6 ms·

> I want to find the same things in the same places How else will designers justify their jobs? I wonder if designer should be reworked to be a seasonal or co

> I want to find the same things in the same places How else will designers justify their jobs? I wonder if designer should be reworked to be a seasonal or consultancy job only, to only hire them when you're making a new product/big feature or there's a drastic need to change things but never otherwise. Having them as permanent staff leads to our present usability and accessability nightmare of everything constantly being redesigned and completely changed around for no good reason other than padding designers' resumes.

dtjb 5y ago
I'm sure there are designers making parallel arguments about developers :)
- bitwize 5y ago
  Indeed, this is how game developers work: hired in legion strength to push a game to release, then laid off once it's released.
  - Transfinity 5y ago
    I've heard that DLC has made this less of a problem in recent years. Since there's a stable, predictable revenue stream and delivery channel for new content, iit's much easier to justify keeping devs, designers and artists on full time. Presumably this varies by studio / publisher / genre, but my impression is it's much better than it was.
- sodapopcan 5y ago
  Yeah, there is certainly a parallel argument to be made about constantly introducing new tech even if the currently used tech is GoodEnough.
ysavir 5y ago
Assuming for the sake of argument that this is at all true, is the problem that designers are out to justify their jobs, and making changes as a consequence, or that designers are being put in a position where they have to justify their jobs, and are making changes to satisfy their managers? If anything, the problem in this scenario is that culturally we need everyone to be contributing all of the time, even for positions that may experience occasional downtime. Let's not assign blame to a particular group when they're simply responding to the pressures put on them.
- jrm4 5y ago
  If this is the best argument one can come up with for not being critical here, for me it absolutely proves we need to be more critical here. Of course, I don't wish to see anyone suffer, but I'm seeing something like: "Hey, we're paying a guy to dig holes and fill them back up with no value whatsoever, why are we doing that?" "Hey, man, stop attacking hole-diggers, they're just trying to make a living."
  - ysavir 5y ago
    Can you go into more detail of why you think we need to be critical of designers? The GP makes no effort to justify their criticism of designers, perhaps you can provide some reasons for it, and thereby allow people to respond to actual arguments.
    - Zababa 5y ago
      A good example that was discussed recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28504573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28504573 The justification isn't "It helps users" or anything like that. It's "This is not a new idea either — pretty much everyone else is doing it, e.g. macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, elementary OS, KDE.". Reducing usability and breaking habits to follow trends is a bad thing.
      - anchpop 5y ago
        This is a purely aesthetic change, it doesn't break any habits. In this case, it probably also improves usability, because there's less visual noise connected to those buttons, which lets you draw attention to buttons the user might not already know about using the same technique while staying within a certain 'visual noise budget'. Users expect that icons on the header bar are buttons (what else would they be?), so there's no need to call attention to that fact with an extra visual indicator. "Following trends" is a good thing because users appreciate when a piece of software looks like software they're already familiar with. It is maybe slightly annoying to people who already are used to the software, but every new user benefits from it.
magicink81 5y ago
Design is misunderstood, often by designers, and it seems like you also may have some misunderstandings based on your assessments of what should designers do (vs what they do). Based on your comment it sounds like the designers you work with have an over-emphasis on visual UI design. I don't think you are to blame though - I have observed a consistent dumbing down of design discourse and practices among people that don't take the time to learn the depth of what is available. This includes most practicing designers. I have observed that designers are less interested in educating the world about their practices than perhaps they need to be in order to change this situation. Design in most cases is essentially a set of knowledge work processes, the best of which is built on solid research practices informed by psychology and cognitive science. For anyone interested in up-leveling their own understanding of design I recommend the articles, videos, courses and other materials available from the Nielsen Norman Group https://www.nngroup.com/ https://www.nngroup.com/
- milkytron 5y ago
  This is such a great comment that adheres to exactly what my SO experiences. She is a UX designer, and she was the first one hired at her company. They had no idea what UX design is and all the processes, research, etc that takes place. > I have observed that designers are less interested in educating the world about their practices than perhaps they need to be in order to change this situation. She has found her job has become mostly informing and teaching others how to go about these practices, and if she has spare time does the work herself. But it was such an ordeal when they hired her because they didn't even know what she was supposed to do. She has acted very much like a consultant in this regard, but also does the work involved.
sizzle 5y ago
Visual UI "graphic" design, full of fleeting design trends and dark patterns, sure I agree, bundle them up and send them to the moon. UX =/ UI Human-centered design professionals who went to school for/taught themselves from the field of Human Computer Interaction, which involves a multitude of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies for assessing usability and bringing the voice of the user early into the development lifecycle on the otherhand... now that is sorely lacking and is historically underinvested in. Their job makes your job as a developer easier, not having to redo work and waste time if they are plugged into your dev team and focusing on your users. Ask yourself, as a developer, do you feel you have the specialist skillset and expertise to truly validate designs with real people (users)? Is this something you would want to do, if only those pesky UX "design" professionals didn't take them over to justify their jobs? Let's put you in front of 10 different users of your product for an hour each, give you a facilitator guide, and have you guide them through a task-based usability review of your product. Make sure you aren't asking leading questions or biasing their responses, then synthesize the essence of all the interviews into insights to improve the product design. Finally create a read out report that you have to present to senior leadership for another hour on what you learned and how to improve the product design. Oh yeah, you now have 0 hours to code in your fulltime 9-5 job. Good luck! Note: I acknowledge a UX researcher is a full-time specialist role, however any UX designer worth a damn should be T-shaped and able to use qualitative research methods to interview users and evaluate their designs.. otherwise they are a UI designer and guessing at best.
- tmp_anon_22 5y ago
  > from the field of Human Computer Interaction This is how you get death by a thousand A/B tests a la Google, Facebook, and other ultimately user-hostile interfaces that optimize for ad engagement. Give me a compassionate, thoughtful, designer who isn't an ass hole any day of the week.
  - sizzle 5y ago
    A/B tests are more of a thing in the ecommerce and ad-tech space and only a small aspect of the UX research methodology landscape, see: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/which-ux-research-methods/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/which-ux-research-methods/ The field of HCI (and Human Factors before it) pioneered the application of qualitative research methods from adjacent fields e.g. anthropology, cognitive/social sciences, etc. towards computers and information technology. Optimizing for 'ad engagement' seems to be a recent phenomenon in the timeline of HCI and arguably is being written by the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. and the people on their payroll who sold their soul to make this their life's work.
patternMachine 5y ago
Pointlessly reworking software is the hallmark of a poor (or green) contributor. Designers can redesign features that work fine, engineers can refactor code that doesn't need optimization, PMs can come up with features that nobody needs. Designers might do this more often since there is a somewhat lower barrier to entry than the other two disciplines, but that doesn't mean the whole profession should be ditched. A good designer knows when to pull out the big design guns and when to leave em holstered.
scollet 5y ago
Designers often have a much more intimate view of the application as an abstraction. I don't think you want to be benching that knowledge very often. Having extended research phases or personal development would be great to cycle in between major releases. In the interim they might develop better tooling or A/B a subset of features, or strategize with the analytics dept. We really all should have a designer mindset, but truly professional designers are product gurus.
nbzso 5y ago
You are essentially right. That's why I switched my focus from UX only to UI and front-end implementation. Fighting for 20 years to educate programmers and investors on the importance of Human Centered Design and Function over Form approach, is hard. And I and everybody in the Design Industry have failed miserably. Now when every startup has a boilerplate, templates and libraries in hand and "that's enough". Designers (or I may say - Decorators) are "thousands a dime", they are racing themselves to the bottom of the pit. But I am cool with it. After all SaaS design software is here to collect and label enough data for big Neural Model to emerge and remove design from the picture. So your dream will come true, and you will be next in line of removal from production pipeline. Having programmers as permanent staff when you need the same CRUD paradigm is unnecessary, and you can hire as a consultants when you're making a new product/feature but never otherwise.

dtjb 5y ago

I'm sure there are designers making parallel arguments about developers :)

bitwize 5y ago
Indeed, this is how game developers work: hired in legion strength to push a game to release, then laid off once it's released.
- Transfinity 5y ago
  I've heard that DLC has made this less of a problem in recent years. Since there's a stable, predictable revenue stream and delivery channel for new content, iit's much easier to justify keeping devs, designers and artists on full time. Presumably this varies by studio / publisher / genre, but my impression is it's much better than it was.
sodapopcan 5y ago
Yeah, there is certainly a parallel argument to be made about constantly introducing new tech even if the currently used tech is GoodEnough.

ysavir 5y ago

Assuming for the sake of argument that this is at all true, is the problem that designers are out to justify their jobs, and making changes as a consequence, or that designers are being put in a position where they have to justify their jobs, and are making changes to satisfy their managers? If anything, the problem in this scenario is that culturally we need everyone to be contributing all of the time, even for positions that may experience occasional downtime. Let's not assign blame to a particular group when they're simply responding to the pressures put on them.

jrm4 5y ago
If this is the best argument one can come up with for not being critical here, for me it absolutely proves we need to be more critical here. Of course, I don't wish to see anyone suffer, but I'm seeing something like: "Hey, we're paying a guy to dig holes and fill them back up with no value whatsoever, why are we doing that?" "Hey, man, stop attacking hole-diggers, they're just trying to make a living."
- ysavir 5y ago
  Can you go into more detail of why you think we need to be critical of designers? The GP makes no effort to justify their criticism of designers, perhaps you can provide some reasons for it, and thereby allow people to respond to actual arguments.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    A good example that was discussed recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28504573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28504573 The justification isn't "It helps users" or anything like that. It's "This is not a new idea either — pretty much everyone else is doing it, e.g. macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, elementary OS, KDE.". Reducing usability and breaking habits to follow trends is a bad thing.
    - anchpop 5y ago
      This is a purely aesthetic change, it doesn't break any habits. In this case, it probably also improves usability, because there's less visual noise connected to those buttons, which lets you draw attention to buttons the user might not already know about using the same technique while staying within a certain 'visual noise budget'. Users expect that icons on the header bar are buttons (what else would they be?), so there's no need to call attention to that fact with an extra visual indicator. "Following trends" is a good thing because users appreciate when a piece of software looks like software they're already familiar with. It is maybe slightly annoying to people who already are used to the software, but every new user benefits from it.

magicink81 5y ago

Design is misunderstood, often by designers, and it seems like you also may have some misunderstandings based on your assessments of what should designers do (vs what they do). Based on your comment it sounds like the designers you work with have an over-emphasis on visual UI design. I don't think you are to blame though - I have observed a consistent dumbing down of design discourse and practices among people that don't take the time to learn the depth of what is available. This includes most practicing designers. I have observed that designers are less interested in educating the world about their practices than perhaps they need to be in order to change this situation. Design in most cases is essentially a set of knowledge work processes, the best of which is built on solid research practices informed by psychology and cognitive science. For anyone interested in up-leveling their own understanding of design I recommend the articles, videos, courses and other materials available from the Nielsen Norman Group https://www.nngroup.com/ https://www.nngroup.com/

milkytron 5y ago
This is such a great comment that adheres to exactly what my SO experiences. She is a UX designer, and she was the first one hired at her company. They had no idea what UX design is and all the processes, research, etc that takes place. > I have observed that designers are less interested in educating the world about their practices than perhaps they need to be in order to change this situation. She has found her job has become mostly informing and teaching others how to go about these practices, and if she has spare time does the work herself. But it was such an ordeal when they hired her because they didn't even know what she was supposed to do. She has acted very much like a consultant in this regard, but also does the work involved.

sizzle 5y ago

Visual UI "graphic" design, full of fleeting design trends and dark patterns, sure I agree, bundle them up and send them to the moon. UX =/ UI Human-centered design professionals who went to school for/taught themselves from the field of Human Computer Interaction, which involves a multitude of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies for assessing usability and bringing the voice of the user early into the development lifecycle on the otherhand... now that is sorely lacking and is historically underinvested in. Their job makes your job as a developer easier, not having to redo work and waste time if they are plugged into your dev team and focusing on your users. Ask yourself, as a developer, do you feel you have the specialist skillset and expertise to truly validate designs with real people (users)? Is this something you would want to do, if only those pesky UX "design" professionals didn't take them over to justify their jobs? Let's put you in front of 10 different users of your product for an hour each, give you a facilitator guide, and have you guide them through a task-based usability review of your product. Make sure you aren't asking leading questions or biasing their responses, then synthesize the essence of all the interviews into insights to improve the product design. Finally create a read out report that you have to present to senior leadership for another hour on what you learned and how to improve the product design. Oh yeah, you now have 0 hours to code in your fulltime 9-5 job. Good luck! Note: I acknowledge a UX researcher is a full-time specialist role, however any UX designer worth a damn should be T-shaped and able to use qualitative research methods to interview users and evaluate their designs.. otherwise they are a UI designer and guessing at best.

tmp_anon_22 5y ago
> from the field of Human Computer Interaction This is how you get death by a thousand A/B tests a la Google, Facebook, and other ultimately user-hostile interfaces that optimize for ad engagement. Give me a compassionate, thoughtful, designer who isn't an ass hole any day of the week.
- sizzle 5y ago
  A/B tests are more of a thing in the ecommerce and ad-tech space and only a small aspect of the UX research methodology landscape, see: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/which-ux-research-methods/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/which-ux-research-methods/ The field of HCI (and Human Factors before it) pioneered the application of qualitative research methods from adjacent fields e.g. anthropology, cognitive/social sciences, etc. towards computers and information technology. Optimizing for 'ad engagement' seems to be a recent phenomenon in the timeline of HCI and arguably is being written by the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. and the people on their payroll who sold their soul to make this their life's work.

patternMachine 5y ago

Pointlessly reworking software is the hallmark of a poor (or green) contributor. Designers can redesign features that work fine, engineers can refactor code that doesn't need optimization, PMs can come up with features that nobody needs. Designers might do this more often since there is a somewhat lower barrier to entry than the other two disciplines, but that doesn't mean the whole profession should be ditched. A good designer knows when to pull out the big design guns and when to leave em holstered.

scollet 5y ago

Designers often have a much more intimate view of the application as an abstraction. I don't think you want to be benching that knowledge very often. Having extended research phases or personal development would be great to cycle in between major releases. In the interim they might develop better tooling or A/B a subset of features, or strategize with the analytics dept. We really all should have a designer mindset, but truly professional designers are product gurus.

nbzso 5y ago

You are essentially right. That's why I switched my focus from UX only to UI and front-end implementation. Fighting for 20 years to educate programmers and investors on the importance of Human Centered Design and Function over Form approach, is hard. And I and everybody in the Design Industry have failed miserably. Now when every startup has a boilerplate, templates and libraries in hand and "that's enough". Designers (or I may say - Decorators) are "thousands a dime", they are racing themselves to the bottom of the pit. But I am cool with it. After all SaaS design software is here to collect and label enough data for big Neural Model to emerge and remove design from the picture. So your dream will come true, and you will be next in line of removal from production pipeline. Having programmers as permanent staff when you need the same CRUD paradigm is unnecessary, and you can hire as a consultants when you're making a new product/feature but never otherwise.