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I think you're mistaking UX with UI design. UX people tend to advocate for simple, boring stuff because they test. Like you pointed out, UX professionals like

I think you're mistaking UX with UI design. UX people tend to advocate for simple, boring stuff because they test. Like you pointed out, UX professionals like Krug, Nielsen, Norman constantly advocate for boring navigation: "Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know." - Jakob's Law of Internet User Experience However, someone simply designing UI will often suggest new and complicated designs, because they don't test. If they don't test, they are not practicing UX. Even if their job title is UX designer, they are just doing UI design. Disclaimer: Yes I am defending my UX job, which involves testing and face time with users :)

reitanqild 8y ago
Nielsen etc advocate boring, predicrable designs. A number of others seem to have mistaken simple and boring for dumb and useless. What happened to the familiar menu? UX Designers decided it wasn't simple enough and replaced it with hamburger menus and ribbons because "dumb users". I'm not saying you are one of these UX designers, but lets not pretend they aren't there cause they run the shop at most places it seems, including a number of places in FAANG land.
- hopler 8y ago
  Try running Netscape on a 4" screen
  - nitrogen 8y ago
    640x480 is tiny compared to a modern phone...
    - reitanqild 8y ago
      Still, there is a point: even if we could easily see the design elements from Netscape 4 on a modern smartphone they'd be hard to hit consistently. So that is not what I argue above. In my post above I argue against the dumbification of desktop apps and websites. Things that were working until UX designers came up with the idea that people are to dumb.
      - FactolSarin 8y ago
        But people are dumb.
    - myguysi 8y ago
      Nope, an iPhone 8 is 375x667 Edit: for those questioning my reply, I’m talking about the logical resolution (what you actually use for layout) not the physical pixel resolution
      - loeg 8y ago
        How did you come up with that? iphone 8 is 1334x750.
        saagarjha 8y ago
        It looks like the parent commenter is talking in points (iPhone 8 is a 2x Retina Display), while you're speaking about pixels.
        myguysi 8y ago
        Yep!
        loeg 8y ago
        Ok; the classic 640x480 figure is also in pixels, so I'm not sure why the parent commenter would use a different unit to try and draw a comparison.
        Mikhail_Edoshin 8y ago
        There must be a pixel-per-inch ratio in this equation. A 14" monitor running at 640x480 will have around 57 ppi, while iPhone X has like 462 ppi.
        myguysi 8y ago
        We’re taking about rendering UI... If I render a div with width=375px and height=667px it will fill the screen on an iPhone 8 because it renders @2x.
      - gbear605 8y ago
        Not according to Apple. They say it is “1334-by-750-pixel resolution at 326 ppi“[0] https://www.apple.com/iphone-8/specs/ https://www.apple.com/iphone-8/specs/
    - jdietrich 8y ago
      A 14" CRT monitor from The Olden Days has an area of about 523 cm². An iPhone X has a screen area of about 127 cm². A 5.8" screen is tiny, regardless of its resolution. Resolution will only get you so far; people don't have infinitely acute eyesight and infinitely precise dexterity. Most people can't reliably hit a touch target of less than ~10mm in any dimension, which equates to ~180 real pixels on an iPhone X.
      - loeg 8y ago
        > A 14" CRT monitor from The Olden Days has an area of about 523 cm². An iPhone X has a screen area of about 127 cm². A 5.8" screen is tiny, regardless of its resolution. People hold phones much closer than you would sit from an Olden Days CRT, too. It's not just raw area that matters, but something like degrees, as observed by your eye.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    This does not explain why there are still hamburger menus on 20" screens.
sephoric 8y ago
This is precisely what drew me to start making Mac apps 10 years ago. There was a whole philosophy behind Mac OS X's Cocoa framework that contrasted sharply with my experience with all the programs I had been accustomed to using on Windows 95-98-2k-XP. In all those OSes, there was invariably some program I would need to run that had its own custom scroll bars that didn't work like normal, and the body of a scrollable page didn't respond to arrow keys and the scroll wheel, or the buttons had unusual semantics and required pressing them in certain ways. This was the norm for Windows programs. When I came to Mac and everything all worked the same, it was a breath of fresh air. The philosophy behind Apple's Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) at the time was that every app should follow the same basic rules with only slight variations where it made sense. I went full force into learning Cocoa because of this genius idea, but unfortunately now every app is Electron and each has their own UX paradigms that reinvent the wheel all over again. It's frustrating and I hope and plan to make apps that hearken back to the days of predictability, familiarity, and simplicity so people can just use their computers to get a thing done and then get off their computers ASAP, like it's meant to be.
- int_19h 8y ago
  Windows also had the equivalent to HIG, and it was just as rigorous as Apple's in many cases, especially by Vista. Take a look at this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/uxguide/guidelines https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/uxguide/gui... Problem is, it was and is routinely ignored. Anyway, as you say, it's the Electron era now, and it's the same everywhere. We had our golden age of desktop UX, but we couldn't keep it.
- aikinai 8y ago
  Just wanted to say thank you for trying to make native apps with thoughtful UX! I also frequently bemoan how far we've fallen since the golden age of app design and implementation.
rhizome 8y ago
Navigational difficulty increases site stickiness, and I hope nobody is going to try to say sites left that idea behind 10 years ago, because they haven't. I think any UX/UI person opining on this topic, by mere businesswise proximity, is behooved to contribute understanding of BizDev and Marketing's role in all of this.

reitanqild 8y ago

Nielsen etc advocate boring, predicrable designs. A number of others seem to have mistaken simple and boring for dumb and useless. What happened to the familiar menu? UX Designers decided it wasn't simple enough and replaced it with hamburger menus and ribbons because "dumb users". I'm not saying you are one of these UX designers, but lets not pretend they aren't there cause they run the shop at most places it seems, including a number of places in FAANG land.

hopler 8y ago
Try running Netscape on a 4" screen
- nitrogen 8y ago
  640x480 is tiny compared to a modern phone...
  - reitanqild 8y ago
    Still, there is a point: even if we could easily see the design elements from Netscape 4 on a modern smartphone they'd be hard to hit consistently. So that is not what I argue above. In my post above I argue against the dumbification of desktop apps and websites. Things that were working until UX designers came up with the idea that people are to dumb.
    - FactolSarin 8y ago
      But people are dumb.
  - myguysi 8y ago
    Nope, an iPhone 8 is 375x667 Edit: for those questioning my reply, I’m talking about the logical resolution (what you actually use for layout) not the physical pixel resolution
    - loeg 8y ago
      How did you come up with that? iphone 8 is 1334x750.
      - saagarjha 8y ago
        It looks like the parent commenter is talking in points (iPhone 8 is a 2x Retina Display), while you're speaking about pixels.
        myguysi 8y ago
        Yep!
        loeg 8y ago
        Ok; the classic 640x480 figure is also in pixels, so I'm not sure why the parent commenter would use a different unit to try and draw a comparison.
        Mikhail_Edoshin 8y ago
        There must be a pixel-per-inch ratio in this equation. A 14" monitor running at 640x480 will have around 57 ppi, while iPhone X has like 462 ppi.
        myguysi 8y ago
        We’re taking about rendering UI... If I render a div with width=375px and height=667px it will fill the screen on an iPhone 8 because it renders @2x.
    - gbear605 8y ago
      Not according to Apple. They say it is “1334-by-750-pixel resolution at 326 ppi“[0] https://www.apple.com/iphone-8/specs/ https://www.apple.com/iphone-8/specs/
  - jdietrich 8y ago
    A 14" CRT monitor from The Olden Days has an area of about 523 cm². An iPhone X has a screen area of about 127 cm². A 5.8" screen is tiny, regardless of its resolution. Resolution will only get you so far; people don't have infinitely acute eyesight and infinitely precise dexterity. Most people can't reliably hit a touch target of less than ~10mm in any dimension, which equates to ~180 real pixels on an iPhone X.
    - loeg 8y ago
      > A 14" CRT monitor from The Olden Days has an area of about 523 cm². An iPhone X has a screen area of about 127 cm². A 5.8" screen is tiny, regardless of its resolution. People hold phones much closer than you would sit from an Olden Days CRT, too. It's not just raw area that matters, but something like degrees, as observed by your eye.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  This does not explain why there are still hamburger menus on 20" screens.

sephoric 8y ago

This is precisely what drew me to start making Mac apps 10 years ago. There was a whole philosophy behind Mac OS X's Cocoa framework that contrasted sharply with my experience with all the programs I had been accustomed to using on Windows 95-98-2k-XP. In all those OSes, there was invariably some program I would need to run that had its own custom scroll bars that didn't work like normal, and the body of a scrollable page didn't respond to arrow keys and the scroll wheel, or the buttons had unusual semantics and required pressing them in certain ways. This was the norm for Windows programs. When I came to Mac and everything all worked the same, it was a breath of fresh air. The philosophy behind Apple's Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) at the time was that every app should follow the same basic rules with only slight variations where it made sense. I went full force into learning Cocoa because of this genius idea, but unfortunately now every app is Electron and each has their own UX paradigms that reinvent the wheel all over again. It's frustrating and I hope and plan to make apps that hearken back to the days of predictability, familiarity, and simplicity so people can just use their computers to get a thing done and then get off their computers ASAP, like it's meant to be.

int_19h 8y ago
Windows also had the equivalent to HIG, and it was just as rigorous as Apple's in many cases, especially by Vista. Take a look at this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/uxguide/guidelines https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/uxguide/gui... Problem is, it was and is routinely ignored. Anyway, as you say, it's the Electron era now, and it's the same everywhere. We had our golden age of desktop UX, but we couldn't keep it.
aikinai 8y ago
Just wanted to say thank you for trying to make native apps with thoughtful UX! I also frequently bemoan how far we've fallen since the golden age of app design and implementation.

rhizome 8y ago

Navigational difficulty increases site stickiness, and I hope nobody is going to try to say sites left that idea behind 10 years ago, because they haven't. I think any UX/UI person opining on this topic, by mere businesswise proximity, is behooved to contribute understanding of BizDev and Marketing's role in all of this.