The toughness of a dandy

As we see the hyper-accelerated spiralling of what we have come to consider as modern online interaction, it's important to go back to our roots. Governments and advertisers control a lot of our internet resources, especially on social media applications and websites. These are becoming completely unusable and any kind of UX design they have is heavily favoured not on the user at all, but on what will make the user be fooled into clicking on an advertisement or a link to somewhere off-site for monetary or number engagement purposes. These sites are often frustrating to navigate at best, inaccessible at worst.

You will have a company worth millions of dollars putting out a steaming pile of broken garbage, calling it a phone app, and yet you will have someone playing with code for free who can put out a website or an app that is so easy to use that you realize just how clunky everything has been for the past 10 years. Why a company with endless resources can't seem to drum up a functional button that, when tapped on your phone, will do what it's supposed to, I don't know. But I do know that the richer a company is, the more succeptible to the pitfalls of trendy internet design they are, and that becomes a soup of flies really quickly.

Engagement tools for the internet are not paintings, they're interactive devices, and therefore something can look sleek and very 2K19, but will reduce the functionality of it's true purpose. People with visual and mobility issues seem to be getting the most rotten end of the stick, while users who don't have related disabilities are certainly not appreciative of the more idiotic changes a company can roll out.

Websites should be about what's on them, and then after that, the design can start to come together, with the best accessibility a webmaster can put together. That means learning the code to make screen readers more functional, give every relevant image the option for alt-text, and to not let readability suffer for the sake of what people think looks good.

These are just some thoughts and frustrations I've had for quite a while, I might update soon with some specific examples and put some design choices on blast.