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UX clichés
- Yuval_Halevi 7y agoMy favorite “If Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, they would have told him faster horses” Used as a counter-argument to the previous statement, when you start to realize you won’t have time or money to do enough user research.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoDo those people think Ford invented motor vehicles? Before the Ford Motor Company ever existed we had a motion film of a trip to the moon, and they didn't go by horse!
- ComputerGuru 7y agoYes, I imagine no one ever thought to themselves a flying horse was the realistic way of getting to the Moon.
- Jenz 7y agoAhem, actually: in norse mythology there was the flying horse «Sleipnir:» https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleipnir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleipnir While not «realistic,» they did believe it was.
- slim 7y agoin arab mythology, it's the Buraq https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buraq https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buraq
- posterboy 7y agoWho says folks believed myths to be realistic? We are actually talking about knowledge, not believe. There may have been many people for whom between horses and steam engine powered trains there was no certainty nor prospect for motorization, only wet dreams of flying. Interesting fact nontheless, Pegasus comes to mind.
- Jenz 7y agoTrue. I find it hard to relate to. Do priest believe god is real, (if so: also realistic,) or do they just believe in him?
- posterboy 7y agoPriests believe in an interpretation of what they know and they know they believe because they have been indoctrinated to think so. It's very difficult and I don't want to disparage it, not actively right now, but latently--and that's similarly a learned behavior. However, if Goedels symbolic proof of gods existence, which is subject to interpretation of course, holds any water, than there might be an elementary truth, the knowledge that good does exist. Similar to Descartes "I think therefore I am", it might be trivial and discovering it might be part of everyones development. In that sense, priests wouldn't be any different. Ironically, I believe that I know that, the proof at least, subconsciously. I actively believe that. That's not good. lol. What does that have to do with UX cliches? If you'd ask priests whether god is dead, they'd say, "why, horses are good enough"?!
- sizzle 7y agoThanks for putting this into perspective, I'm going to start using this fact to refute this tired, cliche saying. I think there is a particular book that tech company managers read where they are indoctrinated with this Henry Ford saying, anyone know what book it is?
- TeMPOraL 7y agoCome to think of it, if Henry Ford could, he probably would design a faster horse. The idea would have a lot of both business and practical sense - it would be improving a known tool, necessary infrastructure and network of services already existed, zero fire hazard, self-driving of level 4 autonomy out of the box. He (and people before him) designed automobiles, because that was the only way we could get the speed and power people needed in useful form.
- DonHopkins 7y ago>zero fire hazard Didn't a cow start the Great Chicago Fire?
- msla 7y ago> Didn't a cow start the Great Chicago Fire? That's the myth, yes. It might be true, it might not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chicago_Fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chicago_Fire > The fire started at about 9:00 p.m. on October 8, in or around a small barn belonging to the O'Leary family that bordered the alley behind 137 DeKoven Street.^[4] The shed next to the barn was the first building to be consumed by the fire. City officials never determined the exact cause of the blaze,^[5] but the rapid spread of the fire due to a long drought in the prior summer, strong winds from the southwest, and the rapid destruction of the water pumping system explain the extensive damage of the mainly wooden city structures. There has been much speculation over the years on a single start to the fire. The most popular tale blames Mrs. O'Leary's cow, who allegedly knocked over a lantern; others state that a group of men were gambling inside the barn and knocked over a lantern.^[6] Still other speculation suggests that the blaze was related to other fires in the Midwest that day.^[1]
- itronitron 7y ago>> “If Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, they would have told him faster horses” I don't buy that, many people probably would have said that they wanted a horse that doesn't poop
- whoopdedo 7y agoOr eat. Or die of old age. And I was going to say he delivered on that. Except now the horse poops carbon monoxide and eats gasoline instead of oats. But while cars also don't live forever except with great care, they do at least have a longer lifespan than a horse.
- ktpsns 7y ago> [cars] do at least have a longer lifespan than a horse. (1.) "The Antique Automobile Club of America defines an antique car as over 25 years of age" [Source: Wikipedia, Oldtimer] (2.) "The modern domestic horse has a life expectancy of 25 to 30 years" [Source: Wikipedia, Horse] Pretty much any car doesn't reach the age of an oldtimer. It is scrapped long before. We live in a throwaway society which produces tons of waste. Horses are pretty cool.
- whoopdedo 7y agoThe lifetime of carriage horses is much shorter. One source I read says it's less than 11 years.
- macspoofing 7y agoIt's true. Asking users what they want is not that useful. Users don't know what they want and any suggestion they make probably won't scale to others. On the other hand, understanding your users, how they work, what they hate, what their pain points are is incredibly useful.
- AlexTWithBeard 7y agoI'd love to see a similar list for software engineering. - if your code isn't important enough to be tested, it's not important to be written - every function must fit a single screen
- jumperjoey 7y ago'every function must fit a single screen' wow, that's an annoying one
- usea 7y ago- if your code isn't important enough to be tested, it's not important to be written Does this rule cover all code? Do your tests, which are code themselves, not need their own tests? If not, what is special about a test that you know it's correct, when there is no faith in in non-test code? Is it possible to write your program entirely out of the special "test" code, so that it's always correct and doesn't need to be tested?
- Waterluvian 7y agoThis is the danger of dumb rules like this. Nothing's universally true. Part of what an engineer is paid for is knowing what should be tested to what extent.
- AlexTWithBeard 7y agoWell, the cliche apparently tries to cover all the code, which, as you correctly said, is non-practical. The problem is that, like all other cliches, it sounds very convincing and it may take quite some time for the young inexperienced mind to rebuff it.
- mLuby 7y agoMy tests run during tests, so they automatically have 100% test coverage. :D
- plorkyeran 7y agoIt's not all that uncommon to have test code which is never actually run. Usually just because of disabled tests or leftover helper functions that are no longer used, but sometimes due to bugs in the tests themselves. Turning on code coverage tracking for the test code itself can sometimes reveal some interesting things.
- tlarkworthy 7y agoMy favourite business cliche is a diagram with three or four things in a circle. I thought about it so much I know think the circular process is an inevitable consequence of reality. Still, the business ones are usually pretty vacuuous.
- tyingq 7y agoI'm thankful that the words "paradigm" and "synergy" have been mocked enough that business people avoid them now.
- wumms 7y agoNow they are leveraging a lot.
- tyingq 7y agoScaled agile is my current pet peeve. "Value Streams" and "Program Increments" and a "distilled" book that's 500+ pages.
- cardinalfang 7y agoI know those books. I think it means fractional distillation where the volume of content remains the same but is categorized differently.
- blowski 7y agoWell, we do have to leverage our resources to achieve a cadence which can deliver optimised value streams as part of a wider quality program.
- bdcravens 7y agoFortunately we got there with "ninja", and "full stack" seems to be headed in the same direction.
- dylanrw 7y ago““Designers should have a seat at the table” When you are not able to prove your strategic value to the company based on your everyday actions and behaviors, and you have to beg to be invited to important meetings.“ Or it could be that an experienced designer has more to offer than acting as a glorified crayon only putting color where the stakeholders want it.
- tyingq 7y agoIt's a self effacing article from a UX person intended to be funny.
- dylanrw 7y agoYeah, I'll admit I missed that. /facepalm
- Waterluvian 7y agoIt's satire. But it's also speaking to the idea that designers who make meaningful contributions won't need to ask to be at the table.
- Udik 7y agoFrankly, I've been in jobs where I was about the only one who made meaningful contributions, and I still had to beg to have a seat at the table. Which they didn't give me. So I know from experience that making meaningful contributions is not sufficient nor necessary to be involved in the decision process.
- dylanrw 7y agoYeah, I'll admit I missed that. /facepalm
- megaremote 7y agoAnd developers need to be at the seat of the designing table, or you end up with things that are impossible to do.
- fjsolwmv 7y ago> "Users don’t read” > ... > If you made this far to this article, you’re living proof that this statement is untrue. I only saw that because I got bored and scrolled to the bottom to see if there was a punchline.
- justcodebruh 7y agowhile we’re on the topic of UI/UX does HN have any recommendations for primers on the subject?
- darylrowland 7y agoThis is great - UI focussed more than UX, but very useful tips for developers - https://refactoringui.com https://refactoringui.com
- DonHopkins 7y agoHow about this anti-primer: http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm Interface Hall of Shame - QuickTime 4.0 Player - Amid much fanfare, Apple recently released a beta version of the QuickTime 4.0 Player. Intended to showcase the technological improvements of the QuickTime 4.0 multimedia technology, the QuickTime 4.0 Player sports a completely redesigned user interface. The new interface represents an almost violent departure from the long established standards that have been the hallmark of Apple software. Ease of Use has always been paramount to Apple, but after exploring the QuickTime 4.0 Player, the rationale behind Apple's recent "Think Different" advertising campaign is now clear.
- sizzle 7y agoI really enjoy this humorous style of design critique, thanks for sharing!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- qplex 7y agoAhh. I remember being forced to install Quicktime 4.0 because I wanted to watch Star Wars: The Phantom Menace trailer. Another proprietary menace back then was RealMedia and RealPlayer. Some time later the .dll codec blobs for both QuickTime and RealMedia were horribly hacked to run under mplayer (and Linux) by the mplayerhq.hu people. It was pretty cool feat back then.
- iambateman 7y agoFantastic article. My favorite is “users don’t read” being used to create blog articles that are 125 words of nonsense when the topic needs 1500.
- jonahx 7y agoThe quoted aphorisms, in my personal experience, aren't used for the reasons being imputed. It feels like forced satire. For example: > "Content is king" - A pretty strong argument to convince everyone to push the deadline because you haven’t received the content that will go on the page you are designing. I've heard this a lot, but never from a designer trying to push a deadline. It's used to say "stop wasting time dicking around with the design -- the content is what matters" or "it doesn't matter how beautiful it is if no one cares about you're saying."
- dvtrn 7y agoIt feels like forced satire. It could also be good old fashioned regular satire, too...
- mosselman 7y agoCould have been, yet isn’t. The first few were accurate and somewhat funny, but it quickly went downhill. Maybe developers aren’t the audience; we are more factual and concrete whereas designers are usually more driven by emotion. The quotes in the article are not very accurate and seem made up, but the general emotion of “designers be like” is evident. Maybe designers respond to that emotion rather than bother with the accuracy of the anecdotes.
- dvtrn 7y agoyet isn’t. You know better than the person who wrote this list, and directly said it in fact is satirical at the conclusion--or is it just a disagreement of what constitutes satire like a few other posters have expressed? Personally I chuckled and grinned wryly at several moments in the piece, understanding completely where the author was coming from.
- zbentley 7y ago> [developers] are more factual and concrete whereas designers are usually more driven by emotion. I am so tired of this trope. Bad designers are influenced by emotion in unconstructive ways. So are bad engineers. I'm also tired of the "emotion == bad when doing engineering stuff" trope. The ideal for developers or designers (or a whole lot of other fields, probably excluding nuclear-launch executors and munitions testers) isn't some emotionless data/spec-driven automaton: it's a responsible person who operates pragmatically and calculatedly when they have enough information, and whose feelings/emotions are constructive and lead to good outcomes when information is scarce or snap decisions need to be made.
- Zarel 7y agoThese are overall really accurate depictions of what life in UX is like. I do have a comment on this one: > “Users don’t read” > An overly used argument to convince clients and stakeholders to cut copy length in half. If you made this far to this article, you’re living proof that this statement is untrue. The real principle here is that users don't read anything that doesn't look like it will help them do what they're trying to do. In the case of the article: Sure, I read the article, because I wanted to read the article. But notice I didn't read the titlebar, the subtitle, the author, the nav, the footer, the newsletter subscription form... Someone reading copy probably wants to know something about your product. Depending on what they want to know, they might skim around the page looking for the most relevant thing – for instance, looking for a header named "Specs" when trying to find battery life. Making your copy shorter will certainly make that task easier and save their time, and it'll probably make it less likely that they'll decide they didn't want to know things about your product that much.
- kbirkeland 7y agoHonestly I skimmed the first part of the article and then checked the comments. It may be a design cliche, but it may be true. I didn't make it to that part.
- capkutay 7y agoMore importantly...users don't read walls of text. this article was just a concise list of cliches and counters.
- 7y ago
- open-source-ux 7y agoNot a UX cliche as such, but a frequently used phrase: A carefully curated collection of resources Translation: a list of links Even better if you can shoehorn “hand-picked” in there (A hand-picked collection of curated resources to help you learn [technology]) Presumably the hand-picked links are always preferable over the, er, robot-picked ones. I wonder what a real museum curator must make of it all (I presume they don’t really care).
- DonHopkins 7y agoHand crafted artisanal RSS feeds. Each character of text and markup and every URL laboriously typed into Notepad as raw XML, without the use of copy-and-paste. Sorry if it doesn't validate!
- smrtinsert 7y agoThe fold is actually true though
- graphememes 7y agoIt really isn't, and if it is what you're targeting, you're not targeting your customers.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- chiefalchemist 7y agoI'm feeling that cliches is not the right word. To call something cliche generally means it's over-used, tired, boring, etc. But the article itself is not saying that. Perhaps maxims or truths, would be better?
- falcor84 7y agoAll of these are very much overused to the point when people don't really think about then any more, and as the article implies, they are often used to dismiss arguments by referring to some vague wisdom.
- werber 7y agoFor what it's worth, I hear most of those things so often in my job (ui dev who works very closely with uxers) that I'd consider them very specific cliches
- chiefalchemist 7y agoYes, to you they might be cliches. But the way they are presented - to n00bs - the wouldn't really be cliches.
- okcando 7y agoI think they're kinds of platitudes. They offer an answer in unequivocating packaging but if you look at them too closely, you'll probably see that they are vacuous.
- Vinnl 7y agoI like this one: > UX should be a mindset, not a step in the process Mostly because it's not a UX-cliché, but a cliché for everything: security, accessibility, UX, localisation, etc.; advocates want them all to be an essential part of the process, but in practice, nobody manages to do all that.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoIt's also true in so far that for some reason[0], people still think of building software like of an assembly-line process, which is wrong. Programmers are seen as construction workers, which is a wrong analogy; it's probably a cliché at this point to mention that in building analogy, the compiler is the construction workers; programmers are the people drawing up the blueprints. At the blueprint level, you have some level of back&forth between designers, architects, structural engineers, electrical engineers, plumbers, fire safety people, etc. Building software is like that. It's a high-dimensional optimization process in which all those concerns like UX, security, accessibility, etc. are each a dimension, and in which you initially only know the rough shape of the terrain, so you have to walk it to discover its features. Or, to use a different analogy - software isn't like assembling a car toy on a factory line. Building software is like everything that happens in between the CEO saying "we need to build a toy car" and the factory getting the BOM and designs. -- [0] - probably because it simplifies management.
- graphememes 7y agoPeople who say this, say it because they don't want to commit.
- normalhuman 7y agoI am not a designer nor a software engineer, nor a business person. I am just a (heavy) user of all sorts of software for a very long time. I am a competent coder, and I code for research and pleasure. I don't have a dog in this, let's say, professional race. Every time I spot "UX" in relation to something I use, I cringe. Not because I have anything against the idea of design, or good interfaces, or designing good interfaces. That is all great. The problem is that 99% of the time that the term "UX" shows up in connection with something I use, two things are going to happen: 1) I will have to relearn how to do something that I already was used to doing without even thinking; 2) Some feature or option is going to be removed. The human brain is incredibly plastic and adaptable. Unless the interface is truly absurd, most people can get used to it and never give it a second thought again. My number one (by far) request as a user: DON'T FUCKING CHANGE THE INTERFACE Unless there is a very good reason, and I bet there isn't. I bought my first MacBook in 2007. Thankfully, Apple is one of the best behaved companies when it comes to not changing things for the sake of it, and part of the reason why I stick with them. I don't mention this out of some sort of fanboy-ism (I have no loyalty to corporations, I just buy shit I like). I mention it to make a more important point: The UX of 2007 was absolutely fine, and if they would have made zero changes since then I would be perfectly happy. UX for laptops/desktops was solved in the early 2000. Everything else since then is just irrelevant bullshit.
- neiman 7y agoI laughed out loud and rolled on the floor laughing at the same time. :-)
- iheartpotatoes 7y ago>> Looks particularly great if written in Helvetica, printed and framed, and hung by the entrance of truly collaborative office spaces. This is the business model of many successful mall-chain-stores.
- analog31 7y agoHere's one to add: "UX is based on research and science"
- saagarjha 7y ago> “I’m wondering if this breaks accessibility standards” > Used as last resort when you are running out of arguments to convince other designers their design is not working. If you break your {app, website} for millions of people because you want it to look just so and the platform widget just doesn’t fit with your “brand”, I have no sympathy for you.
- krm01 7y agoWhile running a UX/UI design studio for B2B SaaS companies for 10+ years - I’ve seen the UX space evolve into a cult like crowd of designers with too many “gurus” and design research methodologies. Really, all you have to do is 2 things: # talk to your users. # look at your data/analytics It’s really not rocket science. These two metrics will take you minutes to find UX problems and opportunities in your product. Then, try to solve them with the least amount of design possible. Repeat.
- pwthornton 7y agoAh, I think this is a bit simplistic, as it leaves out testing, which is critically important. Too many UX people don't follow or even know what a proper user-centered design process looks like. Talking to users and looking at data is a lot of it. Testing is another critical component. The other big part is to be methodical with how you do ideation, design, and prototyping.
- krm01 7y agoTesting is important, absolutely. But it too can be summarized with exactly those two points. It’s part of the same cycle. The proper way to test anything is to launch it, talk to users.. and look at your data.
- ryanSrich 7y ago“UX” should go away. What everyone calls UX is just proper UI design. Too often the term “UX” is put on this pedestal. It’s thought of as more important or cerebral than visual design. The problem with that thinking is that UX _is_ very obviously visual. Those that try to distance UX and visual UI design often have terrible aesthetic taste and lack any creative skill. Which should give you some indication why the design industry is a shell of its former self. The homogeneous nature of modern web products is concerning, but it makes sense unfortunately.
- radley 7y agoActually, I'm finding that UX design translates to "documented design", i.e. providing proof for every design decision.
- Kiro 7y agoI think UX is like SEO, mostly full of snake oil.
- pembrook 7y agoI used to think both those things as well...until I worked on an actual software product and then on content marketing for said product. It only took a few months to shake my prior delusions of grandeur. Important learning: Even though you experience the world as if you are the center of it, it doesn't mean what you do is super important and everything else is "snake oil."
- jimmychangas 7y ago> UX should be a mindset, not a step in the process Every specialist in every branch of software engineering thinks like that. Designers, architects, testers, compliance people, everyone seems to think the software development process should be framed according to their priorities. Who knows, maybe this is a healthy way to establish a balance of power.
- megaremote 7y agoYes. And what they mean is that the developers who actually build the thing should also think about UX, architecture, testing and compliance. It is all about moving everything on the devs plate.
- DonHopkins 7y agoNever use a tightly spaced san serif font to tell users to "click" or "double click".
- gnud 7y agoIt seems fitting that I had to enable reader mode to be able to read a blog post about UX cliches.
- Theodores 7y agoUX is a by-product of the mess we have made of web development. We made web development so overly complicated that vast teams are needed for the simple task of showing stuff on a page. Part of the holdup has been CSS. To build out a responsive layout used to be phenomenally hard. Tim Berners Lee didn't think layout was needed, originally the web was to just link documents that people would open in other programs, so the complexity would have been in those other programs. Need a spreadsheet? Then you would get the link and open it in your spreadsheet program, not an online Google Docs equivalent with its own special interface. With the difficulty and lack of tools in CSS it meant that web pages had to be hacks. Along the way cruft such as frameworks came along to make it that bit more possible, but imposing more stuff to learn along the way. Therefore it meant that teams had to get ever more specialist, you could not just have 'webmaster' doing it all. Things got increasingly siloed. Then this agile nonsense came along to slice and dice projects. This made frontend dev a painting by numbers exercise with designs handed down from on high. Those designs would be done by a designer who by definition did not know HTML, they would be cribbing from other stuff and not acknowledging their sources, meaning that frontend dev was an exercise in reverse engineering whatever was in the PDFs and imagining the way it was supposed to work. Bringing on a UX person with the bullshit language about personas and other nonsense that went with the job took the dev team even further away from understanding the customer, the task overly specialised. Along the way we moved to meaningless HTML, back to that early web stuff we were supposed to get away from. Instead of FONT tags in the markup we ended up with these silly divs and non-semantic class names on every element put there for layout hacks. The thing is that anyone at the coalface of development is assumed to be useless at design, whereas the kiddo out of art school that can't code is assumed to be a genius at it. If you have done 300 test orders of a checkout then you find the pain points of the process and can fix them (or ignore them). If you just do drawings in Photoshop of how it is supposed to work then you ain't gonna be having these insights. So rather than trust the dev team and let them make decisions the designs are cast in stone and these UX experts (who can't code) call the shots. We have developed these huge bloated teams and denied entry to people who want to code with Notepad and FTP. I don't use Notepad and FTP myself, but I don't think that people starting there need to be excluded from the web which should be for everyone. Luckily a lot has changed. We now know what works with UX, so there is no point in having a UI bod putting the menu in the bottom right because they need to 'design' something. Or changing the search icon to a pair of spectacles because they are an artist. Those things are now standardised, we have got that. Equally devs who deliver the deliverables rather than mockups know these things. Also changed is that browsers are standards compliant. No need to produce static mockups when you can do a mockup in HTML. Also changed is CSS grid. There is now a layout engine in every browser that does all the things the hacks were needed for. This innovation means that layout is no longer a major job and real content without the useless div and class bloat can be directly styled in a quarter of the time it used to take with clumsy frameworks. Another change is accessibility. There are laws coming in to make that a thing. So putting these pieces of the puzzle together I hope there soon comes a time when web dev teams get usurped by much smaller and more nimble teams that don't over-complicate the gig and keep it simple. After all web pages don't need to be that hard.
- ivanhoe 7y agoI find it amusing that his final disclaimer how "This is a satire article" really falls under the "if you have to explain a joke, it’s not that good"...
- megaremote 7y agoDid anyone read this and not think it is satire? I guess it is better to be safe when publishing an article, and I wouldn't describe this article as being an example of UX.
- megaremote 7y agoThis is the font we have to use!
- golergka 7y ago> “When escalators break, they actually become stairs” Properly stopped, but functioning escalators become stairs. Escalators that break can become death traps that will kill you.
- graphememes 7y ago> "You are not your own user." Never say this to someone. First, anyone bringing up feedback is doing it for a reason. Weed out what that reason is. If you say this to someone re-asses your own emotional reason for it. This is a very emotional response. I've seen people voice interface feedback that was dismissed with this exact response, and 12 months later was implemented. We could have saved 12 months, instead, we had to deal with a designer's emotional immaturity.