: It is an end. You do not gain a better understanding of the craft, and so steering towards better results is impossible. Inventing new good solutions is VERY impossible.
AI can only approximate the shape of things. It cannot actually make them, because the act of making them requires not only an understanding of the task for a human creator and their task intent
It only copies patterns based on statistics It does not copy effective choices or make them It approximates "the style" of a thing statistically It is the common (non)sense fallacy incarnate: If bad things appear more often than good things, the bad things must be gooderer.
Even in the 5% of "vaguely useful" outcomes: How many inefficient "common nonsense" decisions is AI going to make that cost human time and decimate profit, outcomes and workers? That measly 5% still isn't actually any good. Its 95% shit. 5% "technically edible" shit 100% wasteful
The most average of human design is already fairly problematic in terms of not wasting human time. Handing it to a machine can only be worse. It can only waste exponentially more untold billions of human hours.
We are undoing the computer revolution made possible by people like Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson. We are deciding instead of paying for studies which would improve the computer and produce enormous gains for everybody we are defunding users for a glorified coin-flipper worse than any human.
The only time these algorithms make sense is if the output must be completely indistinguishable from noise that "superficially resembles a thing" -- at which point a noise algorithm is exponentially cheaper and a bespoke procedural generator cheaper and better still.
UX work is like IT security. Businesses simply will not care until it affects the balance sheets enough. I have seen zero businesses that do this from inception or by design. I have seen plenty of businesses that say they do, but do not.
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Prioritizing growth over all else will do that
Going all in on material growth kills mental growth
It's deeply frustrating.
the massive destruction of potential demanded by market competition