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I'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 al

I'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 ago
I 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 ago
  Yeah, 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 ago
  An 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 ago
    This is how I would describe the noun of idiotic design if it existed.
    - marcosdumay 8y ago
      Well, if it didn't exist before, you just created it.
groestl 8y ago
Well, 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 ago
  I 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 ago
I 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 ago
  The 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 ago
I 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.

camhart 8y ago

I 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 ago
Yeah, 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 ago
An 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 ago
  This is how I would describe the noun of idiotic design if it existed.
  - marcosdumay 8y ago
    Well, if it didn't exist before, you just created it.

groestl 8y ago

Well, 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 ago
I 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 ago

I 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 ago
The 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 ago

I 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.