"When I was reading Richard Dawkins about evolution, one example stuck with me: the giraffe's laryngeal nerve. It connects the larynx to the brain, but in a giraffe it runs all the way down the long neck, loops around the aorta, and then comes back up. Logically, it should run straight from the head to the larynx. But the giraffe evolved from a short-necked ancestor that already had this loop around the aorta. As the neck grew, the nerve simply stretched."
"It used to be a timeline of photos from the creators you liked. Then direct messaging was added, and the feed got scrambled with ads and videos. Then the developers copied Stories from Snapchat. They didn't really fit the feed, so they were stuck on top as little circles that live separately from the feed and use different gestures. Then, in various places, they shoved in live streams (not the same as videos),"
Design in many modern digital products has been overtaken by an evolutionary process of incremental additions and experiments. Historical structure and hierarchical organization gave products a legible system that helped users navigate and feel control. Repeated, opportunistic feature insertions create mismatched islands of functionality with different gestures, affordances, and entry points. Teams iterate by launching many variations, keeping what performs, and discarding the rest, which fragments the product's internal logic. Users respond by duplicating actions across features and by relying on guesswork, worsening discoverability and coherence.
Read at Ilyabirman
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