5 ms·

They’re in good company though. UI/UX in general is going to hell. Not just in $big_corp, but nearly everywhere. I think that’s mainly because we have UI/UX as

by fuzzy2 6y ago

They’re in good company though. UI/UX in general is going to hell. Not just in $big_corp, but nearly everywhere. I think that’s mainly because we have UI/UX as a dedicated function now. It’s a job that seems to attract people that don’t know how software _works_. This results in “uncanny” UX that looks similar enough but just doesn’t work the way it should. Maybe I’m just getting old though!

101008 6y ago
I am interested in your point of view. Care to expand?
- _underfl0w_ 6y ago
  I'm not the parent poster but I see where they're coming from - form used to purely _follow_ function in computer UI/UX (as in most engineering fields) but now it's been delegated to "creatives" who, by virtue of their skill set, put form first. Overall "betterness" is subjective, but speaking as someone who uses a computer as a tool I can honestly say I'd prefer it to function pragmatically than look pretty, if the prettiness requires sacrificing of pragmatism in some way.
  - NoSorryCannot 6y ago
    I'm not sure I see any reason to expect or believe that engineers would make good ui/ux decisions. It's not clear to me that choices that are simple for engineering are necessarily even aligned with ultimately being functional. A good ui/ux specialist will be interested in reducing error rates and improving ease of discovery and use through affordances and good organization of information and actions. Obviously other business interest may conflict with those goals but those same interests are capable of corrupting engineering as well. And I don't think ui/ux work is as recent as this is all making it sound. Perhaps it is more common now even for orgs where their bread and butter isn't software but ultimately making tools useful and safe and accessible predates software entirely.
    - arp242 6y ago
      I think the shift in recent years has been from "UI designers" to "graphic designers". There is a massive difference between the two, but also a lot of conflation. Computer programmers may not be the best UI designers, but graphic designers are even less so, and the "but my art!" graphic designers are the absolute worst.
      - cvuls 6y ago
        a main tenet of graphic design is sacrificing your art for functionality. i'm not sure what designers you've been speaking to, but i doubt they're professionals.
        userbinator 6y ago
        I think the difference is between "professionals" as in "gets paid doing this stuff", and as in "actually knows what they're doing". As evidenced by the discussion here, there seems to be far more of the former than the latter.
        oauea 6y ago
        That is still the wrong way to look at it. Functionality comes first, then you can make that look pretty. There should be no art in your UI.
    - derefr 6y ago
      I think they’re talking about a certain kind of “brutalist UI” that used to exist because it was the only possible UI for very simple systems (e.g. switches to bang bytes into registers to bootstrap a machine; character-oriented VRAM you wrote to directly; two-character Unix commands to save line-printer ink; etc.) and then was carried forward as a sort of tradition by people used to that restrictive minimalism (e.g. modern uses of Forth; C for application programming; shell commands that are non-interactive even when run directly from a PTY; essential config files in arcane formats that aren’t easily machine-generated, under the expectation that people are doing system bring-up by hand, Linux-From-Scratch style; etc.)
    - 6y ago
  - BlahGod420 6y ago
    Given two functionally equivalent pieces of software, customers will choose the prettier of the two. That's all I want to contribute to the conversation.
    - ramoz 6y ago
      Yes, same: If your solution users aren't satisfied, then your solution is naively unpragmatic.
      - BlahGod420 6y ago
        That's a totally meaningless sentence.
- fuzzy2 6y ago
  It's really quite simple. I've been using PCs since Windows 3.1. With "good software", I intuitively know how to use it and how it will behave. Of course, new concepts arrive every now and then, like ribbons or the hamburger menu or whatever. However, what's behind them is in the end still the same. When I am faced with the challenge of designing an interaction in software, I always try to make it fit established patterns. Now I'm working with a UX expert. The interaction designs I receive are just not right. They are not intuitive. I am rather disappointed. My impression is that this expert is simply not an expert PC user. Of course, that's N=1 as far as my professional work is concerned. Furthermore, in the last… 12-15 years, more and more software seems to change just for the sake of change. My personal opinion is that this is because of designers trying to justify their existence.
  - CamperBob2 6y ago
    It comes down to a simple, enduring principle: people who don't use something shouldn't have sole authority over its design. So many of the complaints about the dominance of seemingly-incompetent UX professionals really boil down to failure to consume one's own dog food. The UX pros are not incompetent at UX design, but they are unfamiliar with the tasks that the program will ultimately be used for, and that's even worse. This phenomenon is more widespread than most people realize, even here. If you buy a new Porsche 911 today, you'll find that the garage-door opener button has been moved to a touchscreen menu. People who take a bus to work are now designing Porsches, in other words. It's only going to get worse from here.
    - RobertKerans 6y ago
      Corollary is that many engineers are unfamiliar with the tasks that end users are actually going to use the software for. This phenomenon is definitely more widespread that people in this thread seem to realise, afaics because many are power users used to power interfaces. Power interfaces are generally not enormously useful for the majority of users (preemptive /s: yes, please tell me anecdotes about how pet power interface is superior). Yes, there is flawed design: that covers most design, in the same way there is flawed programming, which covers most programming, and flawed approaches to business which covers most business, and so on. [edit] the feeling I get from the threads here is that many commenters don't get that most design involves huge tradeoffs, same as programming. Design training is not "make a pretty thing" (which is what many commenters seem to be dismissively suggesting, which is actively offensive), Dribbble is really not reflective of actual design, and much of what you see is surface driven by designers having to find tradeoffs to deal with management edicts/commercial goals/technical limitations that may conflict with otherwise good design
- benibela 6y ago
  My pet peeve is the new file handling The programs used to ask for a file name before saving it somewhere. Programs with modern UI/UX just save the file to a random place and then you have to search it. The browser saves it to Downloads, or to the Desktop, or perhaps to the home folder. The GNOME screenshot tool saves it to the home folder The GNOME audiorecorder saves it to somewhere else
- dzhiurgis 6y ago
  iOS homescreen management is one example. Three confirmations to delete app. Can’t delete app from search. Editing stacks is miserable. The the control center... changing audio source - fine motor skills required if you ever find how. Long pressing things means its faster to do things from settigns. My pet peeve is macos Photos. Forget ever watching your videos for which storage you pay. It just won’t play until you click edit which is gonna just crash app about 10% of time. If it doesn’t it takes 5 minutes to download at like 10mbps.
  - chii 6y ago
    > Three confirmations to delete app. Can’t delete app from search. Editing stacks is miserable. I would even consider it by design - management doesn't want apps to be deleted so easily. It's a subtle nudge for a user to accumulate apps, which slowly increase and eat up disk space. The justification is that if no one deletes apps often, the button to do so should be hidden away, so users don't "accidentally" delete an app. And the designers are just a cog in the wheel - they listen to the objective given to them by management and do exactly that. This is why you see great designs from apps that are written/made by a single person, or from a small team that cares. One such example is IDEs like Intellij - the UI/UX design is very much geared towards developers (by developers).
    - Griffinsauce 6y ago
      This is it. I'm shocked by the amount of blame designers are getting here while they have a job that gets the most unskilled criticism and feedback (as displayed in many comments here). Everyone has an opinion on design, including stakeholders and management who their jobs depend on. I think all the engineers here don't realise the privilege of having their own impenetrable domain.
  - TheAceOfHearts 6y ago
    Add or Remove Programs on Windows often requires more than 3 clicks to uninstall an application as well, so I'd argue that specific complaint isn't new. On macOS you can usually just drag the .app file to the Trash.
- oauea 6y ago
  Lots of people studying UX design but not actually using a lot of computer programs.
Griffinsauce 6y ago
I disagree. UI/UX designers often make utopic designs that would work great for the user, the engineers don't have the resources (time) or the will to execute it well and halfway through execution of the already dressed down version management pivots the team to their latest whim or fucks it up by adding a bunch of badly designed requirements meant to hack metrics. We live in a world of Frankenstein UIs and it's not the designer's fault what ends up on your screen. If you want to make a historical comparison, I'd argue that it's more likely to be in the way of working of today vs back then when UI design would get locked in much more _or_ get truly designed along the way with the product needs.
- fuzzy2 6y ago
  But software rarely exists in a (design) vacuum. It runs on Windows, it runs in a browser, on an iPhone… or maybe the software already exists and it's just a new feature. That's why "we live in a world of Frankenstein UIs". We don't need "utopic designs" but rather consistency. Both in visual language and interaction design. There are a few notable exceptions like HMIs on industrial machines or a car's entertainment system. Of course, incorrectly implemented design exists, too. No doubt about that.

by fuzzy2 6y ago

101008 6y ago

I am interested in your point of view. Care to expand?

_underfl0w_ 6y ago
I'm not the parent poster but I see where they're coming from - form used to purely _follow_ function in computer UI/UX (as in most engineering fields) but now it's been delegated to "creatives" who, by virtue of their skill set, put form first. Overall "betterness" is subjective, but speaking as someone who uses a computer as a tool I can honestly say I'd prefer it to function pragmatically than look pretty, if the prettiness requires sacrificing of pragmatism in some way.
- NoSorryCannot 6y ago
  I'm not sure I see any reason to expect or believe that engineers would make good ui/ux decisions. It's not clear to me that choices that are simple for engineering are necessarily even aligned with ultimately being functional. A good ui/ux specialist will be interested in reducing error rates and improving ease of discovery and use through affordances and good organization of information and actions. Obviously other business interest may conflict with those goals but those same interests are capable of corrupting engineering as well. And I don't think ui/ux work is as recent as this is all making it sound. Perhaps it is more common now even for orgs where their bread and butter isn't software but ultimately making tools useful and safe and accessible predates software entirely.
  - arp242 6y ago
    I think the shift in recent years has been from "UI designers" to "graphic designers". There is a massive difference between the two, but also a lot of conflation. Computer programmers may not be the best UI designers, but graphic designers are even less so, and the "but my art!" graphic designers are the absolute worst.
    - cvuls 6y ago
      a main tenet of graphic design is sacrificing your art for functionality. i'm not sure what designers you've been speaking to, but i doubt they're professionals.
      - userbinator 6y ago
        I think the difference is between "professionals" as in "gets paid doing this stuff", and as in "actually knows what they're doing". As evidenced by the discussion here, there seems to be far more of the former than the latter.
      - oauea 6y ago
        That is still the wrong way to look at it. Functionality comes first, then you can make that look pretty. There should be no art in your UI.
  - derefr 6y ago
    I think they’re talking about a certain kind of “brutalist UI” that used to exist because it was the only possible UI for very simple systems (e.g. switches to bang bytes into registers to bootstrap a machine; character-oriented VRAM you wrote to directly; two-character Unix commands to save line-printer ink; etc.) and then was carried forward as a sort of tradition by people used to that restrictive minimalism (e.g. modern uses of Forth; C for application programming; shell commands that are non-interactive even when run directly from a PTY; essential config files in arcane formats that aren’t easily machine-generated, under the expectation that people are doing system bring-up by hand, Linux-From-Scratch style; etc.)
  - 6y ago
- BlahGod420 6y ago
  Given two functionally equivalent pieces of software, customers will choose the prettier of the two. That's all I want to contribute to the conversation.
  - ramoz 6y ago
    Yes, same: If your solution users aren't satisfied, then your solution is naively unpragmatic.
    - BlahGod420 6y ago
      That's a totally meaningless sentence.
fuzzy2 6y ago
It's really quite simple. I've been using PCs since Windows 3.1. With "good software", I intuitively know how to use it and how it will behave. Of course, new concepts arrive every now and then, like ribbons or the hamburger menu or whatever. However, what's behind them is in the end still the same. When I am faced with the challenge of designing an interaction in software, I always try to make it fit established patterns. Now I'm working with a UX expert. The interaction designs I receive are just not right. They are not intuitive. I am rather disappointed. My impression is that this expert is simply not an expert PC user. Of course, that's N=1 as far as my professional work is concerned. Furthermore, in the last… 12-15 years, more and more software seems to change just for the sake of change. My personal opinion is that this is because of designers trying to justify their existence.
- CamperBob2 6y ago
  It comes down to a simple, enduring principle: people who don't use something shouldn't have sole authority over its design. So many of the complaints about the dominance of seemingly-incompetent UX professionals really boil down to failure to consume one's own dog food. The UX pros are not incompetent at UX design, but they are unfamiliar with the tasks that the program will ultimately be used for, and that's even worse. This phenomenon is more widespread than most people realize, even here. If you buy a new Porsche 911 today, you'll find that the garage-door opener button has been moved to a touchscreen menu. People who take a bus to work are now designing Porsches, in other words. It's only going to get worse from here.
  - RobertKerans 6y ago
    Corollary is that many engineers are unfamiliar with the tasks that end users are actually going to use the software for. This phenomenon is definitely more widespread that people in this thread seem to realise, afaics because many are power users used to power interfaces. Power interfaces are generally not enormously useful for the majority of users (preemptive /s: yes, please tell me anecdotes about how pet power interface is superior). Yes, there is flawed design: that covers most design, in the same way there is flawed programming, which covers most programming, and flawed approaches to business which covers most business, and so on. [edit] the feeling I get from the threads here is that many commenters don't get that most design involves huge tradeoffs, same as programming. Design training is not "make a pretty thing" (which is what many commenters seem to be dismissively suggesting, which is actively offensive), Dribbble is really not reflective of actual design, and much of what you see is surface driven by designers having to find tradeoffs to deal with management edicts/commercial goals/technical limitations that may conflict with otherwise good design
benibela 6y ago
My pet peeve is the new file handling The programs used to ask for a file name before saving it somewhere. Programs with modern UI/UX just save the file to a random place and then you have to search it. The browser saves it to Downloads, or to the Desktop, or perhaps to the home folder. The GNOME screenshot tool saves it to the home folder The GNOME audiorecorder saves it to somewhere else
dzhiurgis 6y ago
iOS homescreen management is one example. Three confirmations to delete app. Can’t delete app from search. Editing stacks is miserable. The the control center... changing audio source - fine motor skills required if you ever find how. Long pressing things means its faster to do things from settigns. My pet peeve is macos Photos. Forget ever watching your videos for which storage you pay. It just won’t play until you click edit which is gonna just crash app about 10% of time. If it doesn’t it takes 5 minutes to download at like 10mbps.
- chii 6y ago
  > Three confirmations to delete app. Can’t delete app from search. Editing stacks is miserable. I would even consider it by design - management doesn't want apps to be deleted so easily. It's a subtle nudge for a user to accumulate apps, which slowly increase and eat up disk space. The justification is that if no one deletes apps often, the button to do so should be hidden away, so users don't "accidentally" delete an app. And the designers are just a cog in the wheel - they listen to the objective given to them by management and do exactly that. This is why you see great designs from apps that are written/made by a single person, or from a small team that cares. One such example is IDEs like Intellij - the UI/UX design is very much geared towards developers (by developers).
  - Griffinsauce 6y ago
    This is it. I'm shocked by the amount of blame designers are getting here while they have a job that gets the most unskilled criticism and feedback (as displayed in many comments here). Everyone has an opinion on design, including stakeholders and management who their jobs depend on. I think all the engineers here don't realise the privilege of having their own impenetrable domain.
- TheAceOfHearts 6y ago
  Add or Remove Programs on Windows often requires more than 3 clicks to uninstall an application as well, so I'd argue that specific complaint isn't new. On macOS you can usually just drag the .app file to the Trash.
oauea 6y ago
Lots of people studying UX design but not actually using a lot of computer programs.

Griffinsauce 6y ago

I disagree. UI/UX designers often make utopic designs that would work great for the user, the engineers don't have the resources (time) or the will to execute it well and halfway through execution of the already dressed down version management pivots the team to their latest whim or fucks it up by adding a bunch of badly designed requirements meant to hack metrics. We live in a world of Frankenstein UIs and it's not the designer's fault what ends up on your screen. If you want to make a historical comparison, I'd argue that it's more likely to be in the way of working of today vs back then when UI design would get locked in much more _or_ get truly designed along the way with the product needs.

fuzzy2 6y ago
But software rarely exists in a (design) vacuum. It runs on Windows, it runs in a browser, on an iPhone… or maybe the software already exists and it's just a new feature. That's why "we live in a world of Frankenstein UIs". We don't need "utopic designs" but rather consistency. Both in visual language and interaction design. There are a few notable exceptions like HMIs on industrial machines or a car's entertainment system. Of course, incorrectly implemented design exists, too. No doubt about that.