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I would say that the vast majority of users can adapt to anything you throw at them. Users are not delicate flowers which need to be coddled and babied. Remem

I would say that the vast majority of users can adapt to anything you throw at them. Users are not delicate flowers which need to be coddled and babied. Remember that the majority of the computer usage growth of the past 50 years was on home computers that booted to a command prompt when powered on. Certainly the earliest days, when adoption was most vulnerable and the most difficult. Saying that users can't learn something complex or intricate is just not true, and if you look for it, you'll see that users almost always take pride in their ability to wield a complex piece of software. I'm not saying that good design is wasted effort, mind you. I'm not saying that good UX is bad for anyone. I'm saying that a user will often (always?) opt for an option that they believe will make their lives easier, because people almost always underestimate what they are capable of. Simplifying a UI so much that you decide to hide scrollbars is simplifying to the point that you think your users are boneheaded idiots who cannot learn and who are confused by slight movement or strange noises. It's insulting and denigrating, even if this is the outcome that UX/UI testing reveals.

bbarnett 6y ago
Current UI/UX dogma comes from endless studies, done at the dawn of wide scale adoption. Yes, many users between the late 90s, and early 2000s, were a mass of people which had never, ever used computers. They bought them for the Internet, and as their workplace adopted them, to work at home. Many of these users grew up without televisions, calculators, you name it. Yet all new users today are essentially using a tablet or phone at age 5. Users are not as easily confused as they were in the 90s. I mean really, Amazon's website has more complexity than most desktop apps.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > Current UI/UX dogma comes from endless studies, done at the dawn of wide scale adoption. That's the late 90s / early 2000s UI/UX dogma. Research-backed and sane. Current UI/UX dogma is based on taking designer opinions and throwing them into A/B testing blender, optimizing for conversions. What comes out isn't something that delivers value to the user - it's something that streamlines their journey through the sales funnel.
- selfhoster11 6y ago
  Current UI/UX dogma is tainted, to put it bluntly. It's been A/B tested and optimised to death not to empower the user, but to disempower them. The push to get the user to click on the "subscribe"/"buy now" button, or to stay engaged with the app so that you can keep pouring ads down their eyeballs, is an overriding concern. In contrast, 90s/2000s research was all about empowering users, acknowledging psychological limitations so that you can work around them to let people work more efficiently, and making your workspace/playspace your own. Modern UI/UX is a near opposition of that.
  - dkonofalski 6y ago
    >Current UI/UX dogma is tainted, to put it bluntly. I would agree with this statement but only outside of academia. UI/UX dogma in academia is still about proper user experience design and it's simply being taken advantage of by companies looking to cash in on users. That doesn't make the dogma flawed but I can see how that would make you say it's tainted.
- dkonofalski 6y ago
  >Users are not as easily confused as they were in the 90s. I mean really, Amazon's website has more complexity than most desktop apps. What are you basing this on? Current research does not agree with this and, anecdotally, my daily experience also doesn't agree with this. People can buy things on Amazon easily because Amazon has optimized for that. Anything outside of that (account management, returns, etc.) are still not intuitive for most people.

bbarnett 6y ago

Current UI/UX dogma comes from endless studies, done at the dawn of wide scale adoption. Yes, many users between the late 90s, and early 2000s, were a mass of people which had never, ever used computers. They bought them for the Internet, and as their workplace adopted them, to work at home. Many of these users grew up without televisions, calculators, you name it. Yet all new users today are essentially using a tablet or phone at age 5. Users are not as easily confused as they were in the 90s. I mean really, Amazon's website has more complexity than most desktop apps.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
> Current UI/UX dogma comes from endless studies, done at the dawn of wide scale adoption. That's the late 90s / early 2000s UI/UX dogma. Research-backed and sane. Current UI/UX dogma is based on taking designer opinions and throwing them into A/B testing blender, optimizing for conversions. What comes out isn't something that delivers value to the user - it's something that streamlines their journey through the sales funnel.
selfhoster11 6y ago
Current UI/UX dogma is tainted, to put it bluntly. It's been A/B tested and optimised to death not to empower the user, but to disempower them. The push to get the user to click on the "subscribe"/"buy now" button, or to stay engaged with the app so that you can keep pouring ads down their eyeballs, is an overriding concern. In contrast, 90s/2000s research was all about empowering users, acknowledging psychological limitations so that you can work around them to let people work more efficiently, and making your workspace/playspace your own. Modern UI/UX is a near opposition of that.
- dkonofalski 6y ago
  >Current UI/UX dogma is tainted, to put it bluntly. I would agree with this statement but only outside of academia. UI/UX dogma in academia is still about proper user experience design and it's simply being taken advantage of by companies looking to cash in on users. That doesn't make the dogma flawed but I can see how that would make you say it's tainted.
dkonofalski 6y ago
>Users are not as easily confused as they were in the 90s. I mean really, Amazon's website has more complexity than most desktop apps. What are you basing this on? Current research does not agree with this and, anecdotally, my daily experience also doesn't agree with this. People can buy things on Amazon easily because Amazon has optimized for that. Anything outside of that (account management, returns, etc.) are still not intuitive for most people.