> This means, even if you really cared about the user experience of your customers you would only be able to make incremental improvements to the status quo or

> This means, even if you really cared about the user experience of your customers you would only be able to make incremental improvements to the status quo or else be be rejected for being too different. Isn't this a good thing, though? Creating software that most current users out there can be easily onboarded with and be productive and familiar with quickly, without too much work put into it. I recently did an article on using Linux as my daily driver for a week and admittedly picking a really boring desktop environment (XFCE) was a pleasant experience: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/a-week-of-linux-instead-of-windows https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/a-week-of-linux-instead-of-... Sure, things were occasionally broken for technical reasons, but at least the UX itself wasn't what was causing problems or friction. It's very much like using something like LibreOffice (with the default dropdown interface, or the optional ribbon one) after other office packages - it feels close enough to what you're used to not to be completely jarring, even if there might be other issues with it. > Not that certain standards are not also valuable but it still a sobering thought that we are in a local optimum that we will never be able to escape from. (And I fear most products are not even hitting the local optimum but are getting worse when it comes to UI design but that is besides the point.) In my eyes, not challenging the status quo and making incremental improvements is a good idea for the majority of developers out there (even in web development, where you have your navbars and your sidebars and so on), let the trendsetters take the big risks and take what is proven to work in the long run from them, without being impacted negatively by their failures. I do, however, support the idea of usability studies and looking for what might be better than what we currently have, but redesigns for the sake of being "modern" or "trendy" just seems like designers going for the fun low hanging fruit, like large companies just changing around all of their product icons, instead of working on, say, accessibility, text contrast and so on.