Lots of people who are designing websites and webapps are just out for the design. Usability went in the background for whatever reason.
But more and more people are getting more aware of user friendly UI and functions for people with disabilities. But yet it's not the highest priority sadly.
Outside of business specifically oriented towards people with accessibility issues, the energy just doesn't translate into VC.
Companies who do try to shoehorn it in when products are more mature usually have:
A codebase with a frustrating amount of refactoring in order to retroactively get things in line.
Development inertia where it's seen as a low value activity among developers and product owners
Lack of clear guidance/tools/processes to QA new work
Lack of will to retroactively identify the breadth and scope of changes you even want to make
There is no mystery. It's not going to get you sexy VC money at the beginning, and then it's bizarrely more work than you'd think once your project is sufficiently large.
That doesn't explain why already established products are ditching things like plainly visible scroll bars in products like Microsoft word and other content viewers.
This. And it doesn't only apply to companies. I have a personal blog with a couple accessibility issues that I haven't bothered to fix because I've built a lot of my CSS around my bad HTML. Part of the issue is that I built my site as a school project for a web design class I was taking, so code quality wasn't great. One day I might redesign it better, but I don't have the energy for now.
UX design got better and better for many years...but it has definitely been regressing over the past few years, IMO. It's weaponized minimalism at this point. Because it "looks cool, bro".
Yeah, it has a very specific meaning, and people are now using it to mean "things becoming shitty". Just because "shit" is the base word doesn't mean that's what the whole word means.
Enshittification, also known as platform decay,[1] is a way to describe the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that act as two-sided markets.
From the guy who coined the term itself:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification.
Being a pedant is never a good look. You're missing the larger point. The same corporate impulse that drives platform decay ripples out to things like UX design. And that impulse is: the customer doesn't matter anymore, we already got your money, only what we want matters.