8 ms·

> Oh, great, this debate again! I shall use this post as ammunition next time I am arguing with our stupid design team about why we need an off switch on the st

by Kalium 4y ago

> Oh, great, this debate again! I shall use this post as ammunition next time I am arguing with our stupid design team about why we need an off switch on the stupid product we are designing, because it is a giant pain to live with devices you cannot turn off. I increasingly subscribe to the thesis that many designers and design teams design primarily in an effort to impress other designers. They don't have to use the things. They often don't even really care if the things work at all. They care that other designers - their artistic peers - are impressed. This does not generally result in what we the customers or users would regard as good design. The phenomenon reminds me of software engineers I've worked with who were more interested in building something with event sourcing and stream processing and functional languages rather than solving the problem more readily.

zanellato19 4y ago
Oh man, do I believe this. I think every profession does this, tbh, I saw a lot of developers try to do stuff just to impress the rest of the team, but designers are one of the most impactful because they don't do stuff that is _so obvious_ like this one
- yawz 4y ago
  I experienced this in programming when I got into Scala 13-14 years ago. For an outsider, it looked like the community was more interested in impressing each other than solving real problems.
  - Joeri 4y ago
    I have to say that scala was the most fun in programming I’ve had. You can make beautifully elegant code, that is oh so clever. It is easy to get seduced into thinking about elegant code instead of good solutions.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  Yes, every profession does that to some degree. But most professionals are impressed by things that make the results of their work better, even if at completely unreasonable costs. Designers nowadays are in a fashion to get impressed by things that make the results of their work worse. That leads to completely different problems.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
throwaway0a5e 4y ago
Literally every industry has industry circle jerks like that. You always get some people who build asinine crap in order so show off their "mastery" of their craft. It's just that product design and web development have more money sloshing around to provide for that kind of indulgence than residential plumbing and semi trailer manufacturing do.
arinlen 4y ago
> I increasingly subscribe to the thesis that many designers and design teams design primarily in an effort to impress other designers. They don't have to use the things. They often don't even really care if the things work at all. They care that other designers - their artistic peers - are impressed. To put things in perspective, this is how we get stuff like the Eiffel tower.
- yawz 4y ago
  Sacré bleu!
- gumby 4y ago
  Which I never saw the point of, even (especially?) during my periods of living in Paris.
  - superlopuh 4y ago
    Turned out to be useful in WWI
  - zippergz 4y ago
    Do you also not see the point of art?
    - gumby 4y ago
      Not at all. And I understand the now obsolete technical show-off value of the tower at its time. But now I think it's just a humdrum industrial eyesore. I think most people disagree with me so I don't think it's going anywhere. But that's my view of it.
      - robonerd 4y ago
        > But now I think it's just a humdrum industrial eyesore. That was a popular opinion when it was built. Eventually it became iconic, but nevertheless I don't see many cities rushing to build their own.
anonymousab 4y ago
This used to be how I assumed that awful UX keeps coming about, repeating the same mistakes and then making new ones by removing existing conveniences for no clear reason. But surely, I thought, I must be assuming the worst of an assuredly more rational situation. I then heard more about the designers at Microsoft for Vista through Windows 11 which deeply confirmed most of my prior negative assumptions. It sometimes really is as simple as folks who think they know better than anyone who uses their product; people who refused to dogfood or even touch the thing they ostensibly work on, in any given day.
- Stratoscope 4y ago
  Does anyone remember Office 2013 with the UPPER CASE MENUS? They were bad enough, but then Visual Studio 2013 HAD THEM TOO. That was triply bad: ugly, took more screen width than Mixed Case, and perhaps worst of all, to a programmer they looked like errors. Most of the languages we work with are case sensitive, so FILE and File look like two different things. It was a constant irritant. The chief designer for VS2013 had a blog post about the new design, and naturally in the comments there were a lot of complaints about the uppercase menus. The designer eventually replied: "Thanks for your feedback. We decided to keep the uppercase menus because we want more energy in this part of the interface." More energy. I am not making this up. They eventually came to their senses, and the next releases of Office and Visual Studio went back to conventional Mixed Case menus, just like every Windows app has used since the beginning. (Note: my use of uppercase at the top of this message is not for emphasis or shouting, it's for illustrative purposes.)
  - rzzzt 4y ago
    A DESIGN WITH ALL-CAPS: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/a-design-with-all-caps/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/a-design-with-al...
    - robonerd 4y ago
      > 1) to keep Visual Studio consistent with the direction of other Microsoft user experiences In other words, we jumped off this bridge because all our friends did to. Consistency... with other Microsoft products. What a joke. What about consistency with virtually every other Windows application, both from 3rd parties and Microsoft's own history? Citing consistency to justify such a bizarre departure from the 20 year norm is truly insulting.
gotaquestion 4y ago
It depends, I worked briefly for Flex(tronics), and my projects were entirely focused on battery life and size (or at least, the client design requirements were). There's a difference between a customer who plans on selling a billion units, and some company like this game controller design team that clearly making some crappy kids toys. I think the OP twitter person just learned a valuable lesson.
karaterobot 4y ago
> I increasingly subscribe to the thesis that many designers and design teams design primarily in an effort to impress other designers. They don't have to use the things. They often don't even really care if the things work at all. They care that other designers - their artistic peers - are impressed. I've been a designer for about a long time. I've done many dumb things, but never that. I have definitely had the irrational thought that "users will think I'm a bad designer if we ship this product", but that's usually because it was a bad product that shouldn't have been shipped. I've never gotten the sense that my peers do this either. I have definitely gotten the sense that some designers want their designs to impress Apple, and Steve Jobs specifically. Everybody wants to impress their peers to some degree, but to be clear, that usually translates into just doing a really good job. I've never had another designer show me something and say "Nobody else will appreciate this, but I thought you'd like it".
- psygn89 4y ago
  Agreed. I find dumb design usually comes from two pools: inexperienced designers and cost cutting measures. What's a switch to a company but another point of failure that they can't as readily blame the user on?
cardiffspaceman 4y ago
Chris Bangle, who was the chief designer at BMW for the E65 generation of 7 series and E46 generation of 3 series, said that he was designing to the other designers. Which is why he ignored the feedback that the E65 was ugly. The term "Bangle Butt" was applied to the E65. His successor took the radical position that this thing called "beauty" was important. I don't have sources at hand but it was discussed in print and web publications of the consumer side of the auto industry.
- hatware 4y ago
  >The term "Bangle Butt" was applied to the E65 It was applied to a lot more than that. Even the F11 6er still had it. What is interesting, though, is how much flame surfacing started to flood car designs after Bangle's BMWs had been out for a few years. I'm not arguing that the E65 looked good, but he certainly made an impact on all of car design, seemingly overnight.
- joshAg 4y ago
  Sometimes they're not entirely wrong though. The E46 design is now decently well-regarded by many car enthusiasts. Granted, I'm probably not the best person to ask about BMW aesthetics since I think the best looking one they've made is the clownshoe and thought the hood bulge was exceptionally lazy.
Animats 4y ago
Learn to talk to designers. Have a copy of Tog on Interface around. Know about Fitts' Law. Know who Susan Kare is.[1] Know what Bang and Olufsen audio gear looks like. (They took the black-on-black look to the extreme. Designers really like that look. You can't find the controls.) Go on to learn what Bauhaus architecture looks like, how that led to modernism, Frank Lloyd Wright, then Mies Van Der Rohe, then brutalism, and finally Frank Gehry in ridiculous mode.[2] Understand why this didn't result in liveable cities. Then you can talk to designers. [1] kare.com [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ray_and_Maria_Stata_Center_(MIT).JPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ray_and_Maria_Stata_Cente...
dang 4y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31311625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31311625.

by Kalium 4y ago

zanellato19 4y ago

Oh man, do I believe this. I think every profession does this, tbh, I saw a lot of developers try to do stuff just to impress the rest of the team, but designers are one of the most impactful because they don't do stuff that is _so obvious_ like this one

yawz 4y ago
I experienced this in programming when I got into Scala 13-14 years ago. For an outsider, it looked like the community was more interested in impressing each other than solving real problems.
- Joeri 4y ago
  I have to say that scala was the most fun in programming I’ve had. You can make beautifully elegant code, that is oh so clever. It is easy to get seduced into thinking about elegant code instead of good solutions.
marcosdumay 4y ago
Yes, every profession does that to some degree. But most professionals are impressed by things that make the results of their work better, even if at completely unreasonable costs. Designers nowadays are in a fashion to get impressed by things that make the results of their work worse. That leads to completely different problems.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

throwaway0a5e 4y ago

Literally every industry has industry circle jerks like that. You always get some people who build asinine crap in order so show off their "mastery" of their craft. It's just that product design and web development have more money sloshing around to provide for that kind of indulgence than residential plumbing and semi trailer manufacturing do.

arinlen 4y ago

yawz 4y ago
Sacré bleu!
gumby 4y ago
Which I never saw the point of, even (especially?) during my periods of living in Paris.
- superlopuh 4y ago
  Turned out to be useful in WWI
- zippergz 4y ago
  Do you also not see the point of art?
  - gumby 4y ago
    Not at all. And I understand the now obsolete technical show-off value of the tower at its time. But now I think it's just a humdrum industrial eyesore. I think most people disagree with me so I don't think it's going anywhere. But that's my view of it.
    - robonerd 4y ago
      > But now I think it's just a humdrum industrial eyesore. That was a popular opinion when it was built. Eventually it became iconic, but nevertheless I don't see many cities rushing to build their own.

anonymousab 4y ago

This used to be how I assumed that awful UX keeps coming about, repeating the same mistakes and then making new ones by removing existing conveniences for no clear reason. But surely, I thought, I must be assuming the worst of an assuredly more rational situation. I then heard more about the designers at Microsoft for Vista through Windows 11 which deeply confirmed most of my prior negative assumptions. It sometimes really is as simple as folks who think they know better than anyone who uses their product; people who refused to dogfood or even touch the thing they ostensibly work on, in any given day.

Stratoscope 4y ago
Does anyone remember Office 2013 with the UPPER CASE MENUS? They were bad enough, but then Visual Studio 2013 HAD THEM TOO. That was triply bad: ugly, took more screen width than Mixed Case, and perhaps worst of all, to a programmer they looked like errors. Most of the languages we work with are case sensitive, so FILE and File look like two different things. It was a constant irritant. The chief designer for VS2013 had a blog post about the new design, and naturally in the comments there were a lot of complaints about the uppercase menus. The designer eventually replied: "Thanks for your feedback. We decided to keep the uppercase menus because we want more energy in this part of the interface." More energy. I am not making this up. They eventually came to their senses, and the next releases of Office and Visual Studio went back to conventional Mixed Case menus, just like every Windows app has used since the beginning. (Note: my use of uppercase at the top of this message is not for emphasis or shouting, it's for illustrative purposes.)
- rzzzt 4y ago
  A DESIGN WITH ALL-CAPS: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/a-design-with-all-caps/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/a-design-with-al...
  - robonerd 4y ago
    > 1) to keep Visual Studio consistent with the direction of other Microsoft user experiences In other words, we jumped off this bridge because all our friends did to. Consistency... with other Microsoft products. What a joke. What about consistency with virtually every other Windows application, both from 3rd parties and Microsoft's own history? Citing consistency to justify such a bizarre departure from the 20 year norm is truly insulting.

gotaquestion 4y ago

It depends, I worked briefly for Flex(tronics), and my projects were entirely focused on battery life and size (or at least, the client design requirements were). There's a difference between a customer who plans on selling a billion units, and some company like this game controller design team that clearly making some crappy kids toys. I think the OP twitter person just learned a valuable lesson.

karaterobot 4y ago

> I increasingly subscribe to the thesis that many designers and design teams design primarily in an effort to impress other designers. They don't have to use the things. They often don't even really care if the things work at all. They care that other designers - their artistic peers - are impressed. I've been a designer for about a long time. I've done many dumb things, but never that. I have definitely had the irrational thought that "users will think I'm a bad designer if we ship this product", but that's usually because it was a bad product that shouldn't have been shipped. I've never gotten the sense that my peers do this either. I have definitely gotten the sense that some designers want their designs to impress Apple, and Steve Jobs specifically. Everybody wants to impress their peers to some degree, but to be clear, that usually translates into just doing a really good job. I've never had another designer show me something and say "Nobody else will appreciate this, but I thought you'd like it".

psygn89 4y ago
Agreed. I find dumb design usually comes from two pools: inexperienced designers and cost cutting measures. What's a switch to a company but another point of failure that they can't as readily blame the user on?

cardiffspaceman 4y ago

Chris Bangle, who was the chief designer at BMW for the E65 generation of 7 series and E46 generation of 3 series, said that he was designing to the other designers. Which is why he ignored the feedback that the E65 was ugly. The term "Bangle Butt" was applied to the E65. His successor took the radical position that this thing called "beauty" was important. I don't have sources at hand but it was discussed in print and web publications of the consumer side of the auto industry.

hatware 4y ago
>The term "Bangle Butt" was applied to the E65 It was applied to a lot more than that. Even the F11 6er still had it. What is interesting, though, is how much flame surfacing started to flood car designs after Bangle's BMWs had been out for a few years. I'm not arguing that the E65 looked good, but he certainly made an impact on all of car design, seemingly overnight.
joshAg 4y ago
Sometimes they're not entirely wrong though. The E46 design is now decently well-regarded by many car enthusiasts. Granted, I'm probably not the best person to ask about BMW aesthetics since I think the best looking one they've made is the clownshoe and thought the hood bulge was exceptionally lazy.

Animats 4y ago

Learn to talk to designers. Have a copy of Tog on Interface around. Know about Fitts' Law. Know who Susan Kare is.[1] Know what Bang and Olufsen audio gear looks like. (They took the black-on-black look to the extreme. Designers really like that look. You can't find the controls.) Go on to learn what Bauhaus architecture looks like, how that led to modernism, Frank Lloyd Wright, then Mies Van Der Rohe, then brutalism, and finally Frank Gehry in ridiculous mode.[2] Understand why this didn't result in liveable cities. Then you can talk to designers. [1] kare.com [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ray_and_Maria_Stata_Center_(MIT).JPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ray_and_Maria_Stata_Cente...

dang 4y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31311625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31311625.