6 ms·

love the way you crystalized this. It's strange to me how bad UX can devolve at the hands of people whose profession is UX. I trust they aren't intentionally do

by apsurd 5y ago

love the way you crystalized this. It's strange to me how bad UX can devolve at the hands of people whose profession is UX. I trust they aren't intentionally doing it. And other factors like ads, "need to monetize", "short-sighted KPIs", all makes sense. What mechanisms are at play that allow professional UX design teams to fuck up a car display? like literally i dont want to think when i need to defrost my window going 70mph and yet here we are

aceazzameen 5y ago
Sometimes a UX team is forced to follow orders from someone above their pay grade. It could be an MBA leading a new feature that wants their button in a specific spot to increase their own metrics. Or someone higher up who "has an idea." Who knows what happened with Tesla though.
- sizzle 5y ago
  They should be held accountable along with the decision makers if people die or are injured. The lack of consequences allows these decisions to be made without user testing and can harm people needlessly.
  - LadyCailin 5y ago
    This is exactly why I think there should be an engineering license for software developers in life critical things like this. We don’t allow civil engineers to build bridges that kill people, neither should we allow software developers. If you’re writing angry birds or whatever, you can do whatever. But if your software is in a car, and it kills someone, you should lose your license to practice.
  - aceazzameen 5y ago
    I hope you include the CEO for signing off on it too.
  - brokenmachine 5y ago
    So many things are monitored on a Tesla, it would be interesting to see if there would be any consequences from a black box style recording where you could see that someone crashed 1s after pressing the screen struggling to find the demister.
- 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 5y ago
  I'm presuming no UX team anywhere has stated "We're done here, there's no way we can improve on this UI". Hence to keep busy changes need to be made. Same with Health and Safety requirements, once a team is in place H&S 'creep' is inevitable. I once worked on a risk assessment for a laminator.
  - aceazzameen 5y ago
    Good UX members won't stick around if they believe something is finished. But someone above them is always mucking something up, so there's always a problem to solve.
cmurf 5y ago
Not enough contrarians. Possibly none. I would be surprised if anyone especially critical fits in at Tesla.
- a9h74j 5y ago
  Yea, lack of mechanism at play as well, I'd guess. I know Elon has spoken about not letting requirements get crazy, but there must be some safety-related UX requirements to check against.
justsomehnguy 5y ago
> I trust they aren't intentionally doing it. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by the need to sustain the visibility of own necessity. 90% of PR and Web/UI/UX people could be safely fired after a couple of interactions of the design (and brought back 3-5-7 years later when the new or re-design would be needed). Sitting and not doing anything would make them fired, so they invent "new", "innovative" and other bullshit named things to justify their pay. Eg: my bank, which changed the logon page like 10 times in 3 years. All times with a lavish descriptions of how the experience got even more better. The page consists of a login and password boxes, just like it had 10 years ago.
- KronisLV 5y ago
  > 90% of PR and Web/UI/UX people could be safely fired after a couple of interactions of the design (and brought back 3-5-7 years later when the new or re-design would be needed). Sitting and not doing anything would make them fired, so they invent "new", "innovative" and other bullshit named things to justify their pay. Isn't this most positions and just people in general, in some capacity? Business and sales pushing for new features that no one necessarily needs. Back end devs padding their CVs with hot tech and often doing refactoring for the sake of refactoring. Front end devs adding more bloat for marginal visual gains and messing with the UI/UX. DBAs mucking about with indices which will either improve or worsen things when the DB is performing adequately already. Ops pushing for using new industry practices which will probably introduce undue complexity into the mix. QA being overly nitpicky about bugs or even visual flaws that no one will ever even run into or notice. Security complaining about supposed CVEs that automated scanning picked up, but that cannot realistically be exploited. Humans are pretty curious by nature and like to feel like they're doing a good job, so i can't help but to feel that it's turtles all the way down, regardless in which direction you look - everyone will be trying to follow industry trends and not miss out, keep their skills relevant or just do anything to justify the existence of their own position.
  - justsomehnguy 5y ago
    > Isn't this most positions It is. Thing is, technical positions (compared to 'artistic') have the means to show the proof of work, though sometimes it requires 'translation' to manglement-speak and they are not immune from 'I can't see|touch you work - means you are not needed'. Creative positions... they literally show the [finished] product, and in our sphere it is usually seen immediately - you can't imitate redesigning the home page of yoursuperbank.com, or spend months on it. But while DBAing, administrating or securing is a never ending process, re/designing is a process with a clearly (well, usually) defined finishing line. So if you want the paycheck - you need to sell the dire need to tweak fonts every couple of months.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
specialist 5y ago
As a recovering UI designer: The only times I was able to ship proven correct and virtuous designs was a) sneak stuff thru when no one was watching and b) being product manager imbued me with the juice to get what I wanted. Every other time, good design was sabotaged by yahoos and chuckleheads, unburdened by experience or domain knowledge, yet were somehow gifted with the certainty of "what users really want".
sn1de 5y ago
20+ years of web site ecommerce development experience and what I see is that consistently the designers and the managers and/or product owners (who have the final say and must be suitably impressed) have no access to, or don't bother to consume or understand the site metrics and in many cases don't even have a rudimentary understanding how how their site works (or doesn't work). I've been in so many meetings where the group was ready and willing to kill a feature, or a link or a button and I've had to bring up hard metrics to keep them from killing something that not only people used, but converted more often with a bigger cart. And these are ecommerce sites, so I can only suppose that it is even more so with any site where cold hard cash is not on the line. The trend towards hiding things just to make the design look clean is ignorant and lazy. UX is hard. It should be driven by metrics and validated by observing real user behavior. Anyone who doesn't do that is being vastly overpaid and inevitably eroding the user experience. Nobody should ever have to hover randomly around a screen to hunt for controls, but I see it every single day, and now even on former bastions of usability like core Mac interfaces. How does this stuff get through usability testing? A: It was probably never done, or if it was the aforementioned decision makers never gave it a first let along a second look. Best advice I can give is to never, ever, do a wholesale site redesign when conversion counts. Always incremental, always iterative, always driven by metrics and true usability labs. If someone balks at doing any of this, they shouldn't be in the business, get rid of them or ask for another designer/team.

by apsurd 5y ago

aceazzameen 5y ago

Sometimes a UX team is forced to follow orders from someone above their pay grade. It could be an MBA leading a new feature that wants their button in a specific spot to increase their own metrics. Or someone higher up who "has an idea." Who knows what happened with Tesla though.

sizzle 5y ago
They should be held accountable along with the decision makers if people die or are injured. The lack of consequences allows these decisions to be made without user testing and can harm people needlessly.
- LadyCailin 5y ago
  This is exactly why I think there should be an engineering license for software developers in life critical things like this. We don’t allow civil engineers to build bridges that kill people, neither should we allow software developers. If you’re writing angry birds or whatever, you can do whatever. But if your software is in a car, and it kills someone, you should lose your license to practice.
- aceazzameen 5y ago
  I hope you include the CEO for signing off on it too.
- brokenmachine 5y ago
  So many things are monitored on a Tesla, it would be interesting to see if there would be any consequences from a black box style recording where you could see that someone crashed 1s after pressing the screen struggling to find the demister.
6LLvveMx2koXfwn 5y ago
I'm presuming no UX team anywhere has stated "We're done here, there's no way we can improve on this UI". Hence to keep busy changes need to be made. Same with Health and Safety requirements, once a team is in place H&S 'creep' is inevitable. I once worked on a risk assessment for a laminator.
- aceazzameen 5y ago
  Good UX members won't stick around if they believe something is finished. But someone above them is always mucking something up, so there's always a problem to solve.

cmurf 5y ago

Not enough contrarians. Possibly none. I would be surprised if anyone especially critical fits in at Tesla.

a9h74j 5y ago
Yea, lack of mechanism at play as well, I'd guess. I know Elon has spoken about not letting requirements get crazy, but there must be some safety-related UX requirements to check against.

justsomehnguy 5y ago

> I trust they aren't intentionally doing it. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by the need to sustain the visibility of own necessity. 90% of PR and Web/UI/UX people could be safely fired after a couple of interactions of the design (and brought back 3-5-7 years later when the new or re-design would be needed). Sitting and not doing anything would make them fired, so they invent "new", "innovative" and other bullshit named things to justify their pay. Eg: my bank, which changed the logon page like 10 times in 3 years. All times with a lavish descriptions of how the experience got even more better. The page consists of a login and password boxes, just like it had 10 years ago.

KronisLV 5y ago
> 90% of PR and Web/UI/UX people could be safely fired after a couple of interactions of the design (and brought back 3-5-7 years later when the new or re-design would be needed). Sitting and not doing anything would make them fired, so they invent "new", "innovative" and other bullshit named things to justify their pay. Isn't this most positions and just people in general, in some capacity? Business and sales pushing for new features that no one necessarily needs. Back end devs padding their CVs with hot tech and often doing refactoring for the sake of refactoring. Front end devs adding more bloat for marginal visual gains and messing with the UI/UX. DBAs mucking about with indices which will either improve or worsen things when the DB is performing adequately already. Ops pushing for using new industry practices which will probably introduce undue complexity into the mix. QA being overly nitpicky about bugs or even visual flaws that no one will ever even run into or notice. Security complaining about supposed CVEs that automated scanning picked up, but that cannot realistically be exploited. Humans are pretty curious by nature and like to feel like they're doing a good job, so i can't help but to feel that it's turtles all the way down, regardless in which direction you look - everyone will be trying to follow industry trends and not miss out, keep their skills relevant or just do anything to justify the existence of their own position.
- justsomehnguy 5y ago
  > Isn't this most positions It is. Thing is, technical positions (compared to 'artistic') have the means to show the proof of work, though sometimes it requires 'translation' to manglement-speak and they are not immune from 'I can't see|touch you work - means you are not needed'. Creative positions... they literally show the [finished] product, and in our sphere it is usually seen immediately - you can't imitate redesigning the home page of yoursuperbank.com, or spend months on it. But while DBAing, administrating or securing is a never ending process, re/designing is a process with a clearly (well, usually) defined finishing line. So if you want the paycheck - you need to sell the dire need to tweak fonts every couple of months.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

specialist 5y ago

As a recovering UI designer: The only times I was able to ship proven correct and virtuous designs was a) sneak stuff thru when no one was watching and b) being product manager imbued me with the juice to get what I wanted. Every other time, good design was sabotaged by yahoos and chuckleheads, unburdened by experience or domain knowledge, yet were somehow gifted with the certainty of "what users really want".

sn1de 5y ago

20+ years of web site ecommerce development experience and what I see is that consistently the designers and the managers and/or product owners (who have the final say and must be suitably impressed) have no access to, or don't bother to consume or understand the site metrics and in many cases don't even have a rudimentary understanding how how their site works (or doesn't work). I've been in so many meetings where the group was ready and willing to kill a feature, or a link or a button and I've had to bring up hard metrics to keep them from killing something that not only people used, but converted more often with a bigger cart. And these are ecommerce sites, so I can only suppose that it is even more so with any site where cold hard cash is not on the line. The trend towards hiding things just to make the design look clean is ignorant and lazy. UX is hard. It should be driven by metrics and validated by observing real user behavior. Anyone who doesn't do that is being vastly overpaid and inevitably eroding the user experience. Nobody should ever have to hover randomly around a screen to hunt for controls, but I see it every single day, and now even on former bastions of usability like core Mac interfaces. How does this stuff get through usability testing? A: It was probably never done, or if it was the aforementioned decision makers never gave it a first let along a second look. Best advice I can give is to never, ever, do a wholesale site redesign when conversion counts. Always incremental, always iterative, always driven by metrics and true usability labs. If someone balks at doing any of this, they shouldn't be in the business, get rid of them or ask for another designer/team.