7 ms·

This is just the symptom of a larger, deeper and more insiduous problem - design education, short-term corporate targets, discipline, anti-functionalism, celebr

This is just the symptom of a larger, deeper and more insiduous problem - design education, short-term corporate targets, discipline, anti-functionalism, celebration of aesthetics, marketing overreach, lack of rigorous criticism and unwilling to convince users. We're not going to solve it. It requires complete scrub of how we think about building excellent products with deep understanding of humans (not users). Furthermore, needs overhaul on multiple fronts since great design doesn't sell apparently according to most rebuttals. Just look at Apple.com and see how loud it all is. Developers love Stripe design, but it is overrated - full of animations, bright colors, sexy transitions and for some reason they love diagonal lines. We need to revive some people like Paul Rand and Josef Muller-Brockmann, may be get Stankowski and a few others to do marketing. We don't celebrate great design anymore. If it wasn't for Elliot Noyes, no one would ever think of IBM in the same way. We've gotten so worse, it is appalling and we should all be ashamed.

hootbootscoot 6y ago
Don't forget "dark patterns" that serve deliberate goals. It's often perfectly functional for a company to force you into certain courses of action due to apparent mistakes that aren't.
- entropicdrifter 6y ago
  "Oh dang, where's the opt-out of cookies button?"
  - grishka 6y ago
    Forget cookies. It always felt that if your site is related to travel, it absolutely must be filled to the brim with dark patterns. An airline that sneakily adds useless insurance to your order? Why not!
core-questions 6y ago
> celebration of aesthetics Yes and no. Aesthetics are always going to be critical to the consumer experience of technology; the problem is that there are difference schools of aesthetics, and presently the high-status UX school is a minimalist one that values showing as little information as possible in order to look 'easy to understand' in screenshots and at-a-glance tours. If Windows 2000 wasn't "aesthetic" then we wouldn't have Vaporwave, after all; look how that late-90s look is glorified now. There's no shortage of people (myself included) that will still defend it as being a pinnacle of sorts, though I'd point at NeXT as being the real high water mark. I'd call that late 90s style Modern Desktopist, where the metaphor of being a 'desk' we may have seen in some 80s Classical Desktopist has been left behind and replaced with functional, well-designed UI widgets building on years of refinement. There was a reaction to this modernism, and it came first in the form of Late 2000s Skeuomorphist UI as on iOS and in many creative applications on desktops preceding it: the 90s style being seen as too corporate, too 'suit', we ended up with skinnable apps, and apps that mimic the real world (I'm thinking of Propellerhead Reason here as the king of these). What skeuomorphism added in terms of enjoyment was lost in terms of losing all of the expected conventions of normal desktop applications: drag-n-drop, multiple select, keyboard shortcut consistency, etc. Skeuomorphism was rejected in favour of what some call "flat" or "material" design, first in the Microsoft Metro form emulating highway signs, and then in the Google form emulating... nothing. Developer laziness, perhaps? I call this Digital Brutalism, it's at once "function over form" but at the same time missing a great deal of the "function" that the previous era had. It's fundamentally a skeuomorphic UI evolved to lose the skin and to hide most of the controls. We're honestly all just waiting for someone to come out with a drastically more efficient UI paradigm. There's still room to make a real difference with people who use a desktop from day to day....
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ShroudedNight 6y ago
  To the ether: Pardon my ignorance, but is there something obviously wrong about the parent comment? It comes across as reasonable to me, but seems to be fairing poorly in the opinions of others.
  - core-questions 6y ago
    I post dumb things people don't like in other threads and usually they go into my comment page and downvote everything else I've said. Comes with the territory, doesn't bother me
- trilinearnz 6y ago
  Very interesting insights here - thank you. I think you could write an extended version of this post as a very engaging blog article (maybe with some example screenshots), if you were ever so inclined :)
- bscphil 6y ago
  > If Windows 2000 wasn't "aesthetic" then we wouldn't have Vaporwave, after all; look how that late-90s look is glorified now. Isn't vaporwave a self-consciously nostalgic aesthetic though? It's glorified because it captures a kind of ideal of human-computer interaction that wasn't recognized as such at the time. Personally I don't mind material design (which is not really the same as flat design). I'd just like to see a little less padding and fewer hidden UI elements.
- redwall_hp 6y ago
  I have to add that 90s design was highly skeuomorphic as well. Chiseled buttons everywhere, icons and interactivity metaphors like trash cans or "My Briefcase" in Windows land, or even fully metaphorical things like Microsoft Bob. Skeuomorphs, by their technical definition, are a core part of art and design that goes far deeper than just "photorealistic icons and extraneous textured backgrounds." The modern iOS calendar and phone dialer are natural skeuomorphs, since they're carrying forward a familiar mode of interaction. There isn't any real reason why a calendar has to be a grid of dates, but it certainly is a lot easier to think about it that way due to generations of familiarity.
trilinearnz 6y ago
Agreed. Steve Jobs once expounded the notion of 'discoverability' with the Macintosh UI - in particular the use of drop-down menus - which was a response to the keyboard shortcut-heavy applications of the IBM ecosystem. A lot has changed since then. GUIs are standard, touch-based 'appliances' like the iPad are the norm, and there are fewer people for whom computing is totally new to (a big issue back in the 80s and 90s that drove efforts of approachability you saw in the Macintosh and Windows 95). Despite this, I think there's still a timeless usability lesson in that early approach. Gestures, it could be argued, are just another form of the IBM keyboard shortcut.
- Bluestein 6y ago
  > and there are fewer people for whom computing is totally new to ... Including current UX people. They are young enough, digital-native enough to take things for granted ... ... whereas people originally building the interfaces from the "golden age" mentioned upthread could not assume anything, having to build, research, and test everything from scratch.-
- hakfoo 6y ago
  It feels like the OS vendors pulled the rug out from under us. There used to be reliable well-researched style guides. They moved slowly, to the point where the pack-in software from Windows 1.0 looks pretty much sane in Windows 2000, or 1984 Mac software on OS 9 looks reasonable. At some point, they decided to toss all that out the window for aesthetics and shininess. I feel like this could have been done much better by making theming a first-class citizen. Sure, put a pretty theme on by default, but let the user make every button look like a football and have the text blue-on-purpole if they want. If anything, this would further encourage developers to stick to established conventions and style guides, because they'd need to make sure it still looks and works fine when the user is running a theme that makes everything look like a particularly ugly Enlightenment theme.
  - selfhoster11 6y ago
    > feel like this could have been done much better by making theming a first-class citizen. Sure, put a pretty theme on by default, but let the user make every button look like a football and have the text blue-on-purpole if they want. If anything, this would further encourage developers to stick to established conventions and style guides This was very much the case for Classic Windows themes. Everything could have been set to any colour, font, style. Dare I say, it was more customisable for end users than any Linux UI today.
canadianfella 6y ago
thats-just-like-your-opinion-man.gif Have you seen how productive young people are on mobile apps with flat UIs?
redwall_hp 6y ago
We should dial it back to the last known good state and build from there: bash and vim, praised be thy names. The supposition that modern UIs are based on is that they should be drop dead simple for a brand new user to pick up and use without training, but at the expense of flexibility and utility. You can't overwhelm them with options, even under menus, and you need to present large buttons for them to immediately identify and mash. Basically, Fischer-Price toys. However, you're only briefly a new user. You may be using a tool every day for months or years, so the obvious design philosophy should be focusing on efficiency (i.e. keyboard control, snappy response, advanced features) for the long term user.
- fpig 6y ago
  This is totally true (other than the bash/vim part, there certainly is value in having a graphical UI). My conclusion is that these inefficient designs aimed purely at someone who is seeing the app for the first time are a result of two things: 1. Designers / UX "experts" generally have no clue what they're doing. I don't know why, but every single designer I've met has only designed trivial software. I've never met anyone who's designed complex systems, like MS Word, 3DS Max, etc, stuff that people use for hours every day to perform complex work. At the same time, half the developers I know have worked on very complex software at some point in their careers, so it's not like complex software does not get built at all. Does anyone know a single UI designer who has designed an app of that level of complexity? It's really strange that they literally don't seem to exist. So they've never worked on an app that users use extensively, daily, for years, to perform complex tasks, and their whole mindset is about "how will someone seeing it for the first time use it". So when you do bring UI experts on such an app, they have no clue what they're doing, and users complain about their design decisions. And people who get hired to design things are people who've designed e-commerce web sites and mobile apps in the past, because those seem to be the only people that exist. 2. If it's an app that will be demoed in person or demos will be provided as a part of marketing, anyone involved with sales in any way will push hard for this because it demos well. They're not demoing to the guy who's been using the app for 4 hours a day for 5 years, they're demoing to the guy who is going to be using the app, or not even to that guy, but to his boss who isn't even going to be using it. I regularly get requests like "can we make this automatic so the user can do it with 1 click" when it's an action the user will very rarely perform so it doesn't matter whether it takes 4 or 2 seconds, and it provides more flexibility to the user to do it in 2 clicks instead of the app making an assumption that joins 2 actions into one. The reason? They will do it in the demo and they can say "look you can do this with 1 click" even though from the perspective of actually using the application it's not helpful. I am almost ashamed that I worked on an app where you upload stuff by having an "Upload" button on the main page, that you press, and then it guides you through the process of selecting where to upload and what to upload, and then it uploads. Think about how inefficient and cumbersome this is. I guess the point is that if you've never seen the app before, and want to upload, you see "UPLOAD" staring at you, so you press it and it guides you through the rest, there is basically no way to get confused. In fact every action in this app works through a "wizard" of some kind, there is no concept of freely navigating and contextually performing actions on objects as you navigate. If you want to perform an action, you start by pressing a button with the name of that action, then get guided through the rest over multiple pages. It's the literal opposite of how I would build an app if I was building it for myself.
khana 6y ago
spot on!
phendrenad2 6y ago
I've been starting to think a dangerous thought - that maybe UI/UX designers aren't very good as a group. It seems like they SHOULD be, and hand-waving away an entire profession seems like a rookie mistake... but it's the only thing that makes sense at this point. Sure, there are some great designers, and they command a high price, and work for companies who's founders or leadership understand user needs instinctively (as Steve Jobs did), but I think most are just carrying forward things they learned in design school... bad ideas they learned and are repeating by rote.
- kumarvvr 6y ago
  Oh they deserve to be hand waved. The going trend is to sacrifice functionality, for a bit of beauty. Thats not a tereible thing to do, but the UI UX group has too many loud characters that are hell bent on applying this minimalist beauty to everything. Casepoint is the recent update to Youtube android app. Earlier, when i would search something, on the top right corner was a small button that allowed me to filter the results. Now its hidden behind a menu. Why? God knows. The worst part is, its not like the menu has 10 items and the filter icon was moved into it. The menu has just one item and its the filter. I hated Apples shift to minimalist design. I hate apps that think minimal design is functional. There is a place for minimal design, and its not everywhere.

hootbootscoot 6y ago

Don't forget "dark patterns" that serve deliberate goals. It's often perfectly functional for a company to force you into certain courses of action due to apparent mistakes that aren't.

entropicdrifter 6y ago
"Oh dang, where's the opt-out of cookies button?"
- grishka 6y ago
  Forget cookies. It always felt that if your site is related to travel, it absolutely must be filled to the brim with dark patterns. An airline that sneakily adds useless insurance to your order? Why not!

core-questions 6y ago

> celebration of aesthetics Yes and no. Aesthetics are always going to be critical to the consumer experience of technology; the problem is that there are difference schools of aesthetics, and presently the high-status UX school is a minimalist one that values showing as little information as possible in order to look 'easy to understand' in screenshots and at-a-glance tours. If Windows 2000 wasn't "aesthetic" then we wouldn't have Vaporwave, after all; look how that late-90s look is glorified now. There's no shortage of people (myself included) that will still defend it as being a pinnacle of sorts, though I'd point at NeXT as being the real high water mark. I'd call that late 90s style Modern Desktopist, where the metaphor of being a 'desk' we may have seen in some 80s Classical Desktopist has been left behind and replaced with functional, well-designed UI widgets building on years of refinement. There was a reaction to this modernism, and it came first in the form of Late 2000s Skeuomorphist UI as on iOS and in many creative applications on desktops preceding it: the 90s style being seen as too corporate, too 'suit', we ended up with skinnable apps, and apps that mimic the real world (I'm thinking of Propellerhead Reason here as the king of these). What skeuomorphism added in terms of enjoyment was lost in terms of losing all of the expected conventions of normal desktop applications: drag-n-drop, multiple select, keyboard shortcut consistency, etc. Skeuomorphism was rejected in favour of what some call "flat" or "material" design, first in the Microsoft Metro form emulating highway signs, and then in the Google form emulating... nothing. Developer laziness, perhaps? I call this Digital Brutalism, it's at once "function over form" but at the same time missing a great deal of the "function" that the previous era had. It's fundamentally a skeuomorphic UI evolved to lose the skin and to hide most of the controls. We're honestly all just waiting for someone to come out with a drastically more efficient UI paradigm. There's still room to make a real difference with people who use a desktop from day to day....

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ShroudedNight 6y ago
To the ether: Pardon my ignorance, but is there something obviously wrong about the parent comment? It comes across as reasonable to me, but seems to be fairing poorly in the opinions of others.
- core-questions 6y ago
  I post dumb things people don't like in other threads and usually they go into my comment page and downvote everything else I've said. Comes with the territory, doesn't bother me
trilinearnz 6y ago
Very interesting insights here - thank you. I think you could write an extended version of this post as a very engaging blog article (maybe with some example screenshots), if you were ever so inclined :)
bscphil 6y ago
> If Windows 2000 wasn't "aesthetic" then we wouldn't have Vaporwave, after all; look how that late-90s look is glorified now. Isn't vaporwave a self-consciously nostalgic aesthetic though? It's glorified because it captures a kind of ideal of human-computer interaction that wasn't recognized as such at the time. Personally I don't mind material design (which is not really the same as flat design). I'd just like to see a little less padding and fewer hidden UI elements.
redwall_hp 6y ago
I have to add that 90s design was highly skeuomorphic as well. Chiseled buttons everywhere, icons and interactivity metaphors like trash cans or "My Briefcase" in Windows land, or even fully metaphorical things like Microsoft Bob. Skeuomorphs, by their technical definition, are a core part of art and design that goes far deeper than just "photorealistic icons and extraneous textured backgrounds." The modern iOS calendar and phone dialer are natural skeuomorphs, since they're carrying forward a familiar mode of interaction. There isn't any real reason why a calendar has to be a grid of dates, but it certainly is a lot easier to think about it that way due to generations of familiarity.

trilinearnz 6y ago

Agreed. Steve Jobs once expounded the notion of 'discoverability' with the Macintosh UI - in particular the use of drop-down menus - which was a response to the keyboard shortcut-heavy applications of the IBM ecosystem. A lot has changed since then. GUIs are standard, touch-based 'appliances' like the iPad are the norm, and there are fewer people for whom computing is totally new to (a big issue back in the 80s and 90s that drove efforts of approachability you saw in the Macintosh and Windows 95). Despite this, I think there's still a timeless usability lesson in that early approach. Gestures, it could be argued, are just another form of the IBM keyboard shortcut.

Bluestein 6y ago
> and there are fewer people for whom computing is totally new to ... Including current UX people. They are young enough, digital-native enough to take things for granted ... ... whereas people originally building the interfaces from the "golden age" mentioned upthread could not assume anything, having to build, research, and test everything from scratch.-
hakfoo 6y ago
It feels like the OS vendors pulled the rug out from under us. There used to be reliable well-researched style guides. They moved slowly, to the point where the pack-in software from Windows 1.0 looks pretty much sane in Windows 2000, or 1984 Mac software on OS 9 looks reasonable. At some point, they decided to toss all that out the window for aesthetics and shininess. I feel like this could have been done much better by making theming a first-class citizen. Sure, put a pretty theme on by default, but let the user make every button look like a football and have the text blue-on-purpole if they want. If anything, this would further encourage developers to stick to established conventions and style guides, because they'd need to make sure it still looks and works fine when the user is running a theme that makes everything look like a particularly ugly Enlightenment theme.
- selfhoster11 6y ago
  > feel like this could have been done much better by making theming a first-class citizen. Sure, put a pretty theme on by default, but let the user make every button look like a football and have the text blue-on-purpole if they want. If anything, this would further encourage developers to stick to established conventions and style guides This was very much the case for Classic Windows themes. Everything could have been set to any colour, font, style. Dare I say, it was more customisable for end users than any Linux UI today.

canadianfella 6y ago

thats-just-like-your-opinion-man.gif Have you seen how productive young people are on mobile apps with flat UIs?

redwall_hp 6y ago

We should dial it back to the last known good state and build from there: bash and vim, praised be thy names. The supposition that modern UIs are based on is that they should be drop dead simple for a brand new user to pick up and use without training, but at the expense of flexibility and utility. You can't overwhelm them with options, even under menus, and you need to present large buttons for them to immediately identify and mash. Basically, Fischer-Price toys. However, you're only briefly a new user. You may be using a tool every day for months or years, so the obvious design philosophy should be focusing on efficiency (i.e. keyboard control, snappy response, advanced features) for the long term user.

fpig 6y ago
This is totally true (other than the bash/vim part, there certainly is value in having a graphical UI). My conclusion is that these inefficient designs aimed purely at someone who is seeing the app for the first time are a result of two things: 1. Designers / UX "experts" generally have no clue what they're doing. I don't know why, but every single designer I've met has only designed trivial software. I've never met anyone who's designed complex systems, like MS Word, 3DS Max, etc, stuff that people use for hours every day to perform complex work. At the same time, half the developers I know have worked on very complex software at some point in their careers, so it's not like complex software does not get built at all. Does anyone know a single UI designer who has designed an app of that level of complexity? It's really strange that they literally don't seem to exist. So they've never worked on an app that users use extensively, daily, for years, to perform complex tasks, and their whole mindset is about "how will someone seeing it for the first time use it". So when you do bring UI experts on such an app, they have no clue what they're doing, and users complain about their design decisions. And people who get hired to design things are people who've designed e-commerce web sites and mobile apps in the past, because those seem to be the only people that exist. 2. If it's an app that will be demoed in person or demos will be provided as a part of marketing, anyone involved with sales in any way will push hard for this because it demos well. They're not demoing to the guy who's been using the app for 4 hours a day for 5 years, they're demoing to the guy who is going to be using the app, or not even to that guy, but to his boss who isn't even going to be using it. I regularly get requests like "can we make this automatic so the user can do it with 1 click" when it's an action the user will very rarely perform so it doesn't matter whether it takes 4 or 2 seconds, and it provides more flexibility to the user to do it in 2 clicks instead of the app making an assumption that joins 2 actions into one. The reason? They will do it in the demo and they can say "look you can do this with 1 click" even though from the perspective of actually using the application it's not helpful. I am almost ashamed that I worked on an app where you upload stuff by having an "Upload" button on the main page, that you press, and then it guides you through the process of selecting where to upload and what to upload, and then it uploads. Think about how inefficient and cumbersome this is. I guess the point is that if you've never seen the app before, and want to upload, you see "UPLOAD" staring at you, so you press it and it guides you through the rest, there is basically no way to get confused. In fact every action in this app works through a "wizard" of some kind, there is no concept of freely navigating and contextually performing actions on objects as you navigate. If you want to perform an action, you start by pressing a button with the name of that action, then get guided through the rest over multiple pages. It's the literal opposite of how I would build an app if I was building it for myself.

khana 6y ago

spot on!

phendrenad2 6y ago

I've been starting to think a dangerous thought - that maybe UI/UX designers aren't very good as a group. It seems like they SHOULD be, and hand-waving away an entire profession seems like a rookie mistake... but it's the only thing that makes sense at this point. Sure, there are some great designers, and they command a high price, and work for companies who's founders or leadership understand user needs instinctively (as Steve Jobs did), but I think most are just carrying forward things they learned in design school... bad ideas they learned and are repeating by rote.

kumarvvr 6y ago
Oh they deserve to be hand waved. The going trend is to sacrifice functionality, for a bit of beauty. Thats not a tereible thing to do, but the UI UX group has too many loud characters that are hell bent on applying this minimalist beauty to everything. Casepoint is the recent update to Youtube android app. Earlier, when i would search something, on the top right corner was a small button that allowed me to filter the results. Now its hidden behind a menu. Why? God knows. The worst part is, its not like the menu has 10 items and the filter icon was moved into it. The menu has just one item and its the filter. I hated Apples shift to minimalist design. I hate apps that think minimal design is functional. There is a place for minimal design, and its not everywhere.