They Called It Progress. Turns Out It Was Just Hiding Things We Already Knew How to Use.
At some point between 2019 and now, someone redesigned absolutely everything, and I'm fairly certain they forgot to send the memo.
I don't mean they updated things. I mean they took perfectly functional interfaces — websites, apps, the dashboard on a rental car — and rebuilt them from scratch as though the previous version had been offensive to look at. Which it wasn't. It was fine. It worked. You knew where things were.
Now nothing is where it was.
I noticed it properly last month when I tried to pay a water bill online. The utility company's website had been "refreshed." The old site had a button at the top that said PAY BILL. You clicked it. You paid. Done. The new site has a sleek homepage with a video of water flowing through a forest, three enormous tiles labeled DISCOVER, EXPLORE, and MANAGE, and absolutely no indication of where you go to simply hand over money. I eventually found it under MANAGE, then ACCOUNT, then BILLING OPTIONS, then MAKE A PAYMENT. Four clicks deep. For the thing everyone comes to the site to do.
This is not progress. This is interior design pretending to be functionality.
And it's everywhere. My bank moved the transfer button. My email provider hid the search bar under a magnifying glass icon I didn't know was clickable. The supermarket website rearranged its entire category structure and now I can't find tinned tomatoes without typing them into a search box like I'm conducting an investigation.
I used to navigate these things by memory. Muscle memory, even. You'd open a site and your hand would move to the right place without thinking. Now every visit is a fresh puzzle. Where did they put it this time? What's it called now? Is it under a hamburger menu? A three-dot icon? A gear? A person-shaped silhouette?
I'm not technologically illiterate. I ran navigation systems on container ships. I adapted to software updates for forty years. But those updates were additive. They added features. They didn't hide the fundamentals behind aesthetic choices made by someone who clearly never has to use the thing in a hurry.
The worst part is the tone they take when you complain. "It's more intuitive now." No it isn't. Intuitive means it works the way you expect. This works the way a twenty-eight-year-old UX designer in Berlin expects, which is not the same thing.
I asked my daughter about it once. She said, "Oh, yeah, they redesign everything every couple of years to keep it fresh." Fresh for whom? I don't want my banking app to feel fresh. I want it to feel like I've used it before.
There's a certain arrogance in it, I think. The assumption that familiarity is boring. That if something looks the same for too long, people will get tired of it. But nobody gets tired of light switches being in the same place. Nobody demands their kettle be "reimagined" every eighteen months.
And yet here we are, in a world where every app, every website, every piece of software is in a constant state of flux, as though standing still would be an admission of failure.
I'm not opposed to change. I'm opposed to change for its own sake. I'm opposed to fixing things that weren't broken in order to justify someone's job title. I'm opposed to the idea that we all need to relearn basic tasks every two years because someone decided rectangles were out and rounded corners were in.
The freedom of retirement was supposed to include not having to keep up with pointless corporate rituals. Turns out the rituals followed me home. They're on my phone. They're in my browser. They're in the dashboard of the car I hired last week, which had touch-screen climate controls that required three menus and a degree in graphic design to turn the bloody heating down.
I used to think getting older meant the world would move on without you. I didn't realise it would move on and then come back and rearrange your kitchen while you were asleep.
So now I do what everyone over sixty does. I find workarounds. I bookmark the deep links. I write down the steps. I take screenshots before updates so I have a record of where things used to be. I've become an archaeologist of my own digital life, excavating the ruins of interfaces I used to know.
And I suppose that's fine. You adapt. You always do. But it would be nice, just once, if someone designing these things stopped and thought: maybe some people don't want to explore. Maybe some people just want to pay the water bill and get on with their day.
Maybe some people are tired of being redesigned at.
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PS If you're trying to work out what to do next — without hype or reinvention — I have 2 new things up on Gumroad. The Quiet Income Playbook and, but you're probably not ready for this: The Authenticity Stack: 55 Prompts to Build a Publishing Business Without Sounding Like ChatGPT