I’m not convinced that a call to emotional trauma is really a factor here (I know a lot of folks that have lost kids, and the streaming profiles don’t even move the trauma needle).
Rather, it’s a basic usability issue, with extra clicks/taps/whatever required, or an overly-complex presentation, requiring extra attention. Also, as noted in another comment, every UI element increases the opportunity for misfires.
In The Days of Yore, we used to “score” our UI, by how many taps/clicks it took, to accomplish tasks, or how long it took, to understand a screen. The lower, the better. I’m a bit of an anachronism, as I still do that.
My experience, is that implementing intuitive, low-interaction UI is really hard. I’m in the middle of designing a screen with drag-and-drop support for a matrix of icons. I’ve been working on it for a couple of days, already, and probably have at least a couple more to go. Lot of work, for just one screen. It’s all about removing unnecessary interactions, and implementing subtle, intuitive affordances. Also, symbolic debugging of UICollectionView is a real bitch. The debugger borks the drag and drop, so I have to use a bunch of print() statements.
I think most software is done by folks that aren’t willing to “go the extra mile,” to design and implement truly intuitive UI.
Or most likely, there are oxygen wasters whose performance is measured based on "engagement", aka how much human time they wasted. Designing a low-interaction UI is not in their best interests in that case.
Yeah this is just a minor example of enshittification, there's no more to it than that. Netflix and other modern software like it aren't written for customer they are written to extract maximum "value" from "users". They want to push the kids account thing because they think it will make them money. Ux is only important to the extend it's so bad it creates churn, it's not something they care about optimizing.
Rather, it’s a basic usability issue, with extra clicks/taps/whatever required, or an overly-complex presentation, requiring extra attention. Also, as noted in another comment, every UI element increases the opportunity for misfires.
In The Days of Yore, we used to “score” our UI, by how many taps/clicks it took, to accomplish tasks, or how long it took, to understand a screen. The lower, the better. I’m a bit of an anachronism, as I still do that.
My experience, is that implementing intuitive, low-interaction UI is really hard. I’m in the middle of designing a screen with drag-and-drop support for a matrix of icons. I’ve been working on it for a couple of days, already, and probably have at least a couple more to go. Lot of work, for just one screen. It’s all about removing unnecessary interactions, and implementing subtle, intuitive affordances. Also, symbolic debugging of UICollectionView is a real bitch. The debugger borks the drag and drop, so I have to use a bunch of print() statements.
I think most software is done by folks that aren’t willing to “go the extra mile,” to design and implement truly intuitive UI.