benlehman

I am shopping for a new backpack, as my beloved nearly decade-old samsonite which is finally nearing the end of its life.

I am struck by how much *worse* backpack design has gotten over the last decade. Examples: it's harder to reach things, pockets are so deep that they go to my elbow, external pockets are located inaccessibly if they exist at all.

This got me thinking: how did this happen? And it occurs to me that UI decays naturally over time, as features are added.

When a new feature is added, it is generally just grafted on to a pre-existing design. As it gets increasingly "dug-in," it occupies more and more of the design space. And, thus, it basically kills any usability of the pre-existing design. In order to get a usable item again, we have to redesign the thing from scratch, taking into account new usage patterns, etc.

A lot of features have been added to backpacks in the last few years (laptop sleeves, ipod cases, cell phone thinguses, etc.) At the same time, this has made the rest of the pack cluttered, poorly designed, and unusable.

I think that this probably applies to a lot of things. For instance, I bet Jono could talk about it with software.