It's because we've pushed and pushed so much for simplicity and dumbing things down that we've obliterated any semblance of confidence.
When Windows puts up an error message like 'oopsy doospy window's made a fucky wucky!" I don't feel safe! I don't trust this magic box!
Modern software will just lie straight to your face and hide things from you. Like the autosave thing. People don't trust it because it lies. The saving stuff is hidden away, and if it says 'saved', it might not be!
Which, great, fantastic, amazing - when it works. When it doesn't, we don't get any feedback. Things just start magically breaking. Things become unpredictable. And that's scary. We lose confidence in the system.
Like, imagine you have a car with lane keep assist. Lane keep assist makes mistakes, sure. But it beeps, it says "hey we're doing this", and you can trivially override it.
Imagine it didn't do that. Imagine it didn't beep, maybe you didn't even know about the system. Imagine you can't turn it off, or imagine you can't override it. You're just driving one day... and then the car is veering off the road. You push the steering wheel to the right, but it keeps going to the left. How much confidence would you have in that car? Would you get in it again?
When Windows puts up an error message like 'oopsy doospy window's made a fucky wucky!" I don't feel safe! I don't trust this magic box!
Modern software will just lie straight to your face and hide things from you. Like the autosave thing. People don't trust it because it lies. The saving stuff is hidden away, and if it says 'saved', it might not be!
Which, great, fantastic, amazing - when it works. When it doesn't, we don't get any feedback. Things just start magically breaking. Things become unpredictable. And that's scary. We lose confidence in the system.
Like, imagine you have a car with lane keep assist. Lane keep assist makes mistakes, sure. But it beeps, it says "hey we're doing this", and you can trivially override it.
Imagine it didn't do that. Imagine it didn't beep, maybe you didn't even know about the system. Imagine you can't turn it off, or imagine you can't override it. You're just driving one day... and then the car is veering off the road. You push the steering wheel to the right, but it keeps going to the left. How much confidence would you have in that car? Would you get in it again?
That's basically modern software UX in my eyes.