It must be "clean" is what I've heard, and there's nothing cleaner than a big empty space with one single nondescript icon behind which everything has been carelessly thrown. The burger menu is a great example of this "pattern"

It’s not enough that I see the burger on my iPad with plenty of room, I also sometimes see it on a desktop. God forbid the user be able to do what they want. Google cloud is my favorite example. For some reason they’ve hidden the button that starts the instance - one thing that you actually want to do. But at least the interface is “clean”.

yeah but at least it is also better than those blades you get in microsoft Azure. Now that is a clusterfuck.

The 'beauty' of GCP is that I can effectively use my ipad's browser to manage some stuff on the go, or keep google cloud open in a small browser window on a secondary monitor, with full flexibility and full featureset. On azure, the pages don't always work, or break, and the app has way less functionality.

The best thing would be naturally a design that adapts better to display size than what they currently have, but I would call it badly optimized instead of bad design.

Microsoft went the opposite way with the Ribbon, but then went the same way with the Windows 11 right-click menu.

Because when steps are added the naive engagement metric trends upward. The owner of the temperature control or the hamburger menu can show their boss that people are looking at and using the “product”. More taps, more time. It’s a data driven decision making fallacy.

Users want to spend as little time engaging with the UI but that’s hard to measure. The best way to minimize engagement time would be to just remove everything. But then there’s no data. So the thing that can be measured is chosen.

When people learn the UI the engagement metric trends downward and a new UI is designed which “fixes” the “problem”.

Because it's really hard to design an interface with high information density. So the "designers" hide everything behind a menu and call it a day

I'm really curious how Tesla tested this update. I'm not a UX designer myself, but have worked with some really great ones, and there's not a chance in hell they would've put anything as drastic of a change as this into a customer product, especially if it has safety implications, without extensive testing.

What? Tesla has thrown multiple serious FSD changes over the fence into vehicles with little more than a few days since the previous releases (multiple changes to phantom braking, being one of them).

Their attitude to testing, safety or otherwise (i.e. braking) has been horrifically lacking, at best.

I'd be surprised if this move saw much more than a User Story from the MMI PM before going into production.

they == the ux designers I've worked with

I'm also curious if the designer(s) involved have tested it much themselves, or even drive Teslas at all --- some interesting comments on this recent article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30018763 revealed that Windows' UI designers don't even use Windows themselves.

It would be unfortunate, but not entirely surprising given what we've seen, if the people responsible for these changes hadn't even tried them in their own cars for a reasonable amount of time. I'd say at least 1 year is reasonable, since all weather conditions need to be experienced.

Is it actually hard, or is it just that designers care more about their aesthetic vision (of "cleanliness", as some others here have alluded to) than practical usability?

I would say it isn't a user experience choice its an aesthetic choice. And if he UX team, or whoever is making these decisions, is prioritizing aesthetics over functionality than I really don't know what to say.

It's a manifestation of a much more sinister pattern - prioritizing first impressions over long-term considerations