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>People aren't idiots. They don't do this work for no reason. Citation absolutely needed. In my experience people are frequently idiots, and work gets done for
by inertiatic 8y ago
>People aren't idiots. They don't do this work for no reason.
Citation absolutely needed. In my experience people are frequently idiots, and work gets done for no reason after someone with authority is convinced that it's a good idea by someone aching to do that sort of work.
If it happens in so many other cases, it does happen in UI/UX as well.
- calinet6 8y agoI'll concede "most people are of average idiocy" and cite core principles of statistics and the meanings of average and most. But yes, you're right, happens all the time. Less so with most of the large scale more popular redesigns people tend to think of when writing articles like this about tools they actually use; the team at Atlassian, for example, is not made of idiots, neither at Slack, Google, Twitter, or other large companies with mostly significant design experience. Smaller operations where we all likely work—yep, hit or miss.
- camhart 8y agoI and almost everyone from my team loathes the new jira released a year+ ago. The menu drives me nuts still and makes no sense. It's my understanding the use of the word "idiot" in this context implies someone who is primarily responsible for a significant amount of rework on anything that bears no real fruit, ui redesigns being one potential example. Pretty sure big companies make those mistakes just as much as small. Though I don't think its fair to call someone an idiot for this reason--I think its very challenging to do well.
- spease 8y agoYeah, I specifically avoid using Atlassian as much as I can because of how tedious it is to wait ~6 seconds for every UI action to complete.
- groestl 8y agoAn idiot, in the original sense of the word, is someone who focuses on themselves, showing no interest in the common cause/politics. It's a bit heavy, but reapplied here it could mean someone who focuses completely on visual quality, while not putting their time into other important aspects of the product (almost all of which are more important that visual quality, at least according to OP).
- atoav 8y agoThis is how I would describe the noun of idiotic design if it existed.
- marcosdumay 8y agoWell, if it didn't exist before, you just created it.
- groestl 8y agoWell, after the Google Cloud Console redesign of the Datastore UI, visual quality is great, but "Open in new Tab" is broken, the result tables abbreviate dates at the Month field, and in entity edits a timestamp can only be given with Minute resolution. So what should I make of that?
- speedplane 8y agoI loved the old app engine console, it was super fast, and dumped tons of the information you needed to analyze. The new one is slower, and has plenty of UI bugs like the one you mentioned (my pet peave is CTRL+click on many links no longer opens a new tab). On the other hand, look at all the stuff they added! There must be 30 dashboards you can jump into, and yet the new UI makes navigating all of them relatively easy. The old one was great for just app engine, but it would never be able to scale to all the services they currently offer. Also, they are relatively responsive to developer demands, at least as far as the dashboard is concerned. Not that long ago, if you wanted to export a few seconds of logs, you had to setup a Cloud SQL sink that could suck in gigabytes of logs. Not too helpful if you want to analyze just a few hundred lines. People complained, and now you can export the current view to excel/csv. They've also speeded up load times significantly (it's still not snappy though).
- ascar 8y agoI have the feeling they force some UI and especially icon redesign with every new Android version. Not because it's necessarily or actually looks better, but just to make it different. It's mildly annoying to me. Especially since some app icons now have ugly white boarders (galaxy s9 with android 8 and even worse in 9/oneui).
- hopler 8y agoThe white borders was a gimmick to support some new transparency feature, but since Android half-does everything, it doesn't quite work. Android's openness saves the day, you can install 3rd party launcher with icon pack plugins
- btschaegg 8y agoI absolutely love your comment on statistics. But on the notion that large companies specifically don't have hit or miss design or redesigns: I'd argue there's more than enough evidence to the contrary. And, personally, I find Atlassian products to be a very good example of that. Note: In this regard, I focus mainly on Don Norman's view on "design", which is largely orthogonal to aesthetics. It's cool for software to look nice. But if it's laid out in a non-intuitive way or doesn't prevent (or even provokes) user errors, it's not good design, period.
- james_s_tayler 8y agoYeah. It's a bit of column A and a bit of column B.
- kd5bjo 8y agoI’ll agree that people never do anything without a reason, with the caveat that “It’s my boss’s pet project and he signs my paycheck” is often a good enough reason to do something.
- speedplane 8y agoIf it's your boss's pet project, then your boss probably has a reason for doing it, even if it isn't a good one.
- birksherty 8y agoThat reason is often promotion and putting things in the resume.
- PedroBatista 8y agoWell, that’s a pretty good reason, for him.
- speedplane 8y ago> In my experience people are frequently idiots, and work gets done for no reason after someone with authority is convinced that it's a good idea by someone aching to do that sort of work. You're contradicting yourself here. If someone with authority is convinced that something is a good idea, then they have a reason for doing it. It might be a misguided reason, but it's not just randomness.
- paulryanrogers 8y agoDistinguishing between badly chosen ideas and randomly chosen ones may be impossible if the authority figure provides no context.
- calinet6 8y agoI think you’ve identified one of the root causes here. :)
- dsego 8y agoJob security, designers can only design, so that's what they do. And if there is nothing new to design, they will keep redesigning. Gotta keep up with the trends.
- pembrook 8y agoCoders can only code, so that's what they do. Even if there's no new features needed or the old software is working fine as is, they will keep refactoring. Gotta keep up with the trends.
- Hendrikto 8y agoThat does actually happen. Just look at the JS ecosystem.
- austincheney 8y agoAs a JavaScript developer I can say that does happen, but its usually due to bad decisions from insecurity coupled with chasing trends rather than any overt act to justify thy existence.
- oftenwrong 8y agoI'd agree. Given the opportunity, programmers will often work without regard to business needs. For example, rewriting an old codebase using their favourite new stack.
- brobdingnagians 8y agoTotally agree, and for managers who have programmers on staff they will keep making up features without thinking about whether it is a good idea. You start getting "features" crammed in because they have to pay the programmers to do _something_.
- calinet6 8y agoThis is such a real thing that happens, yep. It's really hard to get people together to make good software. I think that's something everyone can agree on.
- eswat 8y agoMaybe I’m reading too much into this. But I think you’re conflating your contempt for negative workplace politics and the aftermath of decisions you’ve experienced, with the intentions of these companies that do these redesigns. Some of these redesigns that don’t work out well could have been worked on by brilliant people that were very cautious about what kind of work they take on. But you don’t always hit it out of the park.
- TelmoMenezes 8y ago"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair
- j45 8y agoVery applicable in leadership and management in this time of disruption everywhere.
- sizzle 8y agoAbsolutely, despite the best intentions of UX designers/researchers the PMs/POs (depending on org), directors and above get final say on business/technology/ final (re)design decisions, which is then broken down into the backlog for developers. Proper (re)design initiatives need to born out of the intersection of "viability, (user) desirability, and feasibility." Usability is only scratching the surface of how to quantify the impact of a redesign and the author doesn't acknowledge the convoluted nature of how design decisions actually get made in non design-led tech organizations. The best companies (i.e. FAANG) have data and are measuring the outcomes of design decisions before developers even get assigned the work. From the author's vantage point and how they get assigned work, they are missing the forest for the trees. Thoughts?