No, I am comparing what was common then to what's common now.

Granted, the menu structure of apps back then was in large part common, because there was only the desktop, and GUI programming was still in its infancy, so everyone used the same widgets.

And no, I am not saying that everything back then was great. There absolutely were apps with shite interfaces. Only it was a lot harder to justify them.

> Standards for things like this will likely settle in over time.

Some will, but since we made the transition from building interfaces to designing them, agreeing on standards became much much harder.

Because now interfaces are the playground of marketing, brand recognition, product identity and design fads. Even explaining how an app works can be hard, because the person asking me could be in another group in some godamn A/B test and have a different one, even though we use the same App.

> When apps now need to have support for touch + trackpads + mouse + keyboard, mobile/tablet/desktop screens, and multi-platform

That certainly makes it more difficult, and requires careful consideration for different platforms.

So riddle me this: Why was common the reaction of all these different requirements to suddenly pretend everyone is using a phone for everything all the time?

Because that's how many apps and websites now look: Like something designed for a small phone screen and navigation by thumb. I open a website on a 4K monitor with a laser-precision pointing device, and I get an information density comparable to the intergalactic void.

It's very resource intensive and challenging to design multiple interfaces is the obvious answer here. Designing a website with just a few interactions that's accessible, supports mobile and desktop screens, and works in all browsers is already challenging and time consuming enough. Asking for almost a separate interface for different screen sizes and more costs significant resources that many won't have.

> Because that's how many apps and websites now look: Like something designed for a small phone screen and navigation by thumb. I open a website on a 4K monitor with a laser-precision pointing device, and I get an information density comparable to the intergalactic void.

What websites and apps in particular? I agree lazy mobile ports exist and are bad but I'm not experiencing this often with my daily apps and websites.

Sure is. Wanna know why? Because there is no unversal standard on how to do it.

And arriving at such a standard is really really difficult, in no small part because of all the "amazing" design ideas I mentioned before, which are not only fast-and-ever-changing, but also don't work well together.

In ye'olde days, the problem was approached from the technical side: Technically, designing graphical interfaces is hard, so here is a constrained system that gives you these well defined methods for doing so. That's what design gets to play with, so that's the standard. It didn't look cool, and didn't lend itself easily to branding etc. but it worked. In fact it worked so well, that we STILL have ALL the UX elements from these days in active use today, and they STILL WORK.

Nowadays, we are in a situation where we try and approach the problem from the other side: Technical limitations basically went away, so everyone is free to design his own stuff, leading to a cambrian explosion of conflicting principles and ideas, including ideas how to standardize and categorize all of it.

If we were able to get this under control and design universal widgets that can automatically adapt to whatever device they are used on, that would be wonderful. And there are amazingly intelligent people who are trying to do that. But all that effort flies out the window the very next time some design studio or company want a nice juicy piece of personal brand recognition and "design" the next-shiny-thing.