You got downvoted for the snark, but damned if it ain't a reasonable opinion.
If you read the seminal "Design of Everyday Things" by Norman Rockwell you'll come away annoyed at half the physical _doors_ you walk through... here in 2025.
I've been pushing these terms to help us talk about and design better interfaces at work...
Static Interfaces - Your supermarket's pretty much a static interface. The frame of whatever website you're looking at. These are static. They've very powerful and were pretty much all you had before digital interfaces became ubiquitous. There's an initial learning curve where you figure out navigation, and then for the most part it's fairly smooth sailing from there provided the controls are exposed well.
Adaptive Interfaces - These interfaces attempt to "adapt" to your needs. Google is probably one of the most successful adaptive interfaces out there. A query for "Shoes" will show a series of shopping results, while a query for "Chinese food" will show a map of the restaurants nearby. The interface adapts to you.
I call this narrow adaptive because the query triggers how the UI adapts. I think "wide area" adaptive interfaces where the interface attempts to meet your needs before you've had a chance to interact with the static interface around it are tremendously difficult and can't think of examples of them being done well.
Adaptable Interfaces - This last interface bucket includes controls which allow a user to adapt the interface to their own needs. This may include dragging icons into a particular order, pinning certain view styles or filters, or customizing the look or behavior of the applications you're working with.
Finder, the iPhone's basic UI, terminal, basic music catalog management (e.g. iTunes)... these are interfaces which are created once with an initial curve of varying difficulty to learn and then live on for decades without much change.
Conclusion - The best interfaces combine an intuitive static frame, with queried adaptive elements, and adaptable features to efficiently meet the needs of a diverse group of user flows instead of attempting the one size fits all approach (which leaves 2/3rds of people annoyed).
Another category, searchable interfaces, may fit into one of these or may be it’s own separate category. But tools like MacOS Spotlight or the command palette in some editors are very useful for power users. Having every command available through a minimal set of fuzzy keyboard strokes is a significant productivity boost, while also allowing some degree of discoverability.
As an aside, if anyone at Adobe is reading this, this sort of tool would be an excellent addition to Illustrator, Photoshop, etc. InDesign already has something like it, although that implementation leaves a little to be desired.
Or you can focus on a single class and produce the best UI for that class.
Static Interfaces for the common actions that everyone does. Best as basic utilities in the operating system (Notepad, The calculator)
Adaptive Interfaces where you have a few advanced layouts for people that wants a bit more. (Wordpad, Notepad++, Kate,...)
The expert tools (Blender, matlab, Adobe Illustrator,...) You will have a small userbase, but they're often willing to pay for a good tool that will solve their needs.
If you read the seminal "Design of Everyday Things" by Norman Rockwell you'll come away annoyed at half the physical _doors_ you walk through... here in 2025.
I've been pushing these terms to help us talk about and design better interfaces at work...
Static Interfaces - Your supermarket's pretty much a static interface. The frame of whatever website you're looking at. These are static. They've very powerful and were pretty much all you had before digital interfaces became ubiquitous. There's an initial learning curve where you figure out navigation, and then for the most part it's fairly smooth sailing from there provided the controls are exposed well.
Adaptive Interfaces - These interfaces attempt to "adapt" to your needs. Google is probably one of the most successful adaptive interfaces out there. A query for "Shoes" will show a series of shopping results, while a query for "Chinese food" will show a map of the restaurants nearby. The interface adapts to you.
I call this narrow adaptive because the query triggers how the UI adapts. I think "wide area" adaptive interfaces where the interface attempts to meet your needs before you've had a chance to interact with the static interface around it are tremendously difficult and can't think of examples of them being done well.
Adaptable Interfaces - This last interface bucket includes controls which allow a user to adapt the interface to their own needs. This may include dragging icons into a particular order, pinning certain view styles or filters, or customizing the look or behavior of the applications you're working with.
Finder, the iPhone's basic UI, terminal, basic music catalog management (e.g. iTunes)... these are interfaces which are created once with an initial curve of varying difficulty to learn and then live on for decades without much change.
Conclusion - The best interfaces combine an intuitive static frame, with queried adaptive elements, and adaptable features to efficiently meet the needs of a diverse group of user flows instead of attempting the one size fits all approach (which leaves 2/3rds of people annoyed).