4 ms·

You asked "in general." It's because "UX" is presently way too full of itself; it passes off a lot of mere fashion and preference as "objectivity" or "science"

by jrm4 5y ago

You asked "in general." It's because "UX" is presently way too full of itself; it passes off a lot of mere fashion and preference as "objectivity" or "science" and then other UX people get suckered into believing it, not just continuing arbitrary trends, but also reducing usability and optionality along the way. Poofy vs. flat buttons is just a preference, it's not science. So fashion is focused on instead of real usability. Fixing this will take time, and probably regulation type measures. The analogue here is architecture. It's great to make something beautiful, but if you don't have wheelchair ramps or the bars on the railing are wide enough for a kid to get a head stuck in you don't get to build the building. UX needs more of this.

karmakaze 5y ago
As much as I like to point out the emptiness of such trends, it would be unfair to place it fully on the UX folk. It comes down to incentives and economics. We the users won't look at a piece of useful software if it doesn't 'look' like the kind of thing that is up-to-date and modern in its behaviors. Same goes for everyone else in the software production industry, except for the core function developers who complain, myself included. In short, fashion exists because it sells. It's also good to know who you're selling to, sometimes it's not the person using your product, e.g. Apple is selling to those who don't already have their latest product, so it's important to round-off (or square) those edges, etc.
- jrm4 5y ago
  I'm not putting it on the people, but I am putting it on the "field" or the "discipline." Perhaps in the same vein as "Economics," which purports to be a science but in practice is something else. UX may even be worse, because at least Econ has had the time and space to be established and is at least arguably a "discipline." I'm quite literally unsure as to whether "UX" should even exist as its own thing at all. I'm not sure you can mix "engineering" and "advertising" and "fashion" and "psychology" to this extent and have something coherent at the end.
  - karmakaze 5y ago
    In an older age, UX would have been industrial design which I can certainly appreciate. Historically there's more of a separation of industrial design and how a thing operates, the variation in the exterior of cars doesn't dictate the drivetrain or controls. With software there tends to be more overlap. How things are grouped, displayed/hidden is explicitly affecting the displays and controls. We do need good UX, usability, ergonomics, etc. It can't be left to engineers who will merely attach a display/control to every element of the data model with 1:1 mappings. I agree that UX doesn't seem to be its own thing but it's hard to separate, with Conway's law and all. The best we can do is be frank with who it serves and/or why. I don't think people really want to know this level of truth on a daily basis though.
    - jrm4 5y ago
      "I don't think people really want to know.." But why not go ahead and actually find out? That's my point, and that's what makes this field potentially SO MUCH DIFFERENT. It's true, in the past you couldn't do this for toasters. You had to do a ton of homework and pick a design and hope people liked it. But this is software! Just bake in a little "hey, you might break this but here's how to fiddle around with it" and let people work-slash-play.
      - karmakaze 5y ago
        This sounds good in theory, but then we could end up with something like the various Linux desktops. It's hard to find a complete and coherent one that doesn't also have annoying bits too. Usually if such a thing exists it's from implementation of a single vision rather than a collection of hobby experiments.
        jrm4 5y ago
        One, there's no good reason that you can't have both. None at all. Lots of times in Steve Job's history where he arbitrarily (or at least, not for reasons of his expertise in UI) shut down greater user configurability -- not for the sake of design, but for the sake of market control. But also, two, I think "various Linux desktops" would be far preferable to what we have now. Again, I appreciate Steve Jobs' accelerating things in many ways, but also, he made interfaces perhaps too simple, to the point of frequently being just dumb.
FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
The high point of UX design was Windows 95. It was consistent. Windows had menus in the same place, and everyone knew what a menu was. Buttons looked like buttons. Apps generally used the same Win32 API and had the same appearance. Key bindings were underlined. You could teach it to someone and they could learn it. And once they knew it they could be fast. Now I have to explain hamburgers and ellipses to my 80-year-old relatives. They have no idea what's going on. It's bewildering for them. It makes me realize how large a part of my brain is forced to run a simulation of the UX designer in my head, to play a game of long-distance charades with them. Google is to blame for a lot of this. They kicked off a minimalist trend with Chrome, which everybody aped. Now everything is a nearly-featureless shape with a few ambiguous hieroglyphs. Internationalization and cost-saving may also be part of it. The old Windows was very verbal: It used words, English words. But it's expensive to translate those to various languages. And expensive to make sure it still works in Arabic and Chinese. So instead, Tech companies have ended up with an iconographic pidgin that they don't have to translate. The burden is pushed to users. It also has to do with the move to WebApps and the absence of standardized GUI APIs. There's no "Win32" for WebApps. So people invent their own. (Actually, I take it back; there is a standard: It's the default form elements, that you had at least as far back as HTML4. When was the last time you saw a native checkbox or radio button?) But I don't think that's the main thing. I think it's mostly fashion. People would be faintly embarrassed to release a program with Win32 clicky buttons -- even though other people would find it easy to use.
- jrm4 5y ago
  Sure, it's fine. But I think there's a bigger point here. I could change Windows 95. Dark theme, light theme, lots more. See also Linux for even more possibilities. That's the great big ball of stupid that all of UX presently misses, and fundamentally why I don't much respect it. ALWAYS at least allow the damn user to decide if they want to change something.
  - FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
    To your point, I'll add that semantic HTML with CSS was like this. It was maybe a little technical, but a motivated person could fairly easily override their browser's stylesheet. And I imagine that this was not just some esoterica to, say, people with limited vision. I don't think you can do this anymore, practically?

by jrm4 5y ago

karmakaze 5y ago

As much as I like to point out the emptiness of such trends, it would be unfair to place it fully on the UX folk. It comes down to incentives and economics. We the users won't look at a piece of useful software if it doesn't 'look' like the kind of thing that is up-to-date and modern in its behaviors. Same goes for everyone else in the software production industry, except for the core function developers who complain, myself included. In short, fashion exists because it sells. It's also good to know who you're selling to, sometimes it's not the person using your product, e.g. Apple is selling to those who don't already have their latest product, so it's important to round-off (or square) those edges, etc.

jrm4 5y ago
I'm not putting it on the people, but I am putting it on the "field" or the "discipline." Perhaps in the same vein as "Economics," which purports to be a science but in practice is something else. UX may even be worse, because at least Econ has had the time and space to be established and is at least arguably a "discipline." I'm quite literally unsure as to whether "UX" should even exist as its own thing at all. I'm not sure you can mix "engineering" and "advertising" and "fashion" and "psychology" to this extent and have something coherent at the end.
- karmakaze 5y ago
  In an older age, UX would have been industrial design which I can certainly appreciate. Historically there's more of a separation of industrial design and how a thing operates, the variation in the exterior of cars doesn't dictate the drivetrain or controls. With software there tends to be more overlap. How things are grouped, displayed/hidden is explicitly affecting the displays and controls. We do need good UX, usability, ergonomics, etc. It can't be left to engineers who will merely attach a display/control to every element of the data model with 1:1 mappings. I agree that UX doesn't seem to be its own thing but it's hard to separate, with Conway's law and all. The best we can do is be frank with who it serves and/or why. I don't think people really want to know this level of truth on a daily basis though.
  - jrm4 5y ago
    "I don't think people really want to know.." But why not go ahead and actually find out? That's my point, and that's what makes this field potentially SO MUCH DIFFERENT. It's true, in the past you couldn't do this for toasters. You had to do a ton of homework and pick a design and hope people liked it. But this is software! Just bake in a little "hey, you might break this but here's how to fiddle around with it" and let people work-slash-play.
    - karmakaze 5y ago
      This sounds good in theory, but then we could end up with something like the various Linux desktops. It's hard to find a complete and coherent one that doesn't also have annoying bits too. Usually if such a thing exists it's from implementation of a single vision rather than a collection of hobby experiments.
      - jrm4 5y ago
        One, there's no good reason that you can't have both. None at all. Lots of times in Steve Job's history where he arbitrarily (or at least, not for reasons of his expertise in UI) shut down greater user configurability -- not for the sake of design, but for the sake of market control. But also, two, I think "various Linux desktops" would be far preferable to what we have now. Again, I appreciate Steve Jobs' accelerating things in many ways, but also, he made interfaces perhaps too simple, to the point of frequently being just dumb.

FooBarBizBazz 5y ago

The high point of UX design was Windows 95. It was consistent. Windows had menus in the same place, and everyone knew what a menu was. Buttons looked like buttons. Apps generally used the same Win32 API and had the same appearance. Key bindings were underlined. You could teach it to someone and they could learn it. And once they knew it they could be fast. Now I have to explain hamburgers and ellipses to my 80-year-old relatives. They have no idea what's going on. It's bewildering for them. It makes me realize how large a part of my brain is forced to run a simulation of the UX designer in my head, to play a game of long-distance charades with them. Google is to blame for a lot of this. They kicked off a minimalist trend with Chrome, which everybody aped. Now everything is a nearly-featureless shape with a few ambiguous hieroglyphs. Internationalization and cost-saving may also be part of it. The old Windows was very verbal: It used words, English words. But it's expensive to translate those to various languages. And expensive to make sure it still works in Arabic and Chinese. So instead, Tech companies have ended up with an iconographic pidgin that they don't have to translate. The burden is pushed to users. It also has to do with the move to WebApps and the absence of standardized GUI APIs. There's no "Win32" for WebApps. So people invent their own. (Actually, I take it back; there is a standard: It's the default form elements, that you had at least as far back as HTML4. When was the last time you saw a native checkbox or radio button?) But I don't think that's the main thing. I think it's mostly fashion. People would be faintly embarrassed to release a program with Win32 clicky buttons -- even though other people would find it easy to use.

jrm4 5y ago
Sure, it's fine. But I think there's a bigger point here. I could change Windows 95. Dark theme, light theme, lots more. See also Linux for even more possibilities. That's the great big ball of stupid that all of UX presently misses, and fundamentally why I don't much respect it. ALWAYS at least allow the damn user to decide if they want to change something.
- FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
  To your point, I'll add that semantic HTML with CSS was like this. It was maybe a little technical, but a motivated person could fairly easily override their browser's stylesheet. And I imagine that this was not just some esoterica to, say, people with limited vision. I don't think you can do this anymore, practically?