8 ms·

How did the designers become absolute dictators? I've dealt with this at a few companies and it's really crazy. I've seen them tank products more than once bec

How did the designers become absolute dictators? I've dealt with this at a few companies and it's really crazy. I've seen them tank products more than once because they ignore everyone and are given unquestionable power. It's absurd. They have as much capacity to be wrong as anybody else

megablast 5y ago
Who should override the experts in design.
- rvba 5y ago
  Management
- Wildgoose 5y ago
  Users. They are the ones providing the money that pays for their employment. "Expert" User Design is design that is recognised as such and accepted by Users. If Users reject these designs then they can't claim to be "experts".
  - kevincox 5y ago
    Any high quality design team should be regularly interacting with users. They should be during users studies, with both the shipping products and mocks of new features. And design team that thinks they can make changes and new features just by sketching in their notebook is mistaken and ineffective. You can't have every user inputting on each change so the design team needs to be the voice of the user. They are talking to users anyways.
fendy3002 5y ago
Maybe same with usual companies, higher ups don't really get ux / functionality, and are moved purely by looks. "Because many users are appraising apple's looks, by cloning apple we'll also get praised by our users right?" "Then we can get Apple users to use windows too!"
- desiarnezjr 5y ago
  But they don't. They've cloned some superficial UX bits. I'm still dismayed that in Windows 10 you still basically have 2 separate UI/UX experiences to configure the damn OS.
  - 41b696ef1113 5y ago
    Isn't that incredible? Trillion dollar company cannot have a top-down decree that the mixed UIs need to be fixed for the next OS.
    - hulitu 5y ago
      Yes, they cannot. Because the new UI is more or less useless and touches core functionality (i.e. interaction with HW). Maybe they were told by kernel engineers to not touch this part.
  - pmontra 5y ago
    A couple of days ago I run into one of those windows in Task Scheduler. I had to type a long string of program arguments into a right aligned narrow text field (plenty of space at the left of it) inside a window that I could not resize to make that text input wider. Luckily that was a VM in my Linux box (the luck is that I use Linux, not Windows.) The Linux equivalent would be either cron or systemd, which are configured with text files that I can type full screen if I care. Microsoft made a ton of work building those graphical UIs and in some case the result is worse than not doing it and using text files. Note that GUIs are not magical. To do what I was up to I still had to look for documentation and eventually had to type some XML in a text area. That is to start a task after another one completed.
    - desiarnezjr 5y ago
      I understand that OSs are really complicated. I've been exposed to every one now for almost four decades. What's dismaying is that in that four decades it's now just regression. I admittedly have used MacOS for a couple of decades -- simple and it works well enough, but always run Windows as a secondary OS and Linux "as needed". Windows has gotten so ersatz and bizarro that it's just strange to me when I do use it every few days. Windows 2000 / Windows 98 had it down. It wasn't fancy, logical, and it worked. It's been a confusing mess since Windows 7.
joenathanone 5y ago
> How did the designers become absolute dictators? When the iPhone became successful, before that it was all utility, then fashion took priority when the iPhone out sold literally everything.
- kristopolous 5y ago
  I've always been suspicious of that attribution. Pretend everything else about the iPhone happened; The charisma and leadership of Steve Jobs, the brilliant marketing, the countless number of talented software engineers, but instead the device basically looks like a blackberry. Physical keyboard, plastic case, More or less a knock off aesthetically. We're deep in counterfactual territory but I think it can be argued that this imagined iphone with a very conventional aesthetic would have done effectively just as well. It still connects to iTunes and hooks up to your Mac, having all the same technical features and functionality. The point is people see something successful, then they assign one of the attributes as the driver of the success and there seems to be very little reflection of the two core questions: (1) is it true? (2) is it generalizable to other companies? And let's say it is. Are you really going to make something that's more iPhoney than an iPhone? More macosy then macos? So even conceding those two points, which I think are utterly contestable, It still doesn't make any sense. Maybe that's why it's never worked. Maybe. Who knows?
  - zakius 5y ago
    the thing about iphone is: it didn't start the smartphone era like many say, it ended it suddenly people started desiring device as expensive as business models were that coul'd only do half of things their mainstream ones could so by market rules it wasn't profitable to struggle and do things right anymore, do you remember cheap Chinese portable music players that required dedicated software but we beared with it because they were cheap? so... iphone isn't cheap
    - kristopolous 5y ago
      Apple, and a number of other players, have long had the ability to craft a favourable narrative in most people's minds. Heck even supposedly technically minded people will say things like "Apple invented the mouse" or they had "the first mp3 player" or "the first smartphone". There's a circus about them that permits them to stomp out history before their first performance and mark it as irrelevant. Musk is also a master of this craft. Founder of Tesla? You'd be surprised. Founder of PayPal? Go look that up. These people could have been excellent actors if their businesses had failed
lugu 5y ago
Everyone can give their opinion on UX choices, this is something higher up can discuss at lenght. It is much more involving to discuss engineering topics and the time scale is different. Overhall it is easier for designers to develop accointance with top management (as compared with engineers). Engineers would love to do what designers do: propose massive changes every years. They don't for engineering reasons. Is there such a thing as design continuity? or granular design change?
willcipriano 5y ago
Designers focus hard on interpersonal skills. To non-technical leadership they look like tech guys who aren't weird and have better haircuts.

megablast 5y ago

Who should override the experts in design.

rvba 5y ago
Management
Wildgoose 5y ago
Users. They are the ones providing the money that pays for their employment. "Expert" User Design is design that is recognised as such and accepted by Users. If Users reject these designs then they can't claim to be "experts".
- kevincox 5y ago
  Any high quality design team should be regularly interacting with users. They should be during users studies, with both the shipping products and mocks of new features. And design team that thinks they can make changes and new features just by sketching in their notebook is mistaken and ineffective. You can't have every user inputting on each change so the design team needs to be the voice of the user. They are talking to users anyways.

fendy3002 5y ago

Maybe same with usual companies, higher ups don't really get ux / functionality, and are moved purely by looks. "Because many users are appraising apple's looks, by cloning apple we'll also get praised by our users right?" "Then we can get Apple users to use windows too!"

desiarnezjr 5y ago
But they don't. They've cloned some superficial UX bits. I'm still dismayed that in Windows 10 you still basically have 2 separate UI/UX experiences to configure the damn OS.
- 41b696ef1113 5y ago
  Isn't that incredible? Trillion dollar company cannot have a top-down decree that the mixed UIs need to be fixed for the next OS.
  - hulitu 5y ago
    Yes, they cannot. Because the new UI is more or less useless and touches core functionality (i.e. interaction with HW). Maybe they were told by kernel engineers to not touch this part.
- pmontra 5y ago
  A couple of days ago I run into one of those windows in Task Scheduler. I had to type a long string of program arguments into a right aligned narrow text field (plenty of space at the left of it) inside a window that I could not resize to make that text input wider. Luckily that was a VM in my Linux box (the luck is that I use Linux, not Windows.) The Linux equivalent would be either cron or systemd, which are configured with text files that I can type full screen if I care. Microsoft made a ton of work building those graphical UIs and in some case the result is worse than not doing it and using text files. Note that GUIs are not magical. To do what I was up to I still had to look for documentation and eventually had to type some XML in a text area. That is to start a task after another one completed.
  - desiarnezjr 5y ago
    I understand that OSs are really complicated. I've been exposed to every one now for almost four decades. What's dismaying is that in that four decades it's now just regression. I admittedly have used MacOS for a couple of decades -- simple and it works well enough, but always run Windows as a secondary OS and Linux "as needed". Windows has gotten so ersatz and bizarro that it's just strange to me when I do use it every few days. Windows 2000 / Windows 98 had it down. It wasn't fancy, logical, and it worked. It's been a confusing mess since Windows 7.

joenathanone 5y ago

> How did the designers become absolute dictators? When the iPhone became successful, before that it was all utility, then fashion took priority when the iPhone out sold literally everything.

kristopolous 5y ago
I've always been suspicious of that attribution. Pretend everything else about the iPhone happened; The charisma and leadership of Steve Jobs, the brilliant marketing, the countless number of talented software engineers, but instead the device basically looks like a blackberry. Physical keyboard, plastic case, More or less a knock off aesthetically. We're deep in counterfactual territory but I think it can be argued that this imagined iphone with a very conventional aesthetic would have done effectively just as well. It still connects to iTunes and hooks up to your Mac, having all the same technical features and functionality. The point is people see something successful, then they assign one of the attributes as the driver of the success and there seems to be very little reflection of the two core questions: (1) is it true? (2) is it generalizable to other companies? And let's say it is. Are you really going to make something that's more iPhoney than an iPhone? More macosy then macos? So even conceding those two points, which I think are utterly contestable, It still doesn't make any sense. Maybe that's why it's never worked. Maybe. Who knows?
- zakius 5y ago
  the thing about iphone is: it didn't start the smartphone era like many say, it ended it suddenly people started desiring device as expensive as business models were that coul'd only do half of things their mainstream ones could so by market rules it wasn't profitable to struggle and do things right anymore, do you remember cheap Chinese portable music players that required dedicated software but we beared with it because they were cheap? so... iphone isn't cheap
  - kristopolous 5y ago
    Apple, and a number of other players, have long had the ability to craft a favourable narrative in most people's minds. Heck even supposedly technically minded people will say things like "Apple invented the mouse" or they had "the first mp3 player" or "the first smartphone". There's a circus about them that permits them to stomp out history before their first performance and mark it as irrelevant. Musk is also a master of this craft. Founder of Tesla? You'd be surprised. Founder of PayPal? Go look that up. These people could have been excellent actors if their businesses had failed

lugu 5y ago

Everyone can give their opinion on UX choices, this is something higher up can discuss at lenght. It is much more involving to discuss engineering topics and the time scale is different. Overhall it is easier for designers to develop accointance with top management (as compared with engineers). Engineers would love to do what designers do: propose massive changes every years. They don't for engineering reasons. Is there such a thing as design continuity? or granular design change?

willcipriano 5y ago

Designers focus hard on interpersonal skills. To non-technical leadership they look like tech guys who aren't weird and have better haircuts.