Ephemerality in User Interfaces

A nice feature of traditional web applications is a lot of things we’d nowadays do with modals or popovers required a whole page transition. This limitation of the medium had good spillover effects:

The constraints of hypermedia, and the desktop form factor, created empowering software. The keyboard and mouse allow high-bandwidth, high-frequency interaction. They permit creation. Users were expected to be “computer literate”, to learn to operate the computer before a specific software program. Desktops are interactive.

Phones are cramped, bad at multitasking, impossible to type on. Nothing is expected of mobile users. Phones can only be interpassive.

And so the trend in UI design, for the past 15y, has been towards less information, fewer affordances, and turning free-standing pages into transient modals. Interfaces are stripped, made ephemeral, and apps become Fisher-Price toys for users to paw at.

A common antipattern nowadays is where you can infer the existence of some entity, but you can’t interact with it. You are screened from it.

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