[o175]

We actually solved this problem once and then deliberately unsolved it. Skeuomorphic design — the beveled buttons, the underlined blue links, the scrollbars that looked like physical scrollbars — wasn't just aesthetic preference. It was an affordance language that leveraged decades of physical-world intuition. You see a raised button, you know it can be pressed. You see underlined blue text, you know it goes somewhere.

And then around 2012-2013 we collectively decided that looked "dated" and replaced it with flat rectangles that may or may not be buttons, text that may or may not be links, and scroll areas with invisible scrollbars that appear only on hover — which of course assumes you know where to hover. The entire visual vocabulary got stripped out in favor of... cleanliness?

What's genuinely perverse is that this happened simultaneously with the web becoming mandatory infrastructure. You can't opt out of paying your electric bill online in a lot of places now. So we took the interface that 80-year-olds had finally learned to navigate, ripped out every visual clue that made it navigable, and then told them the alternative was a phone tree that also doesn't work.