This is a bit of a rant.

I’m getting very frustrated with the ensloppification of consumer software. It’s always been a small problem, but it seems to be getting a lot worse.

Lost in the Bureaucracy

A lot of websites are just harder to use now. Whatever you’re trying to do is buried in complex menus, or hidden behind “accept our cookies,” “accept our privacy policy,” click here, click here. The actual user experience is lost under mountains of bureaucracy.

Or Just Broken

Other websites are simple, but they’re broken.

I find myself opening the browser inspector on consumer websites all the time, reading network traces to figure out why a request failed.

For example: a form with 20 or 30 fields. It takes 10 minutes to fill out. I hit submit, and it says “Error.” That’s it. What went wrong? I entered a ton of stuff on here!

Sure enough, the network trace shows it didn’t like how I formatted my phone number. I used spaces instead of dashes. I fix it, hit submit, and it works. I run into stuff like this constantly.

Don’t even get me started on email codes. I’d guess a quarter of the time, the email never shows up. If you’re going to gate sign-in behind an email code and not accept my password, you need reliable email sending.

Then there are sign-in forms that make me enter my email, hit next, enter my password, then hit sign in. My password manager can’t fill both at once, so I waste extra clicks every single time. Whoever built that clearly doesn’t use a password manager.

Old People Are Screwed

Some of the friction is on purpose. Try helping someone sign in to their cell phone provider account. You need a password, an email code, and a phone code. They forgot their password. They don’t have access to their email. It snowballs fast.

I have a password manager with an absurd number of passwords in it. A lot of the older people I know have one password they use for everything, or they forget their passwords all the time, or both. For them, just signing in is an ordeal.

And it doesn’t stop there. You fight through the sign-in, then you fight through the support chatbot, then you fight through the UI to find the thing you came to do. The software fights you every step of the way.

AI Makes This Inexcusable

Maybe I’m more frustrated now because, in the era of AI, it’s extremely easy to do this stuff right. It’s no longer “I don’t know how to code this.” Good isn’t complicated. Good is just what’s easy for the user. Tell AI to make it better and fix these problems.

There have always been poor developers writing bad code. The difference is that now they’re using AI, and the velocity of their slop is increasing, at the expense of the rest of the internet. AI didn’t fix the incompetence. It just lets it ship faster.

As someone who cares about doing things well, and about being efficient with my time, my clicks, and my attention, anything that isn’t done well really gets to me.

Use What You Build

What I really wish is that people would pay attention to what they’re building, and actually use it.

I’ve seen engineers who are good at their one piece but have never used their product as a customer. I once asked one a really basic question about their own service, and they had no idea. That’s embarrassing.

Use what you build, end to end, as a customer would. Think about what your users are actually trying to do, and be graceful when they don’t do it perfectly. If someone types their phone number with spaces, just accept it. Find the friction and fix it. Too many people never do, and that’s how you end up with crappy products.

---

← Back to blog