"Designers fundamentally do not understand that software is a tool that people use to get things done. " They understand. Also 'UI design' and 'design' are se

"Designers fundamentally do not understand that software is a tool that people use to get things done. " They understand. Also 'UI design' and 'design' are separate disciplines, often conflated into the same thing. 'UI designers' 100% understand the nature of 'usability' it's the core of their job - they provide for the actual experience that users will encounter, and it's very hard. Having done quite a lot of UI design and software, I think the former might be hard in many cases - there are just so many intangibles, and everything cross-cuts making coherency often difficult, moreover 'there are no perfect answers'. Consider the Google home page, and how many features actually exist in Google search that the vast majority of people are not aware of. The 'google search bar' is the 'most used UI in the world' and my gosh do they have to worry about how to extend that to the range of 'barely literate' people, to regular users, to power-searchers. Consider the other 'most popular UI': Windows. The Windows 10 release was a fiasco, consider that the richest company in the world struggled to map to a new UI paradigm for a variety of reasons. At least with software we tend to derive an objective, and we 'solve the problem'. We can say 'it's done' (to a certain degree) and even test for completeness.