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The "dribbilization of design" (in reference to Dribble.com) seems to have gotten especially bad in the last decade or so. I used to teach Human-Computer Inter

The "dribbilization of design" (in reference to Dribble.com) seems to have gotten especially bad in the last decade or so. I used to teach Human-Computer Interaction, and it was exciting to me when many companies started hiring UX designers. But ultimately it was disappointing because especially in consumer products it seems like product managers prioritized hiring folks with strong aesthetics even at the expense of fundamentals like usability and research.

tyingq 5y ago
Correcting a small typo in the above, I assume it's https://dribbble.com/ https://dribbble.com/ (3 b's) I wasn't familiar, but this site fits the comment better, so I assume that's what was meant.
- asoneth 5y ago
  You are correct, thank you!
fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
Another issue here is that UX/Product tend to focus on two or three privileged use cases at the expense of any concept of flexibility/extensibility: I’ve worked on several projects now that could have enabled some really fantastic third-party extension feature but, because these only appeal to a small fraction of the users, they’re never prioritized or thought about: the ethos embodies in a lot of the old Unix programs (emacs/vim) or even something like Excel is largely underserved.
- kafkaIncarnate 5y ago
  I think your comment has me thinking that instead of everyone having a vim/emacs holy war mixed with battling the Excel wizards, we should all band together because we are infighting at this point. We were on top of the world, now the world is built on top of us.
- asoneth 5y ago
  Flexible products cost more to design, implement, and support than simple ones. Outside of expensive tools for professionals (and web browsers oddly enough) the market seems to have spoken that not enough consumers are willing to pay for that flexibility. (Personally I like designing expressive/extensible products, so that constrains me to working on tools for professionals.)
  - fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
    I think there’s a chicken and egg problem here, though: if all the apps/websites an average user uses aren’t designed to make “power users” possible, fewer people will have the opportunity cross the line from user to power user. (In the extreme, I had a former coworker who started as an accountant, discovered he really liked automating excel Workflows with VBA and eventually made the career jump to Software Engineer)
    - asoneth 5y ago
      Agreed. Excel is an interesting case. Most of the power and expressiveness was added to support professional use cases but because it's bundled with MS Office it's available to novices as well. At least in my experience, making products for non-professional power users presents a few challenges. First off, you can't charge much for a product that isn't a professional tool. At the same time, power users are (initially) a niche segment so in order to support a development team you probably need something that will appeal to a broad audience. But designing a product that works well for a broad audience and for power users is harder (=more expensive) than focusing on one or the other. It doesn't help that power users can be more demanding in terms of support and feature requests than average users. My experience is that power-user features often get nixed not because any one stakeholder doesn't like them -- often internal folks are themselves power users and think it would be pretty cool -- but because it's often harder to make a good ROI argument for building and supporting power-user features compared to features for the average user.
      - fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
        I think what this misses is the disproportionate influence of power users: they're a small fraction of the user base, but they tend to be concentrated among the people that are in a position to recommend your product. It's a slightly different case, but I remember noticing that, when Google retired Google Reader, the perception of Google in media and on tech sites seemed to go bad nearly overnight.
infogulch 5y ago
What do you think the thing new designs are missing? I don't want to casually dismiss the visual aspects of 'dribbblized' designs, because they do look nice, but clearly they're missing some aspect that makes them good for humans to actually use.
- kafkaIncarnate 5y ago
  Just basic adherence to web standards I think is really the problem people have with these interfaces. Basic support for already existing web client functionality. For instance, I shouldn't have to sacrifice the ability to open a link in a new tab, or sacrifice the ability to link _period_ which is commonly the case (which interferes with bookmarking, etc). I shouldn't be logged out or yelled at by an app for hitting the back or refresh buttons on my web browser. Most of these things are reinventing the wheel. Just for prettiness they'll break a basic browser functionality, then they try to re-implement in their framework and it just creates an abstraction layer on top of an abstraction layer, creating unnecessary bloat. Many times this is even just so they can show you a blog post, which is just text and some images. I shouldn't need JavaScript to see that, especially if I don't know you or trust you. Even Google AdWords has had malware injected in its JavaScript, a blogger is not going to be worth my time to read if I have to trust his code isn't malicious just to see what he has to say about an obscure fruit.
- Kliment 5y ago
  I'm not the person you're replying to but I can put in my two cents on what I miss often in modern designs: - Information density. This is especially a problem with communication tools, which for some reason are all copying Slack and leaving very little screen space for the thing you actually want to see - the text that the other person is writing. Messages go off the screen very quickly and a lot of screen space is spent on decorations (user icons, names, speech bubbles, padding) leaving it with basically the density of comic chat. Graphic background images with semitransparent visual elements on top are another similar trend which uses a lot of padding to not obscure the background too much, and the transparency makes contrast and readability worse. - Affordance discoverability. Many modern user interfaces have a lot of functionality hidden behind catchall elements like a user icon, a gear icon, or a hamburger menu. This may be a misguided attempt to make the user interface "cleaner" but it makes it very difficult to find what functionality is available unless you go exploring. This is especially bad for context-dependent functionality because there's no visual indication that the hidden contents of the catchall have changed. - Delineated targets. A lot of modern designs have flatness as a design concept, meaning the click or tap targets are not clearly separated from the static parts of the interface. This makes it hard to know that they are targets (as it's common to have nonclickable decorative graphics too) and hard to tell where exactly they start/end so it causes extra cognitive load in order to hit them precisely. - Non-gigantic targets. This is related to the low information density mentioned above. More and more designs target smartphone displays, which used to be very small and require big targets to ensure they could be mashed with normal human fingers. However, this gets reused on tablets, modern gigantic smartphones, and even desktop, where none of this makes sense. - High-contrast targets with identifiable icons. Low-contrast or monochrome targets have become fashionable. Clickable items often have simplified, highly abstracted icons with thin-line monochrome content, frequently implemented as fonts, which is less distracting from the visuals of the design but is also hard to understand what it's supposed to represent. Another common one is having said elements in grey on grey, making them very difficult to read for people with less than perfect vision. - Less modality. Many modern designs will have modal interface elements that prevent access to the rest of the user interface until interacted with and/or dismissed. The "blur the content and put a tiny dialog with a huge button in the middle" is a common tactic, and is often user-hostile nudging trying to get the user to do something they don't really want in order to get rid of the thing that is literally blocking their access to whatever they were actually doing. This is basic human-computer interaction design stuff, but somehow it's all gotten lost.
pedrogpimenta 5y ago
Well, Dribbble itself is 11 years old so the "dribbblisation" of design as a concept couldn't be older than a decade.
- asoneth 5y ago
  It was certainly not known by that name[1] but the tension between designers with a cognitive/ergonomic/human factors/HCI/research focus and those with a visual/aesthetic/artistic focus goes back a lot further. Having said that, the shift in favor of visual/aesthetic designers does seem to be somewhat recent. My impression is that companies scrambled to hire interface designers when good interfaces became a selling point for consumers, which led to a lot of graphic/print/visual/web designers switching over to UX, and some of those designers never got around to learning about the rest of UX. Whatever the reason, there simply seem to be more designers these days who operate as if the most important aspect of a design is how it looks. [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dribbblization+dribbblisation https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dribbblization+dribbblisation

tyingq 5y ago

Correcting a small typo in the above, I assume it's https://dribbble.com/ https://dribbble.com/ (3 b's) I wasn't familiar, but this site fits the comment better, so I assume that's what was meant.

asoneth 5y ago
You are correct, thank you!

fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago

Another issue here is that UX/Product tend to focus on two or three privileged use cases at the expense of any concept of flexibility/extensibility: I’ve worked on several projects now that could have enabled some really fantastic third-party extension feature but, because these only appeal to a small fraction of the users, they’re never prioritized or thought about: the ethos embodies in a lot of the old Unix programs (emacs/vim) or even something like Excel is largely underserved.

kafkaIncarnate 5y ago
I think your comment has me thinking that instead of everyone having a vim/emacs holy war mixed with battling the Excel wizards, we should all band together because we are infighting at this point. We were on top of the world, now the world is built on top of us.
asoneth 5y ago
Flexible products cost more to design, implement, and support than simple ones. Outside of expensive tools for professionals (and web browsers oddly enough) the market seems to have spoken that not enough consumers are willing to pay for that flexibility. (Personally I like designing expressive/extensible products, so that constrains me to working on tools for professionals.)
- fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
  I think there’s a chicken and egg problem here, though: if all the apps/websites an average user uses aren’t designed to make “power users” possible, fewer people will have the opportunity cross the line from user to power user. (In the extreme, I had a former coworker who started as an accountant, discovered he really liked automating excel Workflows with VBA and eventually made the career jump to Software Engineer)
  - asoneth 5y ago
    Agreed. Excel is an interesting case. Most of the power and expressiveness was added to support professional use cases but because it's bundled with MS Office it's available to novices as well. At least in my experience, making products for non-professional power users presents a few challenges. First off, you can't charge much for a product that isn't a professional tool. At the same time, power users are (initially) a niche segment so in order to support a development team you probably need something that will appeal to a broad audience. But designing a product that works well for a broad audience and for power users is harder (=more expensive) than focusing on one or the other. It doesn't help that power users can be more demanding in terms of support and feature requests than average users. My experience is that power-user features often get nixed not because any one stakeholder doesn't like them -- often internal folks are themselves power users and think it would be pretty cool -- but because it's often harder to make a good ROI argument for building and supporting power-user features compared to features for the average user.
    - fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
      I think what this misses is the disproportionate influence of power users: they're a small fraction of the user base, but they tend to be concentrated among the people that are in a position to recommend your product. It's a slightly different case, but I remember noticing that, when Google retired Google Reader, the perception of Google in media and on tech sites seemed to go bad nearly overnight.

infogulch 5y ago

What do you think the thing new designs are missing? I don't want to casually dismiss the visual aspects of 'dribbblized' designs, because they do look nice, but clearly they're missing some aspect that makes them good for humans to actually use.

kafkaIncarnate 5y ago
Just basic adherence to web standards I think is really the problem people have with these interfaces. Basic support for already existing web client functionality. For instance, I shouldn't have to sacrifice the ability to open a link in a new tab, or sacrifice the ability to link _period_ which is commonly the case (which interferes with bookmarking, etc). I shouldn't be logged out or yelled at by an app for hitting the back or refresh buttons on my web browser. Most of these things are reinventing the wheel. Just for prettiness they'll break a basic browser functionality, then they try to re-implement in their framework and it just creates an abstraction layer on top of an abstraction layer, creating unnecessary bloat. Many times this is even just so they can show you a blog post, which is just text and some images. I shouldn't need JavaScript to see that, especially if I don't know you or trust you. Even Google AdWords has had malware injected in its JavaScript, a blogger is not going to be worth my time to read if I have to trust his code isn't malicious just to see what he has to say about an obscure fruit.
Kliment 5y ago
I'm not the person you're replying to but I can put in my two cents on what I miss often in modern designs: - Information density. This is especially a problem with communication tools, which for some reason are all copying Slack and leaving very little screen space for the thing you actually want to see - the text that the other person is writing. Messages go off the screen very quickly and a lot of screen space is spent on decorations (user icons, names, speech bubbles, padding) leaving it with basically the density of comic chat. Graphic background images with semitransparent visual elements on top are another similar trend which uses a lot of padding to not obscure the background too much, and the transparency makes contrast and readability worse. - Affordance discoverability. Many modern user interfaces have a lot of functionality hidden behind catchall elements like a user icon, a gear icon, or a hamburger menu. This may be a misguided attempt to make the user interface "cleaner" but it makes it very difficult to find what functionality is available unless you go exploring. This is especially bad for context-dependent functionality because there's no visual indication that the hidden contents of the catchall have changed. - Delineated targets. A lot of modern designs have flatness as a design concept, meaning the click or tap targets are not clearly separated from the static parts of the interface. This makes it hard to know that they are targets (as it's common to have nonclickable decorative graphics too) and hard to tell where exactly they start/end so it causes extra cognitive load in order to hit them precisely. - Non-gigantic targets. This is related to the low information density mentioned above. More and more designs target smartphone displays, which used to be very small and require big targets to ensure they could be mashed with normal human fingers. However, this gets reused on tablets, modern gigantic smartphones, and even desktop, where none of this makes sense. - High-contrast targets with identifiable icons. Low-contrast or monochrome targets have become fashionable. Clickable items often have simplified, highly abstracted icons with thin-line monochrome content, frequently implemented as fonts, which is less distracting from the visuals of the design but is also hard to understand what it's supposed to represent. Another common one is having said elements in grey on grey, making them very difficult to read for people with less than perfect vision. - Less modality. Many modern designs will have modal interface elements that prevent access to the rest of the user interface until interacted with and/or dismissed. The "blur the content and put a tiny dialog with a huge button in the middle" is a common tactic, and is often user-hostile nudging trying to get the user to do something they don't really want in order to get rid of the thing that is literally blocking their access to whatever they were actually doing. This is basic human-computer interaction design stuff, but somehow it's all gotten lost.

pedrogpimenta 5y ago

Well, Dribbble itself is 11 years old so the "dribbblisation" of design as a concept couldn't be older than a decade.

asoneth 5y ago
It was certainly not known by that name[1] but the tension between designers with a cognitive/ergonomic/human factors/HCI/research focus and those with a visual/aesthetic/artistic focus goes back a lot further. Having said that, the shift in favor of visual/aesthetic designers does seem to be somewhat recent. My impression is that companies scrambled to hire interface designers when good interfaces became a selling point for consumers, which led to a lot of graphic/print/visual/web designers switching over to UX, and some of those designers never got around to learning about the rest of UX. Whatever the reason, there simply seem to be more designers these days who operate as if the most important aspect of a design is how it looks. [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dribbblization+dribbblisation https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dribbblization+dribbblisation