Is the Internet becoming less user-friendly?

Image generated by Ideogram AI.

Is the Internet becoming harder to use?

I was collaborating with the volunteer yesterday, making minor visual adjustments to a new website and that got me thinking about whether or not we are making the Internet easier or harder to use. This thought could also be applied to technology in general. Admittedly ease-of-use is a highly subjective consideration, but still overall when you look at the broad perspective I have the sneaking hunch if we are not making things harder for people there definitely is a trend toward making the experience more convoluted.

Think of the plethora of icons that are now used in place of text descriptions on websites. While we all understand some of them to represent services like Facebook etc. many of them don't give you a clue as to what they represent and if you use the old trick of hovering over them with your mouse pointer there is usually no further embedded text description displayed. (If you hover over the graphic at the top of this article you should see some text appear describing it.) So your only alternative is to click on each one to see what it does. This is just inefficient. Yes, it saves valuable screen space and if the symbol is universal it gets around the language barrier. But if it's something the designer just made up then again it just slows people down.

The other issue I see occurring a lot online in general and with various apps is that you are constantly being interrupted in one way or another. My Pixel 6a 90% of the time it displays a notification about something right after I put in my PIN even if I have just cleared all the notifications. This occurs so often, that I am forced to conclude it was a design choice. Again this can impair one's ability to do something because you are momentarily distracted, and that is just annoying.

Graphical User Interface design (GUI) as a complementary component called User-Experience design  (UX) which is focused on the experience of using the product or device itself so one would think the goal would be to remove the above mentioned problems. But we are now trying to pack so many features into every web application and devices that there is simply no universal way to organize. So you end up with a real disjointed mess, unless you happen to know the brand or manufacturer well enough to understand their design philosophy. 

This may well be an area in which artificial intelligence can be a benefit. A user experience focused AI could learn how a particular user works best with the device or service and then automatically adjusts as needed. For example, I find that most pop-up notifications disappear far too quickly in this case particularly on android devices for my liking. I have another friend however that finds them too slow. 

However, until we get to that stage where artificial intelligence is sufficiently ubiquitous enough to do per device user experience adjustments. I would like to hear what you have to say. Let's start a broad discussion and see where it goes.

Now, I know this topic is diverse and some people's "features" are others "impediments" particularly if for considering the various disabilities. However for this discussion let's keep it to the broader picture. A strict technology becoming easier to use or do you find it getting in the way more often than not? 

Patrick 

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