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It's also worth mentioning that the misconception of thinking UX as being solely related to aesthetics is getting dangerously more and more common, even among p

by myth2018 6y ago

It's also worth mentioning that the misconception of thinking UX as being solely related to aesthetics is getting dangerously more and more common, even among professionals referring to themselves as UX designers. Aesthetics is important, but, in some sorts of systems, it has much lower priority than other non-functional requirements, like overall speed, maintainability, testability and so on. I don't know if my experience is the same of most of you, but I've seen more and more systems getting aesthetic pleasant but painfully slow and/or buggy these days. It's easy when you can simply quit using the software, but when your bank, your broker, your airline, your accountant, the company that operates the subway ticket machines, when those sorts of businesses start to embrace such vision, things start to get complicated. And, unfortunately, all those examples I mention here are real and this is not an exhaustive list. Besides, I'm not sure those companies (at least the ones in my examples) do that as an attempt to exploit users. I believe they do that due to plain lack of competence.

loceng 6y ago
The biggest issue to me is the dumbing down of an experience and design, treating your users as incompetent vs. treating them as intelligent and being able to figure out things; there's still bad design that can occur when complex, but good UX of presenting information appropriately and contextually can create a rich but easy, intuitive flow. The slowness of certain platforms is also an equally big issue, Reddit for example who seems to purposefully ignore and allow their website via browser experience to suffer - in an attempt to drive people to their app for ad tracking purposes - which I think is shooting themselves in the foot with the trend towards eliminating shallow-manipulative advertising from existence.
- myth2018 6y ago
  Indeed. I'd also mention a small experiment I often do. If you have the opportunity of visiting a company still using COBOL, Clipper or some other text mode software, ask their users for an opinion on those old systems compared to the current ones. Most of them prefer the acient ones. When asked why, they simply say "I don't know. It works, it feels right". Even the younger users (who already had experience with web applications, big tech's stuff etc when they joined the company) prefer the text based ones. I'm not at all implying that every software should be text based. But I think there are some very important lessons to be learned here. Things we developers used to know, intuitively. I think UX designers should listen more to those users and less to theories and to Google and its MDC trying to make the internet look like their own products
  - loceng 6y ago
    For a network of sites I am developing I am planning a command prompt where users can type /command for basically every function: /msg username, /logout, /search phrase, etc.
    - ehnto 6y ago
      Interesting! I had a similar idea but as a library to drop into existing sites, perhaps even be a browser extension. Vimium does a great job of enabling keyboard control over a website but I think a generic web CLI could take the experience even further.
    - jimktrains2 6y ago
      I did something similar for a web app at work and the people on the floor really liked it. It was mich faster than trying to mouse to things, especially when half of their task is scanning barcodes anyway.
  - alpaca128 6y ago
    Can confirm. Started out writing code in IDEs, now I'm using Vim and CLI utilities. It's a polished, stable ecosystem that doesn't hide anything from the user and isn't incentivised to do anything other than its purpose, and that becomes very noticeable once you're familiar with it. It doesn't come with file sync, plugin management or flashy animations. But I also don't get loading screens, don't need to look at SaaS pricing tiers and don't get overwhelmed by UI dark patterns. That's a trade-off I'll take any day.
    - ryandrake 6y ago
      One of the great things about command-line interfaces of old are that you could often enter your keyboard input faster than the system could respond to it, and it was OK because the system buffered them up for you and executed them as it caught up. So if you know on this screen you need to hit F1, and that on the next screen you will have to hit X, then on the following screen, you need to type in the SKU number, you could simply issue as fast as you wanted: F1-X-4112295[ENTER], and take your mind off it while the system would just go through the whole experience successfully at its own pace. With "better" GUI/mouse based systems, you have to click here, wait... wait... wait..., now click there, wait... wait... wait..., then click there and type in your SKU. Your attention needs to be on the screen at all times in order to wait for the UI and aim the mouse. Next time you go to your bank web site to pay a bill, think to yourself: Wouldn't it be nice if, rather than navigating their cumbersome UX, you could just hit a known string of keystrokes that you memorized, hit enter, then walk away to get coffee while all the Javascript and page reloading chugged along and paid your bill?
- alpaca128 6y ago
  Some of the worst offenders in this area were the preinstalled apps on Windows 8. Their official OneDrive app had I think 1-2 options to toggle and didn't even show how much of the cloud storage was used/free. It was basically a picture viewer but without properly working right click. And in terms of performance I fear slow, ad-filled websites slowly trained users to accept bad performance in applications outside the browser as well. At least I don't know how to otherwise explain the widespread indifference toward those things, often even among developers.
  - loceng 6y ago
    Makes me think of a system/application getting attention, reach, that it doesn't deserve - hasn't earned - a negative of the advertising industry as well, one reason I love Tesla is that they don't advertise, any attention they get has been earned.
  - myth2018 6y ago
    > And in terms of performance I fear slow, ad-filled websites slowly trained users to accept bad performance in applications outside the browser as well. At least I don't know how to otherwise explain the widespread indifference toward those things, often even among developers. Yeah, I don't know either, and I think yours is a very good hypothesis. I'm currently working on a windows project after spending four years exclusively on Linux, using mostly vim and Eclipse. Visual Studio feels now way worse than it used to. You get more conscious about the time you're wasting. And, most interestingly, the same happens to users. It's not a matter of being text based, it's a matter of getting useful stuff done, and fast. Users can and actually enjoy using the keyboard. Users don't want to be delighted with our stuff (speaking of the enterprise here), they just want a system that helps them to get their job done and, after that, get out of their way. Designers and more and more developers seem to forget that animations, complex colorful screens, all this stuff has to be built, tested, processed by user's hardware which is already having a bad time supporting windows. So, instead of shipping something fast, something we are able to build and fix and test quickly, we deliver something detrimental, in many ways, to user experience.
    - 6y ago
- teraku 6y ago
  In order to get my reddit addiction in check I uninstalled the app and started using it in the browser. After 1 week I quit reddit forever. Never looking back.
  - laurent92 6y ago
    Reddit is an example of a good dark pattern for me: The popup reminds me that I need to leave the side. Unfortunately, like the Nigerian Prince Paradox, an upfront obnoxiousness is often designed to filter people out early, if they risk not being gullible enough during the rest of the path.
- jariel 6y ago
  "treating your users as incompetent" Actually, this is good practice. We are all busy and distracted. Dumbing down an experience to it's essential aspects is a great way to make something easier to use. If a 'fool could use it while trying to juggle' then that's good. Making it dumb means speaking to intuition, not thought. I should add, there are some good comments here about 'command line' etc. - I suggest that that makes sense but in an entirely different realm of usability. Designing for something that's going to be used by competent people all day for their jobs, is different than designing for the proles standing in line at the bank, looking for 3 minutes of respite from whatever, or even trying to squeeze in that little update.
  - majewsky 6y ago
    I somewhat agree. A UI that works well for inexperienced users is better than one that isn't. But the real measure of a good UI is if it works well for inexperienced users and actively allows for them to gain experience while using the software. A good example is how, in classic application menus, each entry would have its keyboard shortcut printed next to it. A fresh user can navigate the menu to find an action, and the same option is open to anyone how forgot about how to invoke the action, but whenever they land on the action, they can see the keyboard shortcut and eventually they'll remember it and learn to invoke the action faster without having to make an active effort. This is good UX. Then designers or product owners or someone decided that the shortcuts made their menus look cluttered (or maybe they really took that "treating your users as incompetent" mantra to heart and thought the shortcuts looked too technical or intimidating), thus condeming inexperienced users to stay inexperienced forever. This is bad UX.
    - jariel 6y ago
      Those are good points - often we're in different headspaces as well on the matter. Physical product design, mobile app, command line, common entry (like the software the waiter uses), pro software (i.e. Photoshop) are all very different aspects of usability representing colliding viewpoints.
- kitsune_ 6y ago
  This offers an interesting tangent to me: is the dumbing down of the user experience what ultimately opens the door for dark patterns?
- jonathanstrange 6y ago
  May I ask what you think is wrong with Reddit's UI? In my opinion, it's one of the best out there and I've never had problems with it. HN is better, but mainly because it offers far less functionality. Facebook is for me the prototypical example of a bad UI with lots of dark patterns, confusing navigation, different settings scattered all over the place, and frequent technical glitches.
  - retox 6y ago
    Here are my annoyances as someone without an account that dips in from time to time via links or news stories. The large "this experience is better in the app" on mobile visits Only having one or two levels of responses visible without completely reloading the page, seemingly all the way down the reply chain Sides of the page taking you back to the index on clicking (why?) Having to expand a discussion thread that you clicked into (just to tell me how many replies there are, why?) Not scrolling correctly when clicking threads, meaning I end up somewhere in the infinite 'other threads' list at the bottom of the page The updating and flashing number of upvotes constantly drawing my attention while trying to read As an outsider reddit is a disgusting mess, and every minute I spend reading it is mental harassment.
  - ryanbrunner 6y ago
    Have you used Reddit on a phone without using the app? It constantly berates you to use the app, even when you've clearly stated your preference for using the site before. There's also the problem that the new UI is clearly more buggy than the old one, and requires manually refreshing to fix glitches far too often, but that's more of a technical problem and not a UX issue.
  - Thorrez 6y ago
    When I click on a post it only shows 4 comments by default, and I have to click again to see more. To be honest, they actually seem to have improved new reddit a lot since I last looked (a few months ago). Now once you do that second click it shows a decent number of comments, whereas previously even then it would still not show many.
  - handoflixue 6y ago
- afarrell 6y ago
  Part of the issue is inter-team communication and part of the problem comes from that very phrase "dumbing down". I often hear people argue for "dumbing things down" when there is an overwhelming amount of information, but that phrase: 1. Treats people's intelligence as 1-dimensional, which it is not. 2. Gives no clear direction to an engineer who is passionate about UX, recognises that humans are multidimensional, and is trying to ask about what their users really need. You might say I'm arguing semantics, but communication matters! Without it, you can write code at high speed, but you won't learn what direction to go in order to present information appropriately and contextually to create a rich but easy, intuitive flow.
benrbray 6y ago
For me, the most frustrating example of this is the control panel on Windows. The new mobile-friendly menus exclude many important "advanced" (emphasis on the quotes) settings, especially related to audio and networking. The old menu is still available, but over the years they've made it progressively harder to find. But when apps get confused about my bluetooth headset the only way to fix it is to pull up the old menu.
- hansvm 6y ago
  Off-topic, one of the things that surprised me the most when I finally made the jump to Linux (I don't remember anymore which dark pattern finally turned me off of Windows, but it was one too goddamned many) -- the bluetooth support was light-years ahead of anything I'd previously encountered. I was expecting hardware incompatibilities to be way more problematic than they actually were.
  - benrbray 6y ago
    It infuriates me to no end that bluetooth headsets have two modes -- one for listening only, and one for listening+voice, where the latter has absurdly low audio quality. This has been a major source of problems for me, especially on Windows, where I often have to manually switch between the two. I have two Linux laptops. On one, Bluetooth devices endlessly disconnect/reconnect and I gave up entirely. On the other, Bluetooth works flawlessly, better than Windows! So it's really hit and miss in my experience.
- laurent92 6y ago
  Don’t you remember in Windows XP how you had to click on 6 « advanced » dialogs to set the machine IP? And DHCP wasn’t the default on many, many routers at the time. Windows has always been bad at UX, probably because each dialog was the job of a different team.
- astura 6y ago
  I actually like it better because I just type whatever I'm looking for in the search bar and it brings up the appropriate item, I don't have to go searching. In fact, for something like bluetooth settings I wouldn't even pull up the control panel, just click start and type "bluetooth" then enter (when you see it's brought up the correct item). I remember in the old versions of windows changing environment variables was something that was a bit of a pain paint because it was hidden behind multiple "advanced" dialogs. Now it's real easy, click start type "envi" and hit enter. That actually brings up "System properties" advanced tab and you have to click "environment variables."
chromanoid 6y ago
I totally agree. It begins with using monochrome icons and ends with something that is pleasant to look at but where nothing that is useful is standing out. As if they try to make screenshots to look good to hang them on their walls. Form over function....
montagg 6y ago
I've run into this while interviewing people for UX positions. They'll walk me through a portfolio and point out a lot of the aesthetics, whereas I'm asking about their decision-making process: how did you identify the problem? What other solutions did you consider and why didn't you go with them? How did you determine the organization of X? Why did you choose this flow? Why are you framing the task this way? Why did you make this more important than that? Why are you grouping this and that together? Why not these other things? Why expose this information at a glance and hide that information behind an interaction? etc.
medium_burrito 6y ago
At a social networking company once I brought up the fact that the post message to feed workflow required 3x more steps than any of our competitors, and that perhaps we should focus on making it easy to post. Design of course ignored it, as they wanted something "measureable" to iterate on.
- chromanoid 6y ago
  Wouldn't be new posts per day a good measure in this case?
  - medium_burrito 6y ago
    One would think so, but apparently no.
dccoolgai 6y ago
Came here to say that. UX should, by and large, be staffed with deep experience in User Psychology, with some tech and design experience to know how to apply that knowledge. Instead it's mostly discount designers who occasionally conduct a user interview.
- myth2018 6y ago
  My stock broker have recently redesigned their systems to provide us "an improved experience". Except that, besides removing some functionality existent in the previous platform, the new one doesn't allow you any longer to lay out your tools the way you think it's more convenient. They asked for a feedback and I said it feels like the artist conceptual design has priority over the damn user needs. It's evident that the people involved on that project have never performed something beyond trivial operations at the stock market. Financial industry usually values stability and it's a bit disconcerting to see a stock broker embarking on such trend now.
  - fakedang 6y ago
    >Financial industry usually values stability and it's a bit disconcerting to see a stock broker embarking on such trend now. It's because of Robinhood. Mobile friendly (Material?) UX is very "welcoming" to users, compared to the multitudes of tables and charts that are typically part of a trading platform. Since RH was able to onboard a lot of users, especially amateurs, the others have been paying attention and doing every thing to become similar to RH, to capture that huge amateur market.
    - myth2018 6y ago
      I know, but here I'm talking about a decades-old broker which targeted intermediate and professional investors since forever. Besides, nothing prevented them from offering an alternate, more amateur-friendly platform, without turning the traditional one off
      - fakedang 6y ago
valand 6y ago
Disconnect between UX department and engineering department can cause this too. Business object can grow out of nothing. UX designers might feel creative and introduce some unintended features, dynamic colors, even complex structure data. If the design is not validated regularly, these non essential items get worked on by the engineers not knowing that these are not in anybody's interest other than the UX designer. This is not solely UX designer's fault. This is also the team workflow's fault to not accommodate time for validating design. At the other spectrum, from engineering side it can be from the underlying mechanism, such as request of huge data should be made stateful because one http call can't handle it, multiple points of hardware failures in a seemingly single operation, etc. These can sometimes change the game and UX design need to be changed so that user information. If these are not well communicated, the initial UX design may not suffice to honestly picture the actual underlying process of the product, causing the users to miss one or two options they should have, e.g. missing retry button where user is supposed to be able to retry an action. Again there should be a period where UX design is validated again and again in the middle of development. A department or a role in the development team that takes care of the big picture of UX design (information architect and interaction design), the big picture of system architecture, and the big picture of project management (to determine which developer works when) might be ideal for it.
- myth2018 6y ago
  Those are good points. And that's why I'm such a big fan of simple, as-much-text-based-as-possible interfaces. By self-imposing a decrease in her degrees of freedom, one gets fewer things compounding the probably already high project burdens.
  - valand 6y ago
    Yeah, and the so-called abstraction, either in the UX world or engineering world, should be a mere default of how the underlying mechanism works, but everybody should still have access to the nitty gritty details.
- emilsedgh 6y ago
  > This is not solely UX designer's fault. This is also the team workflow's fault to not accommodate time for validating design. We suffer from this greatly. Our app is complicated by nature. The designs that come from our product team turn a blind eye on the complexity and try to "make it simple". As a result, the product doesn't really work (in some aspects). Every time we try to "validate" those designs, we're shut down "because simplicity". Honestly I think product designers should go through a database course or something to understand that if there's a one-to-many relationship between to entities in real life, you cannot force it into a one-to-one relationship and ignore all potential corner cases. Suddenly 40% of cases are "corner cases" and the app doesn't work.
reader_x 6y ago
I agree with your conclusion that it’s more likely lack of competence. I appreciate the article ending with the impossible NY website for COVID-19 vaccine registration. The situation is the same in Maryland, except that one must register for three so as to be on a waiting list with the county health department and the private pharmacy and the local hospital (as there is no telling which might get supply first). Not to mention the larger problem: the target group is people age 75 and up! No one seems to have thought that maybe an optional system of registration by phone, or through a call center representative authorized by the caller to register them on their behalf, is plausible. Somehow, three bad websites is considered fine. And one can’t blame this on ‘government’- the private pharmacies are as bad. So is it incompetence, laziness, or sheer lack of concern whether the most vulnerable elderly get vaccinated? Incompetence might be the most comforting interpretation.
- mns 6y ago
  This is happening everywhere. It took me around 2 hours to sign up my parents for the vaccine (in an EU country) on a website that was impossible to figure out. Add details here, then you have a list of details, but those are not the actual people that you can sign up, then you need to go somewhere else to actually be able to schedule someone. It's as if they made the scheduling website so complicated that only the people that really want the vaccine will spend 1+ hour to try and register. For a 65+ person, it is almost impossible to navigate through that. And for the icing on the cake, it's all a react SPA that they build in a hurry, probably, that when you got a server error back for one of the requests, the whole multi-step process crashed and you had to start over. After all the frustration I ended up completing the process with Postman.
throwaway5752 6y ago
At what point is UX meaningless or indistinguishable from "best practices" though? I agree it's a shame it's conflated with cosmetic/UI work.
asoneth 6y ago
I think it can be a challenge on both the supply and demand sides. On the supply side the profession has ballooned and subjectively it feels like a disproportionate amount of the growth has been folks who tend towards the "aesthetic" side and/or who lack stat/psych/research/engineering experience. Not that aesthetics isn't valuable, mind you, just that the balance feels off. On the demand side more product teams are considering UX but many of them seem to have the impression that UX is there to "make it look better". In my experience most teams are receptive to doing user research to identify and solve the underlying problems, but occasionally I'll get someone who insists that the solution is to use the latest UI fad. Combined and I can see why UX is being perceived as more shallow.
snarfy 6y ago
> other non-functional requirements, like overall speed, maintainability, testability and so on If your title is UX designer, and the UX problem is 'overall speed', how do you solve that given your skills and responsibilities? As software engineering has grown from someone hacking in their basement to large corporate teams practicing SAFe agile, the responsibilities of the individual software engineer have been reduced. The lone basement hacker is responsible for everything, but the corporate engineer is a cog in the machine with requirements handed down from project managers and ux designers. Overall speed is a systems quality encompassing the whole system. It's something a lone engineer responsible for the whole system can tackle and be diligent about, but the corporate engineer must rehash the design over and over with ux designers and project managers until an efficient design, not just an aesthetically pleasing design, is what is used. Another systems quality besides speed is security, and you'll notice more and more systems are less secure than they used to be.
ulrikrasmussen 6y ago
Slack is a prime example of this. Simple things like switching a chat room, which was instantaneous in mIRC on my old 166mhz PC, can take seconds in Slack. But at least there are round corners everywhere, plenty of padding around elements, and animated gifs /s
- deanCommie 6y ago
  Real talk though...if you polled slack users and said "You could have instantaneous room switching, but you have to give up animated gifs", what percentage of users would actually take that trade?
  - ulrikrasmussen 6y ago
    Absolutely, you're probably right if you meant to imply that the percentage of such users is low. But on the other hand, if Slack became as fast as desktop apps from the 1990s tomorrow, how many users do you think would raise their arms in joy and exclaim that their computers suddenly became much faster? Latency is less directly visible to users - which is probably why it receives less attention - but silently adds to the users frustrations when working with the system.
  - kreco 6y ago
    Th worst part is that if say "You could have both, speed and gifs" no one would "believe" it could happen.
    - deanCommie 6y ago
      While I hear you that this isn't a technical limitation, every organization has choices and tradeoffs to make with regards to their priorities. It's not that latency isn't important to Slack, but it's not AS important as everything else.
brailsafe 6y ago
I disagree, it was always as common as it is and never broke past the barrier of getting people to understand it's value, beyond designers themselves. This was true before UX was called UX (before 2014 maybe and as far back as designers of any kind have been around) and it's true now.
hnick 6y ago
The UX sin that bothers me the most lately is when I can enter data faster than the device can handle and it doesn't buffer. The example I gave last time is running calc.exe, then hitting enter and typing a formula. On Win10 you'll lose keypresses and half the formula, but not on the older versions. It used to be a very convenient way to do some quick maths without even interrupting my workflow, now I have to wait for it. It's even in some games I've played recently, where I'm in a menu and hitting down twice then a button will sometimes ignore the second press because it's still playing a 'move the cursor' animation. I was pleasantly surprised last time I snuck a look at the screen in my local post office where I saw an ASCII terminal UI full of text with hotkeys. There is a mistaken belief that complicated is bad, but in a job where you spend your whole day all week long it can be very beneficial because everyone can be a power user.
deleted 6y ago
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amenod 6y ago
> ...even among professionals referring to themselves as UX designers. I believe this is a part of the problem. Because there is a word "designers" in "UX designers", a lot of designers expanded their credentials to include UX. In my experience, they invariably suck at it (at least the ~5 I had the pleasure to work with). The proliferation of high-fidelity wireframes (and tools like Adobe XD, Figma) is another testament to that; impressive looking designs that hide basic UX mistakes. Low fidelity wireframes would make them obvious, but who wants to look at the "wires" when you can have colors? I think the designers simply prioritize aesthetics over content / usability and it is difficult for them to get past that. The best UX designers I have worked with in the past were either engineers or coming from completely unrelated fields.

loceng 6y ago

The biggest issue to me is the dumbing down of an experience and design, treating your users as incompetent vs. treating them as intelligent and being able to figure out things; there's still bad design that can occur when complex, but good UX of presenting information appropriately and contextually can create a rich but easy, intuitive flow. The slowness of certain platforms is also an equally big issue, Reddit for example who seems to purposefully ignore and allow their website via browser experience to suffer - in an attempt to drive people to their app for ad tracking purposes - which I think is shooting themselves in the foot with the trend towards eliminating shallow-manipulative advertising from existence.

myth2018 6y ago
Indeed. I'd also mention a small experiment I often do. If you have the opportunity of visiting a company still using COBOL, Clipper or some other text mode software, ask their users for an opinion on those old systems compared to the current ones. Most of them prefer the acient ones. When asked why, they simply say "I don't know. It works, it feels right". Even the younger users (who already had experience with web applications, big tech's stuff etc when they joined the company) prefer the text based ones. I'm not at all implying that every software should be text based. But I think there are some very important lessons to be learned here. Things we developers used to know, intuitively. I think UX designers should listen more to those users and less to theories and to Google and its MDC trying to make the internet look like their own products
- loceng 6y ago
  For a network of sites I am developing I am planning a command prompt where users can type /command for basically every function: /msg username, /logout, /search phrase, etc.
  - ehnto 6y ago
    Interesting! I had a similar idea but as a library to drop into existing sites, perhaps even be a browser extension. Vimium does a great job of enabling keyboard control over a website but I think a generic web CLI could take the experience even further.
  - jimktrains2 6y ago
    I did something similar for a web app at work and the people on the floor really liked it. It was mich faster than trying to mouse to things, especially when half of their task is scanning barcodes anyway.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  Can confirm. Started out writing code in IDEs, now I'm using Vim and CLI utilities. It's a polished, stable ecosystem that doesn't hide anything from the user and isn't incentivised to do anything other than its purpose, and that becomes very noticeable once you're familiar with it. It doesn't come with file sync, plugin management or flashy animations. But I also don't get loading screens, don't need to look at SaaS pricing tiers and don't get overwhelmed by UI dark patterns. That's a trade-off I'll take any day.
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    One of the great things about command-line interfaces of old are that you could often enter your keyboard input faster than the system could respond to it, and it was OK because the system buffered them up for you and executed them as it caught up. So if you know on this screen you need to hit F1, and that on the next screen you will have to hit X, then on the following screen, you need to type in the SKU number, you could simply issue as fast as you wanted: F1-X-4112295[ENTER], and take your mind off it while the system would just go through the whole experience successfully at its own pace. With "better" GUI/mouse based systems, you have to click here, wait... wait... wait..., now click there, wait... wait... wait..., then click there and type in your SKU. Your attention needs to be on the screen at all times in order to wait for the UI and aim the mouse. Next time you go to your bank web site to pay a bill, think to yourself: Wouldn't it be nice if, rather than navigating their cumbersome UX, you could just hit a known string of keystrokes that you memorized, hit enter, then walk away to get coffee while all the Javascript and page reloading chugged along and paid your bill?
alpaca128 6y ago
Some of the worst offenders in this area were the preinstalled apps on Windows 8. Their official OneDrive app had I think 1-2 options to toggle and didn't even show how much of the cloud storage was used/free. It was basically a picture viewer but without properly working right click. And in terms of performance I fear slow, ad-filled websites slowly trained users to accept bad performance in applications outside the browser as well. At least I don't know how to otherwise explain the widespread indifference toward those things, often even among developers.
- loceng 6y ago
  Makes me think of a system/application getting attention, reach, that it doesn't deserve - hasn't earned - a negative of the advertising industry as well, one reason I love Tesla is that they don't advertise, any attention they get has been earned.
- myth2018 6y ago
  > And in terms of performance I fear slow, ad-filled websites slowly trained users to accept bad performance in applications outside the browser as well. At least I don't know how to otherwise explain the widespread indifference toward those things, often even among developers. Yeah, I don't know either, and I think yours is a very good hypothesis. I'm currently working on a windows project after spending four years exclusively on Linux, using mostly vim and Eclipse. Visual Studio feels now way worse than it used to. You get more conscious about the time you're wasting. And, most interestingly, the same happens to users. It's not a matter of being text based, it's a matter of getting useful stuff done, and fast. Users can and actually enjoy using the keyboard. Users don't want to be delighted with our stuff (speaking of the enterprise here), they just want a system that helps them to get their job done and, after that, get out of their way. Designers and more and more developers seem to forget that animations, complex colorful screens, all this stuff has to be built, tested, processed by user's hardware which is already having a bad time supporting windows. So, instead of shipping something fast, something we are able to build and fix and test quickly, we deliver something detrimental, in many ways, to user experience.
  - 6y ago
teraku 6y ago
In order to get my reddit addiction in check I uninstalled the app and started using it in the browser. After 1 week I quit reddit forever. Never looking back.
- laurent92 6y ago
  Reddit is an example of a good dark pattern for me: The popup reminds me that I need to leave the side. Unfortunately, like the Nigerian Prince Paradox, an upfront obnoxiousness is often designed to filter people out early, if they risk not being gullible enough during the rest of the path.
jariel 6y ago
"treating your users as incompetent" Actually, this is good practice. We are all busy and distracted. Dumbing down an experience to it's essential aspects is a great way to make something easier to use. If a 'fool could use it while trying to juggle' then that's good. Making it dumb means speaking to intuition, not thought. I should add, there are some good comments here about 'command line' etc. - I suggest that that makes sense but in an entirely different realm of usability. Designing for something that's going to be used by competent people all day for their jobs, is different than designing for the proles standing in line at the bank, looking for 3 minutes of respite from whatever, or even trying to squeeze in that little update.
- majewsky 6y ago
  I somewhat agree. A UI that works well for inexperienced users is better than one that isn't. But the real measure of a good UI is if it works well for inexperienced users and actively allows for them to gain experience while using the software. A good example is how, in classic application menus, each entry would have its keyboard shortcut printed next to it. A fresh user can navigate the menu to find an action, and the same option is open to anyone how forgot about how to invoke the action, but whenever they land on the action, they can see the keyboard shortcut and eventually they'll remember it and learn to invoke the action faster without having to make an active effort. This is good UX. Then designers or product owners or someone decided that the shortcuts made their menus look cluttered (or maybe they really took that "treating your users as incompetent" mantra to heart and thought the shortcuts looked too technical or intimidating), thus condeming inexperienced users to stay inexperienced forever. This is bad UX.
  - jariel 6y ago
    Those are good points - often we're in different headspaces as well on the matter. Physical product design, mobile app, command line, common entry (like the software the waiter uses), pro software (i.e. Photoshop) are all very different aspects of usability representing colliding viewpoints.
kitsune_ 6y ago
This offers an interesting tangent to me: is the dumbing down of the user experience what ultimately opens the door for dark patterns?
jonathanstrange 6y ago
May I ask what you think is wrong with Reddit's UI? In my opinion, it's one of the best out there and I've never had problems with it. HN is better, but mainly because it offers far less functionality. Facebook is for me the prototypical example of a bad UI with lots of dark patterns, confusing navigation, different settings scattered all over the place, and frequent technical glitches.
- retox 6y ago
  Here are my annoyances as someone without an account that dips in from time to time via links or news stories. The large "this experience is better in the app" on mobile visits Only having one or two levels of responses visible without completely reloading the page, seemingly all the way down the reply chain Sides of the page taking you back to the index on clicking (why?) Having to expand a discussion thread that you clicked into (just to tell me how many replies there are, why?) Not scrolling correctly when clicking threads, meaning I end up somewhere in the infinite 'other threads' list at the bottom of the page The updating and flashing number of upvotes constantly drawing my attention while trying to read As an outsider reddit is a disgusting mess, and every minute I spend reading it is mental harassment.
- ryanbrunner 6y ago
  Have you used Reddit on a phone without using the app? It constantly berates you to use the app, even when you've clearly stated your preference for using the site before. There's also the problem that the new UI is clearly more buggy than the old one, and requires manually refreshing to fix glitches far too often, but that's more of a technical problem and not a UX issue.
- Thorrez 6y ago
  When I click on a post it only shows 4 comments by default, and I have to click again to see more. To be honest, they actually seem to have improved new reddit a lot since I last looked (a few months ago). Now once you do that second click it shows a decent number of comments, whereas previously even then it would still not show many.
- handoflixue 6y ago
afarrell 6y ago
Part of the issue is inter-team communication and part of the problem comes from that very phrase "dumbing down". I often hear people argue for "dumbing things down" when there is an overwhelming amount of information, but that phrase: 1. Treats people's intelligence as 1-dimensional, which it is not. 2. Gives no clear direction to an engineer who is passionate about UX, recognises that humans are multidimensional, and is trying to ask about what their users really need. You might say I'm arguing semantics, but communication matters! Without it, you can write code at high speed, but you won't learn what direction to go in order to present information appropriately and contextually to create a rich but easy, intuitive flow.

benrbray 6y ago

For me, the most frustrating example of this is the control panel on Windows. The new mobile-friendly menus exclude many important "advanced" (emphasis on the quotes) settings, especially related to audio and networking. The old menu is still available, but over the years they've made it progressively harder to find. But when apps get confused about my bluetooth headset the only way to fix it is to pull up the old menu.

hansvm 6y ago
Off-topic, one of the things that surprised me the most when I finally made the jump to Linux (I don't remember anymore which dark pattern finally turned me off of Windows, but it was one too goddamned many) -- the bluetooth support was light-years ahead of anything I'd previously encountered. I was expecting hardware incompatibilities to be way more problematic than they actually were.
- benrbray 6y ago
  It infuriates me to no end that bluetooth headsets have two modes -- one for listening only, and one for listening+voice, where the latter has absurdly low audio quality. This has been a major source of problems for me, especially on Windows, where I often have to manually switch between the two. I have two Linux laptops. On one, Bluetooth devices endlessly disconnect/reconnect and I gave up entirely. On the other, Bluetooth works flawlessly, better than Windows! So it's really hit and miss in my experience.
laurent92 6y ago
Don’t you remember in Windows XP how you had to click on 6 « advanced » dialogs to set the machine IP? And DHCP wasn’t the default on many, many routers at the time. Windows has always been bad at UX, probably because each dialog was the job of a different team.
astura 6y ago
I actually like it better because I just type whatever I'm looking for in the search bar and it brings up the appropriate item, I don't have to go searching. In fact, for something like bluetooth settings I wouldn't even pull up the control panel, just click start and type "bluetooth" then enter (when you see it's brought up the correct item). I remember in the old versions of windows changing environment variables was something that was a bit of a pain paint because it was hidden behind multiple "advanced" dialogs. Now it's real easy, click start type "envi" and hit enter. That actually brings up "System properties" advanced tab and you have to click "environment variables."

chromanoid 6y ago

I totally agree. It begins with using monochrome icons and ends with something that is pleasant to look at but where nothing that is useful is standing out. As if they try to make screenshots to look good to hang them on their walls. Form over function....

montagg 6y ago

I've run into this while interviewing people for UX positions. They'll walk me through a portfolio and point out a lot of the aesthetics, whereas I'm asking about their decision-making process: how did you identify the problem? What other solutions did you consider and why didn't you go with them? How did you determine the organization of X? Why did you choose this flow? Why are you framing the task this way? Why did you make this more important than that? Why are you grouping this and that together? Why not these other things? Why expose this information at a glance and hide that information behind an interaction? etc.

medium_burrito 6y ago

At a social networking company once I brought up the fact that the post message to feed workflow required 3x more steps than any of our competitors, and that perhaps we should focus on making it easy to post. Design of course ignored it, as they wanted something "measureable" to iterate on.

chromanoid 6y ago
Wouldn't be new posts per day a good measure in this case?
- medium_burrito 6y ago
  One would think so, but apparently no.

dccoolgai 6y ago

Came here to say that. UX should, by and large, be staffed with deep experience in User Psychology, with some tech and design experience to know how to apply that knowledge. Instead it's mostly discount designers who occasionally conduct a user interview.

myth2018 6y ago
My stock broker have recently redesigned their systems to provide us "an improved experience". Except that, besides removing some functionality existent in the previous platform, the new one doesn't allow you any longer to lay out your tools the way you think it's more convenient. They asked for a feedback and I said it feels like the artist conceptual design has priority over the damn user needs. It's evident that the people involved on that project have never performed something beyond trivial operations at the stock market. Financial industry usually values stability and it's a bit disconcerting to see a stock broker embarking on such trend now.
- fakedang 6y ago
  >Financial industry usually values stability and it's a bit disconcerting to see a stock broker embarking on such trend now. It's because of Robinhood. Mobile friendly (Material?) UX is very "welcoming" to users, compared to the multitudes of tables and charts that are typically part of a trading platform. Since RH was able to onboard a lot of users, especially amateurs, the others have been paying attention and doing every thing to become similar to RH, to capture that huge amateur market.
  - myth2018 6y ago
    I know, but here I'm talking about a decades-old broker which targeted intermediate and professional investors since forever. Besides, nothing prevented them from offering an alternate, more amateur-friendly platform, without turning the traditional one off
    - fakedang 6y ago

valand 6y ago

Disconnect between UX department and engineering department can cause this too. Business object can grow out of nothing. UX designers might feel creative and introduce some unintended features, dynamic colors, even complex structure data. If the design is not validated regularly, these non essential items get worked on by the engineers not knowing that these are not in anybody's interest other than the UX designer. This is not solely UX designer's fault. This is also the team workflow's fault to not accommodate time for validating design. At the other spectrum, from engineering side it can be from the underlying mechanism, such as request of huge data should be made stateful because one http call can't handle it, multiple points of hardware failures in a seemingly single operation, etc. These can sometimes change the game and UX design need to be changed so that user information. If these are not well communicated, the initial UX design may not suffice to honestly picture the actual underlying process of the product, causing the users to miss one or two options they should have, e.g. missing retry button where user is supposed to be able to retry an action. Again there should be a period where UX design is validated again and again in the middle of development. A department or a role in the development team that takes care of the big picture of UX design (information architect and interaction design), the big picture of system architecture, and the big picture of project management (to determine which developer works when) might be ideal for it.

myth2018 6y ago
Those are good points. And that's why I'm such a big fan of simple, as-much-text-based-as-possible interfaces. By self-imposing a decrease in her degrees of freedom, one gets fewer things compounding the probably already high project burdens.
- valand 6y ago
  Yeah, and the so-called abstraction, either in the UX world or engineering world, should be a mere default of how the underlying mechanism works, but everybody should still have access to the nitty gritty details.
emilsedgh 6y ago
> This is not solely UX designer's fault. This is also the team workflow's fault to not accommodate time for validating design. We suffer from this greatly. Our app is complicated by nature. The designs that come from our product team turn a blind eye on the complexity and try to "make it simple". As a result, the product doesn't really work (in some aspects). Every time we try to "validate" those designs, we're shut down "because simplicity". Honestly I think product designers should go through a database course or something to understand that if there's a one-to-many relationship between to entities in real life, you cannot force it into a one-to-one relationship and ignore all potential corner cases. Suddenly 40% of cases are "corner cases" and the app doesn't work.

reader_x 6y ago

I agree with your conclusion that it’s more likely lack of competence. I appreciate the article ending with the impossible NY website for COVID-19 vaccine registration. The situation is the same in Maryland, except that one must register for three so as to be on a waiting list with the county health department and the private pharmacy and the local hospital (as there is no telling which might get supply first). Not to mention the larger problem: the target group is people age 75 and up! No one seems to have thought that maybe an optional system of registration by phone, or through a call center representative authorized by the caller to register them on their behalf, is plausible. Somehow, three bad websites is considered fine. And one can’t blame this on ‘government’- the private pharmacies are as bad. So is it incompetence, laziness, or sheer lack of concern whether the most vulnerable elderly get vaccinated? Incompetence might be the most comforting interpretation.

mns 6y ago
This is happening everywhere. It took me around 2 hours to sign up my parents for the vaccine (in an EU country) on a website that was impossible to figure out. Add details here, then you have a list of details, but those are not the actual people that you can sign up, then you need to go somewhere else to actually be able to schedule someone. It's as if they made the scheduling website so complicated that only the people that really want the vaccine will spend 1+ hour to try and register. For a 65+ person, it is almost impossible to navigate through that. And for the icing on the cake, it's all a react SPA that they build in a hurry, probably, that when you got a server error back for one of the requests, the whole multi-step process crashed and you had to start over. After all the frustration I ended up completing the process with Postman.

throwaway5752 6y ago

At what point is UX meaningless or indistinguishable from "best practices" though? I agree it's a shame it's conflated with cosmetic/UI work.

asoneth 6y ago

I think it can be a challenge on both the supply and demand sides. On the supply side the profession has ballooned and subjectively it feels like a disproportionate amount of the growth has been folks who tend towards the "aesthetic" side and/or who lack stat/psych/research/engineering experience. Not that aesthetics isn't valuable, mind you, just that the balance feels off. On the demand side more product teams are considering UX but many of them seem to have the impression that UX is there to "make it look better". In my experience most teams are receptive to doing user research to identify and solve the underlying problems, but occasionally I'll get someone who insists that the solution is to use the latest UI fad. Combined and I can see why UX is being perceived as more shallow.

snarfy 6y ago

> other non-functional requirements, like overall speed, maintainability, testability and so on If your title is UX designer, and the UX problem is 'overall speed', how do you solve that given your skills and responsibilities? As software engineering has grown from someone hacking in their basement to large corporate teams practicing SAFe agile, the responsibilities of the individual software engineer have been reduced. The lone basement hacker is responsible for everything, but the corporate engineer is a cog in the machine with requirements handed down from project managers and ux designers. Overall speed is a systems quality encompassing the whole system. It's something a lone engineer responsible for the whole system can tackle and be diligent about, but the corporate engineer must rehash the design over and over with ux designers and project managers until an efficient design, not just an aesthetically pleasing design, is what is used. Another systems quality besides speed is security, and you'll notice more and more systems are less secure than they used to be.

ulrikrasmussen 6y ago

Slack is a prime example of this. Simple things like switching a chat room, which was instantaneous in mIRC on my old 166mhz PC, can take seconds in Slack. But at least there are round corners everywhere, plenty of padding around elements, and animated gifs /s

deanCommie 6y ago
Real talk though...if you polled slack users and said "You could have instantaneous room switching, but you have to give up animated gifs", what percentage of users would actually take that trade?
- ulrikrasmussen 6y ago
  Absolutely, you're probably right if you meant to imply that the percentage of such users is low. But on the other hand, if Slack became as fast as desktop apps from the 1990s tomorrow, how many users do you think would raise their arms in joy and exclaim that their computers suddenly became much faster? Latency is less directly visible to users - which is probably why it receives less attention - but silently adds to the users frustrations when working with the system.
- kreco 6y ago
  Th worst part is that if say "You could have both, speed and gifs" no one would "believe" it could happen.
  - deanCommie 6y ago
    While I hear you that this isn't a technical limitation, every organization has choices and tradeoffs to make with regards to their priorities. It's not that latency isn't important to Slack, but it's not AS important as everything else.

brailsafe 6y ago

I disagree, it was always as common as it is and never broke past the barrier of getting people to understand it's value, beyond designers themselves. This was true before UX was called UX (before 2014 maybe and as far back as designers of any kind have been around) and it's true now.

hnick 6y ago

The UX sin that bothers me the most lately is when I can enter data faster than the device can handle and it doesn't buffer. The example I gave last time is running calc.exe, then hitting enter and typing a formula. On Win10 you'll lose keypresses and half the formula, but not on the older versions. It used to be a very convenient way to do some quick maths without even interrupting my workflow, now I have to wait for it. It's even in some games I've played recently, where I'm in a menu and hitting down twice then a button will sometimes ignore the second press because it's still playing a 'move the cursor' animation. I was pleasantly surprised last time I snuck a look at the screen in my local post office where I saw an ASCII terminal UI full of text with hotkeys. There is a mistaken belief that complicated is bad, but in a job where you spend your whole day all week long it can be very beneficial because everyone can be a power user.

deleted 6y ago

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amenod 6y ago

> ...even among professionals referring to themselves as UX designers. I believe this is a part of the problem. Because there is a word "designers" in "UX designers", a lot of designers expanded their credentials to include UX. In my experience, they invariably suck at it (at least the ~5 I had the pleasure to work with). The proliferation of high-fidelity wireframes (and tools like Adobe XD, Figma) is another testament to that; impressive looking designs that hide basic UX mistakes. Low fidelity wireframes would make them obvious, but who wants to look at the "wires" when you can have colors? I think the designers simply prioritize aesthetics over content / usability and it is difficult for them to get past that. The best UX designers I have worked with in the past were either engineers or coming from completely unrelated fields.