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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

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.)
- int_19h 6y ago
  An example of good UI/UX specialists would be the people who designed IBM CUA. Where did they all go?
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.

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.)
int_19h 6y ago
An example of good UI/UX specialists would be the people who designed IBM CUA. Where did they all go?

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.