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This is exactly how it feels with every iteration of my company's new design. Let's disappear scroll bars! Let's hide the menu! Let's order sub-menus by frequen

This is exactly how it feels with every iteration of my company's new design. Let's disappear scroll bars! Let's hide the menu! Let's order sub-menus by frequency of use, rather than by alphabetical order! Let's get rid of border lines around text entry boxes! Let's make clickable and non-clickable text the same font, style, and color! Let's-- I do not understand why designers are so insistent on making tools so difficult and unpleasant to use.

mitchdoogle 5y ago
Frequency of use seems like a better metric than alphabetical order. The order of the alphabet is arbitrary. Besides, I think this is fairly normal - I just had a look at all the applications I have open now and not one has submenus in alphabetical order
tartoran 5y ago
Don’t be surprised. They’re brewing dark patterns.
- quacked 5y ago
  I don't disagree with you in the slightest for most other software tools, but this is an internal tool that we're selling so that people can build their own applications. There's no advertising--in fact, the fewer seconds people spend inside the application, the better it is for our bottom line because it means we can pump out the applications faster.
  - brimble 5y ago
    I think there are a few related causes behind this behavior: 1) Visual changes show better than feature lists. I'm not convinced this matters anywhere near as much for customers as marketing folks seem to think it does, but marketing values it regardless, management values it (it'll show better to their bosses, too), and product managers, designers, and front-end developers value it (so they have nice-looking things for portfolios and presentations, both internal and external) 2) Making something that looks good in a screenshot or demo is not the same thing as making something that works well (that is, has "good UX"), and making something that does both well is hard enough that the talent (and environment/budget) to do it may be fairly rare. The former matters to those concerned about point 1, so that's what gets priority (which is why so many redesigns are neutral, at best, as far as UX, and many are worse). 3) If design is done well, it's heavily cyclical. Design guidelines and languages and component libraries and such should be built up such that most design work only happens when there are initial designs, very large feature add-ons that break with what the previous design guidelines can accommodate, or redesigns. So, if you're a designer and want to stay comfortably employed, and you're a manager who doesn't want to surrender head-count or lose your people to other projects, and a large part of the org has various incentives to push initiatives that result in something nice to to look at (see 1, again) what happens? Lots more redesigns than need to happen. LOTS more. [EDIT] And all this is before we even consider possible business reasons to deliberately make the product worse, which are also A Thing.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    > in fact, the fewer seconds people spend inside the application, the better it is for our bottom line because it means we can pump out the applications faster. This might be true from a bottom-line perspective, but the marketing/product/engagement manager's targets (whether company-mandated or personally-mandated to use them as resume bullet points) may still hinge on increasing "engagement".
kbutler 5y ago
Because they are visual designers, not interaction designers, so appearance is the primary criteria, rather than visual affordances to guide the user. Recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things
- quacked 5y ago
  Wonderful recommendation (I have read it). I don't think anyone should be allowed to design one single consumer product until they have it practically memorized.
- Jerrrry 5y ago
  Functional design ain't pretty.
  - 542458 5y ago
    I don’t think is true. Functional design may not be optimally pretty in some cases. However, the eye finds things like readability, organization, and visual hierarchy to be visually appealing - so functional design can very well be pretty in some cases (for example, Blender’s UI is highly functional, but still relatively visually pleasing). I’m not saying that all functional design is pretty, but I am saying that rejecting all pretty designs as non-functional is incorrect.
    - b112 5y ago
      And regardless, function before form does not invalidate form after the fact. EG, you're building a bridge. It needs to do its job, and not collapse. There are many perfectly functional designs, which have appealing form. Yet, if you want to actually be able to use the beast, it: - needs to be wide enough to pass traffic, but not too wide (waste of money) - needs to be able to keep the traffic from careening off into the abyss each use - needs 100 other things such as the above But once the above "functional" criteria are met, form is fine. Why not make it look good? Great! Yet, don't (as an example) overlay form which then reflects sunlight into driver's eyes, so they can't see and crash on the bridge. This is all reasonably understood with normal day objects. But, when someone engineers a bridge, they have to go to a decade of schooling + years on the job, to rise to that position. And the same for people designing beautiful buildings, or homes. They know the restrictions, the load requirements, and then they layer extra on top of that. Not even sure what I'm fully rambling on here about, except I guess that I think UX/UI should only be attempted after years of using software in a professional capacity. I was in to a store the other day, and they were looking up stock. It was an ncurses display. And the employee was zooming through it, as typical, with keyboard shortcuts, and FAST. UX/UI is really the problem. Making things pretty gets in the way of functional first. Keep it function before form, and you're fine. And if anyone rattles on about Apple and Steve Jobs, from what I've read, heard, and watched? He was 100% about "function first!". He'd go ballistic if simple functionality was hard to get at, or missing, or buggy, or incomprehensible. Yup, he wanted form to look good. But that came on top of proper, perfect function. Which is its own beauty.
manachar 5y ago
"Move fast and break things" with a healthy does of deep disrespect for the user mixed into a young and mostly self taught discipline (UI/UX) based on nice sounding pseudo-science that cherry picks usability studies to meet aesthetic desires of the highest-paid opinion in the room. The modern web disgusts and enrages me more often than not.
- aaaaaaaaata 5y ago
  It's one of few ways a small, scrappy firm can stand out — talking to the user instead of taking the decision made by some investor/suit in a larger, less efficient firm.
_Algernon_ 5y ago
If UI designers were making a car, the pedals would switch spots for no apparent reason every year, and the steering wheel would turn into a trendy motion control interface.
- colpabar 5y ago
  Sounds like the spotify app. Why can't there just be a static button to get me to my recommended weekly/daily playlists?
  - salzig 5y ago
    There is? You can follow those playlist and place them at the top of your playlists. Who needs the crap „startpage“ as a startpage anyways.
    - colpabar 5y ago
      > Who needs the crap „startpage“ as a startpage anyways. I understand this 100%. Youtube is the same exact thing - the home page is total garbage unless you enjoy watching the same 8 videos you just watched. But we're in a thread about bad UI/UX, so I'm going to complain that the "default" being bad is a bad thing.
      - _Algernon_ 5y ago
        Perhaps a bit off-topic, but the browser extension Unhook^[1] can be used to clean up the Youtube interface pretty well. I use it to remove everything except the subscription feed. [1]: FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recommended-videos/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom... Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-youtube-rec/khncfooichmfjbepaaaebmommgaepoid?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout...
  - bobsmooth 5y ago
    You don't have a "Made for you" button under the "Browse" tab?
creakingstairs 5y ago
I think it's because they are usually targeting the design for the broadest audience, so they design for the lowest common denominators and simplify the screen as much as possible to streamline "the main flow" of their app. This involves removing as much elements as possible to cause the least confusion when they interact with the app for the first time. This means that the app will work amazing and without thought ("it just works!") for 80% of the population but will be non-functional for the 20% of the population which includes power users and users who would have been willing to go through the initial learning curve for a more powerful app. Just to note: I'm not deriding the "lowest common denominators" as I am definitely one for some domains. For example, I chose the app with the simplest deisgn for doing my taxes as I didn't want to spend time learning about taxes.
- pmontra 5y ago
  It's that once they did all the useful work they are not old enough to retire so they have to invent something to do. To be fair, most of us are doing only marginally useful work.
- alecbz 5y ago
  It won't be "non-functional", just not as functional as they would have otherwise liked.
  - creakingstairs 5y ago
    You are right. "Non-functional" might have been too strong here.
- xigoi 5y ago
  It's sad that more apps don't have a “power user mode” hidden somewhere in settings, which would give you the choice.
bsedlm 5y ago
what makes you think they're designing tools for you to use? what if they're actually designing systems and schemes which use you? (in soviet russia ---and the modern day internet--- computer uses YOU) I started trying to make a joke but now I'm not laughing :|
8ytecoder 5y ago
Let's break login forms into two pages so we can annoy all the password manager users - for kicks.
- andrewmackrodt 5y ago
  This annoys me too, but since starting work at a company which uses single sign on, it's started to make sense why certain sites have this pattern, e.g. if your login is an email address and the domain is enrolled to handle sign on outside of the service, you are redirected and the original website doesn't have the ability to capture your password. For personal use, I find 1Password typically handles multiple screen logins, including 2FA quite well, although requires an extra UI interaction.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    I understand the technical reason behind it but still, it shouldn't be that hard to provide a separate page with both fields on it that non-SSO users can bookmark.
1270018080 5y ago
They're not going to allow something well designed to be made on the first pass. Sure that would be good for the user and company, but they need to justify their 40hr/week salaried job somehow. It's like planned obsolescence but for work.
userbinator 5y ago
Let's make clickable and non-clickable text the same font, style, and color! Let's remove all indications that buttons are buttons! I've actually had to use a site which had all four combinations: static text that looks like static text, static text that looks like a button, buttons that look like static text, and buttons that look like buttons.
egypturnash 5y ago
"Less is more" is a religion that is very easy to carry far past the point where less begins being less.
nicoffeine 5y ago
> I do not understand why designers are so insistent on making tools so difficult and unpleasant to use. Because they need something to pad their resume. In fact, most of the things that are wrong with software today are for the same reason. Executives want to make bold changes, so the Start button must be "re-imagined." For the same reason, Product Managers "re-imagine" the menus that have been in place for years and Product Designers "re-imagine" the design language to remove all cues that a button clicks and a panel scrolls. In my routine trips to the auto parts stores over the past 20 years, I have seen their throughput drop as more and more of these modern ideas seeped in. Their text menus had been the same for decades, with as many options for a next action as there were keys on the keyboard. If my intuition is correct, they were remote sessions to a server/mainframe. How about that for keeping the computation close to the data. Now that has all been replaced with a single button and a cursor. I'm not a die-hard CLI user by any stretch, but I understand the impulse after watching usability circle the drain year after year. There's a healthy middle somewhere and I am hoping to find it.
mrjin 5y ago
If I remember correctly, Chrome started all this BS with the infamous burger menu. With traditional designs, I can easily find what are the operations available and now I have make at least one extra click to discover that. Making it worse, some websites do not implement the menus correctly so when you move your mouse trying to click one of the sub-menus, the pop-out hides automatically as now you have moved away from the burger menu... It was kinda make sense as we used to have very small screens and the screen estate was very tight. But now we have much bigger screens, such trend just gets worse...
sings 5y ago
I want to push back on this idea that designers are out to destroy everything. I think one interesting way to look at these sort of changes is analogous to the introduction of new features in code. In the short term, new features can be added to the existing codebase without the need for much change, but eventually, the overhead becomes problematic and there is the need to make more structural adjustments. I think it’s similar for designers, who get to the point where new features don’t have a natural home in the existing interface and want to make changes. Just as a junior developer might be tempted to rewrite from scratch, a junior designer might be tempted to introduce a new mental model and rearrange everything. In some cases this may be OK but generally you need a more nuanced approach. The fact that users are the consumers of the change, not designers, is where the analogy falls apart, and thus the need for a more thoughtful introduction of any change. Obviously the abrupt changes are those that cause a negative reaction, especially when combined with the exaggerated desire to clean up an interface. However, not all change is for changes sake. Sometimes it’s just a case of trying to respond to constraints and make the best compromise when dealing with changing software.
- worthless-trash 5y ago
  You can always push back, but in the general case, reality is showing otherwise.
montag 5y ago
Reminds me of when we removed the “Previous Track” button on the Rdio player controls. The data showed that users skipped to previous only a tiny fraction of the time. Lasted about 3 days in production. Underlying this fallacy is the assumption that usage should somehow be uniformly distributed across all features. In reality, a power law distribution is more natural.
ngc248 5y ago
They gotta have something to do ... else how will they justify their salary :)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
DocTomoe 5y ago
If a designer doesn't change things, obviously they have achieved peak design, and are now irrelevant and ready to be fired. As long as they move things around, they get a paycheck.
phendrenad2 5y ago
It's because we (in the tech world) hire UI designers based on how beautiful their portfolio is, not how usable their design is. "But that's the job of UX!" you say. Yes, but we don't hire UX people. We just hire UI people and expect them to secretly be UX people despite giving every indication to the contrary. Oh well.
- mitchdoogle 5y ago
  Function is as much a part of design as is aesthetic appeal. A designer who doesn't consider function on the same level as aesthetics is a bad designer.

mitchdoogle 5y ago

Frequency of use seems like a better metric than alphabetical order. The order of the alphabet is arbitrary. Besides, I think this is fairly normal - I just had a look at all the applications I have open now and not one has submenus in alphabetical order

tartoran 5y ago

Don’t be surprised. They’re brewing dark patterns.

quacked 5y ago
I don't disagree with you in the slightest for most other software tools, but this is an internal tool that we're selling so that people can build their own applications. There's no advertising--in fact, the fewer seconds people spend inside the application, the better it is for our bottom line because it means we can pump out the applications faster.
- brimble 5y ago
  I think there are a few related causes behind this behavior: 1) Visual changes show better than feature lists. I'm not convinced this matters anywhere near as much for customers as marketing folks seem to think it does, but marketing values it regardless, management values it (it'll show better to their bosses, too), and product managers, designers, and front-end developers value it (so they have nice-looking things for portfolios and presentations, both internal and external) 2) Making something that looks good in a screenshot or demo is not the same thing as making something that works well (that is, has "good UX"), and making something that does both well is hard enough that the talent (and environment/budget) to do it may be fairly rare. The former matters to those concerned about point 1, so that's what gets priority (which is why so many redesigns are neutral, at best, as far as UX, and many are worse). 3) If design is done well, it's heavily cyclical. Design guidelines and languages and component libraries and such should be built up such that most design work only happens when there are initial designs, very large feature add-ons that break with what the previous design guidelines can accommodate, or redesigns. So, if you're a designer and want to stay comfortably employed, and you're a manager who doesn't want to surrender head-count or lose your people to other projects, and a large part of the org has various incentives to push initiatives that result in something nice to to look at (see 1, again) what happens? Lots more redesigns than need to happen. LOTS more. [EDIT] And all this is before we even consider possible business reasons to deliberately make the product worse, which are also A Thing.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  > in fact, the fewer seconds people spend inside the application, the better it is for our bottom line because it means we can pump out the applications faster. This might be true from a bottom-line perspective, but the marketing/product/engagement manager's targets (whether company-mandated or personally-mandated to use them as resume bullet points) may still hinge on increasing "engagement".

kbutler 5y ago

Because they are visual designers, not interaction designers, so appearance is the primary criteria, rather than visual affordances to guide the user. Recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things

quacked 5y ago
Wonderful recommendation (I have read it). I don't think anyone should be allowed to design one single consumer product until they have it practically memorized.
Jerrrry 5y ago
Functional design ain't pretty.
- 542458 5y ago
  I don’t think is true. Functional design may not be optimally pretty in some cases. However, the eye finds things like readability, organization, and visual hierarchy to be visually appealing - so functional design can very well be pretty in some cases (for example, Blender’s UI is highly functional, but still relatively visually pleasing). I’m not saying that all functional design is pretty, but I am saying that rejecting all pretty designs as non-functional is incorrect.
  - b112 5y ago
    And regardless, function before form does not invalidate form after the fact. EG, you're building a bridge. It needs to do its job, and not collapse. There are many perfectly functional designs, which have appealing form. Yet, if you want to actually be able to use the beast, it: - needs to be wide enough to pass traffic, but not too wide (waste of money) - needs to be able to keep the traffic from careening off into the abyss each use - needs 100 other things such as the above But once the above "functional" criteria are met, form is fine. Why not make it look good? Great! Yet, don't (as an example) overlay form which then reflects sunlight into driver's eyes, so they can't see and crash on the bridge. This is all reasonably understood with normal day objects. But, when someone engineers a bridge, they have to go to a decade of schooling + years on the job, to rise to that position. And the same for people designing beautiful buildings, or homes. They know the restrictions, the load requirements, and then they layer extra on top of that. Not even sure what I'm fully rambling on here about, except I guess that I think UX/UI should only be attempted after years of using software in a professional capacity. I was in to a store the other day, and they were looking up stock. It was an ncurses display. And the employee was zooming through it, as typical, with keyboard shortcuts, and FAST. UX/UI is really the problem. Making things pretty gets in the way of functional first. Keep it function before form, and you're fine. And if anyone rattles on about Apple and Steve Jobs, from what I've read, heard, and watched? He was 100% about "function first!". He'd go ballistic if simple functionality was hard to get at, or missing, or buggy, or incomprehensible. Yup, he wanted form to look good. But that came on top of proper, perfect function. Which is its own beauty.

manachar 5y ago

"Move fast and break things" with a healthy does of deep disrespect for the user mixed into a young and mostly self taught discipline (UI/UX) based on nice sounding pseudo-science that cherry picks usability studies to meet aesthetic desires of the highest-paid opinion in the room. The modern web disgusts and enrages me more often than not.

aaaaaaaaata 5y ago
It's one of few ways a small, scrappy firm can stand out — talking to the user instead of taking the decision made by some investor/suit in a larger, less efficient firm.

_Algernon_ 5y ago

If UI designers were making a car, the pedals would switch spots for no apparent reason every year, and the steering wheel would turn into a trendy motion control interface.

colpabar 5y ago
Sounds like the spotify app. Why can't there just be a static button to get me to my recommended weekly/daily playlists?
- salzig 5y ago
  There is? You can follow those playlist and place them at the top of your playlists. Who needs the crap „startpage“ as a startpage anyways.
  - colpabar 5y ago
    > Who needs the crap „startpage“ as a startpage anyways. I understand this 100%. Youtube is the same exact thing - the home page is total garbage unless you enjoy watching the same 8 videos you just watched. But we're in a thread about bad UI/UX, so I'm going to complain that the "default" being bad is a bad thing.
    - _Algernon_ 5y ago
      Perhaps a bit off-topic, but the browser extension Unhook^[1] can be used to clean up the Youtube interface pretty well. I use it to remove everything except the subscription feed. [1]: FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recommended-videos/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom... Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-youtube-rec/khncfooichmfjbepaaaebmommgaepoid?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout...
- bobsmooth 5y ago
  You don't have a "Made for you" button under the "Browse" tab?

creakingstairs 5y ago

I think it's because they are usually targeting the design for the broadest audience, so they design for the lowest common denominators and simplify the screen as much as possible to streamline "the main flow" of their app. This involves removing as much elements as possible to cause the least confusion when they interact with the app for the first time. This means that the app will work amazing and without thought ("it just works!") for 80% of the population but will be non-functional for the 20% of the population which includes power users and users who would have been willing to go through the initial learning curve for a more powerful app. Just to note: I'm not deriding the "lowest common denominators" as I am definitely one for some domains. For example, I chose the app with the simplest deisgn for doing my taxes as I didn't want to spend time learning about taxes.

pmontra 5y ago
It's that once they did all the useful work they are not old enough to retire so they have to invent something to do. To be fair, most of us are doing only marginally useful work.
alecbz 5y ago
It won't be "non-functional", just not as functional as they would have otherwise liked.
- creakingstairs 5y ago
  You are right. "Non-functional" might have been too strong here.
xigoi 5y ago
It's sad that more apps don't have a “power user mode” hidden somewhere in settings, which would give you the choice.

bsedlm 5y ago

what makes you think they're designing tools for you to use? what if they're actually designing systems and schemes which use you? (in soviet russia ---and the modern day internet--- computer uses YOU) I started trying to make a joke but now I'm not laughing :|

8ytecoder 5y ago

Let's break login forms into two pages so we can annoy all the password manager users - for kicks.

andrewmackrodt 5y ago
This annoys me too, but since starting work at a company which uses single sign on, it's started to make sense why certain sites have this pattern, e.g. if your login is an email address and the domain is enrolled to handle sign on outside of the service, you are redirected and the original website doesn't have the ability to capture your password. For personal use, I find 1Password typically handles multiple screen logins, including 2FA quite well, although requires an extra UI interaction.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  I understand the technical reason behind it but still, it shouldn't be that hard to provide a separate page with both fields on it that non-SSO users can bookmark.

1270018080 5y ago

They're not going to allow something well designed to be made on the first pass. Sure that would be good for the user and company, but they need to justify their 40hr/week salaried job somehow. It's like planned obsolescence but for work.

userbinator 5y ago

Let's make clickable and non-clickable text the same font, style, and color! Let's remove all indications that buttons are buttons! I've actually had to use a site which had all four combinations: static text that looks like static text, static text that looks like a button, buttons that look like static text, and buttons that look like buttons.

egypturnash 5y ago

"Less is more" is a religion that is very easy to carry far past the point where less begins being less.

nicoffeine 5y ago

> I do not understand why designers are so insistent on making tools so difficult and unpleasant to use. Because they need something to pad their resume. In fact, most of the things that are wrong with software today are for the same reason. Executives want to make bold changes, so the Start button must be "re-imagined." For the same reason, Product Managers "re-imagine" the menus that have been in place for years and Product Designers "re-imagine" the design language to remove all cues that a button clicks and a panel scrolls. In my routine trips to the auto parts stores over the past 20 years, I have seen their throughput drop as more and more of these modern ideas seeped in. Their text menus had been the same for decades, with as many options for a next action as there were keys on the keyboard. If my intuition is correct, they were remote sessions to a server/mainframe. How about that for keeping the computation close to the data. Now that has all been replaced with a single button and a cursor. I'm not a die-hard CLI user by any stretch, but I understand the impulse after watching usability circle the drain year after year. There's a healthy middle somewhere and I am hoping to find it.

mrjin 5y ago

If I remember correctly, Chrome started all this BS with the infamous burger menu. With traditional designs, I can easily find what are the operations available and now I have make at least one extra click to discover that. Making it worse, some websites do not implement the menus correctly so when you move your mouse trying to click one of the sub-menus, the pop-out hides automatically as now you have moved away from the burger menu... It was kinda make sense as we used to have very small screens and the screen estate was very tight. But now we have much bigger screens, such trend just gets worse...

sings 5y ago

I want to push back on this idea that designers are out to destroy everything. I think one interesting way to look at these sort of changes is analogous to the introduction of new features in code. In the short term, new features can be added to the existing codebase without the need for much change, but eventually, the overhead becomes problematic and there is the need to make more structural adjustments. I think it’s similar for designers, who get to the point where new features don’t have a natural home in the existing interface and want to make changes. Just as a junior developer might be tempted to rewrite from scratch, a junior designer might be tempted to introduce a new mental model and rearrange everything. In some cases this may be OK but generally you need a more nuanced approach. The fact that users are the consumers of the change, not designers, is where the analogy falls apart, and thus the need for a more thoughtful introduction of any change. Obviously the abrupt changes are those that cause a negative reaction, especially when combined with the exaggerated desire to clean up an interface. However, not all change is for changes sake. Sometimes it’s just a case of trying to respond to constraints and make the best compromise when dealing with changing software.

worthless-trash 5y ago
You can always push back, but in the general case, reality is showing otherwise.

montag 5y ago

Reminds me of when we removed the “Previous Track” button on the Rdio player controls. The data showed that users skipped to previous only a tiny fraction of the time. Lasted about 3 days in production. Underlying this fallacy is the assumption that usage should somehow be uniformly distributed across all features. In reality, a power law distribution is more natural.

ngc248 5y ago

They gotta have something to do ... else how will they justify their salary :)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

DocTomoe 5y ago

If a designer doesn't change things, obviously they have achieved peak design, and are now irrelevant and ready to be fired. As long as they move things around, they get a paycheck.

phendrenad2 5y ago

It's because we (in the tech world) hire UI designers based on how beautiful their portfolio is, not how usable their design is. "But that's the job of UX!" you say. Yes, but we don't hire UX people. We just hire UI people and expect them to secretly be UX people despite giving every indication to the contrary. Oh well.

mitchdoogle 5y ago
Function is as much a part of design as is aesthetic appeal. A designer who doesn't consider function on the same level as aesthetics is a bad designer.