A 50-year-old principle from Bell Labs, and what your iPhone keeps getting wrong
At one of his seminars, I heard Brian Kernighan of Bell Labs fame say, that the purpose of computing is the conservation of typing.[1] I took that to heart during my development days, and it shapes how I think about technology to this day.
Which makes what I’m seeing now
all the more frustrating. We’ve moved from keyboards to touchscreens, from
typing to clicking, but the principle should have traveled with us.
Conservation of typing should have become conservation of clicks.
Instead, with every new iOS release, it seems to take more clicks to do
what used to take fewer. I’ve started calling it click bloat: the quiet
accumulation of extra steps that creeps into our devices with each update,
usually unannounced and rarely acknowledged.
Let me give you three examples
from my own recent experience.
Reading email on my iPad.
In the old layout, a simple
< icon let me back out of a message in one click. Now there’s a three-part
icon. You click to open it. You click the X, not the <, to close the email.
Two clicks instead of one. Is there a setting to restore the old layout? I
looked. There isn’t. Classic click bloat.
Picking up the NYT puzzle mid-game.
I usually start the daily
crossword on my iPhone and finish it on my iPad, or vice versa. The app syncs
well enough, at least it looks that way. Here’s my five-click adventure to
simply resume where I left off: open the game board (1), select “Resume” (2),
only to find a blank board, none of my answers in sight. So, I close the game
(3), reopen it (4), and select “Resume” again (5). This time, mercifully, the
words have synced. Five clicks to get back to where I already was. I suppose I
should be grateful it didn’t ask me to upgrade my account!
Hiding options as a method of promoting new ones.
I explored this one at length
in my last post, and it still bothers me. Here’s the
pattern: a new release arrives, and somewhere in the shuffle, a button you’ve
clicked a thousand times has quietly moved, or vanished entirely, to make
visual room for something the designers want you to notice. Your muscle memory
is now wrong. You go hunting. You feel, briefly, like a confused newcomer on
your own device. The feature isn’t gone, of course. It’s just been demoted,
tucked behind an extra click or two. Which means, yes, more click bloat,
dressed up as innovation.
I genuinely understand the
pressure to ship new features with most releases. But adding features while
quietly inflating the click count on things people already knew how to do isn’t
progress, it’s a trade-off the user never agreed to. Are the UX designers even
tracking this? Are they measuring click counts against previous versions?
Somewhere along the way, the user got left out of that conversation.
Kernighan’s principle was
elegant precisely because it was measurable. How many keystrokes did this save?
We should be asking the same question about every new release: how many clicks
did this add, let alone save? If the answer is more than zero, someone owes the
user an explanation. Click Bloat is real, and it’s time we started calling it
out by name.
So what can you do about it?
Start by leaving feedback: most
apps have a built-in mechanism for it, usually tucked somewhere in Settings. If
the bloat is coming from your device’s OS, find your way to Apple’s or Google’s
feedback channels. And if the culprit is an Amazon app? Well, good luck. I mean
that sincerely. Navigating their customer feedback labyrinth may itself be the
finest example of Click Bloat you’ll ever encounter.
And then there’s the brave new
world of AI assistants. Try telling ChatGPT that you’d like to pass some
feedback along to the development team. It won’t. Instead, you’ll click the
thumbs down icon (intuitive, right?) and then manually copy and paste the relevant
portions of your conversation into a feedback form. In 2026, that’s how you
reach the people building the future. The irony writes itself.
But try anyway, all of it,
because the only way UX designers hear that this matters is if enough of us say
so, loudly and repeatedly.
[1]The quote is commonly attributed to Bell Labs folklore, possibly
originating with Rob Pike. It echoes Richard Hamming’s earlier remark that “the
purpose of computing is insight, not numbers,” documented in Numerical
Methods for Scientists and Engineers (1962).
