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The UX Research Reckoning is Here
- hyperhello 3y agoTarget users engaging with the product and pointing out semi-obvious complaints is apparently an ignored path. I can’t get anyone to fix anything.
- politelemon 3y agoI often feel that UX refuse to listen to ideas unless it originated in their kabal. They can completely ignore obvious points even if users themselves are pointing it out. And in this I think the underlying criticism is that they have forgotten or deemphasized the U in UX. Resulting in poor meshing with the rest of the organisation.
- calderwoodra 3y agoThe justification I've heard here is that one person's feedback shouldn't trump the research and feedback of dozens of users over many months. Seems reasonable but feels like there's a blind spot here too imo.
- noodles_nomore 3y agoThe article tries really hard to avoid the thing everyone outside this field seems to know: Concurrent with this 15 year golden age, UX has become universally terrible.
- GenerWork 3y agoCan you go into some more detail as to how "UX has become universally terrible"? I'm a UX person, so I'm always intrigued when I hear people say that UX has become terrible.
- sp332 3y agoNot showing the interact-able parts of the UI. Sometimes buttons will have a large colored area, but only the text at the center is clickable. More often the opposite, a chunk of text with no indication of where the clickable/tappable area begins and ends. Even worse is when there are multiple options in a row with no way to see the boundaries between, or if there is any dead space. Fitt's Law has been a thing since before these designers were born! The worst example I encounter on a daily basis is Twitter. Each tweet has at least 8 sections that do different things when tapped. I never know quite where to long-press with my thumb over the tiny timestamp to open it in a new tab, or where the boundary is between the single line of text and the username.
- andy81 3y agoThe rise of targeted advertising is the main culprit of bad UX. Everywhere there's dark patterns, performance overhead, mandatory updates degrading user experience, unnecessary JS and walled gardens breaking accessibility/compatibility, online-only etc.
- GenerWork 3y agoThis mostly matches up with the "business > users" point that the author was making. Businesses have decided that degrading the end experience for users through dark patterns, mandatory updates, walled gardens, and online only services is acceptable because users either have to use their product (electric companies, as an example), or because they offer a genuinely compelling product that people want to use despite the terrible experience (another point the authors made). For performance overhead and unnecessary JS, that sounds like poor development practices that happens to also degrade the end experience for users, although some of that unnecessary JS could be some sort of tracking implementation that was included through business requirements.
- isleyaardvark 3y agoFor example, this site went viral because it resonated with so many people: https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/ https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/
- rakamotog 3y agoGenerally speaking in B2B Apps, I think UX has improved quite a bit. End user workflows have improved in both usability and beauty for the masses (10-100's of Millions)
- waboremo 3y agoYes, although the important question here is how much of this can be attributed to UXR and not the roles it works alongside? It's one the article struggles with answering, and I expect why most businesses are trimming UXR teams as much as they can.
- bob1029 3y agoIn some B2B apps, a good UX can be the primary marketed feature. B2B app space is wonderful when it comes to UX engineering... You still have to think about some edges, but depending on your customer you will probably find you can skip a lot of painful items due to their unique organizational constraints. We sell software to financial institutions and our mission is to provide low-skill hourly hires the ability to reliably open complex accounts. Clearly, focusing on the ability of your target audience is really important if you want to go to this kind of an extreme. For me, this is what "UXR" is - Our team sitting down and asking "how does it feel to use that workflow?" and "If I were walking out of HS graduation, could I understand what I am looking at?". I don't think this is really complicated stuff at the end of the day. If you let the customers harass the developers just a tiny bit, you might find high quality UXR occurs automagically.
- hedora 3y ago> End user workflows have improved in both usability and beauty for the masses (10-100's of Millions) Can you cite a single example? Web browsers, mail, event ticket purchases, window managers, music playback, file management, maps, televisions, kitchen appliances, paying for parking, paying for gas / EV charge, credit card checkouts, and banks have all enshittened in the last 15 years. That's just stuff that actively wasted my time this week. I can't think of any counter examples.
- zwaps 3y agoI really wonder how they made something like the windows2k interface in the 90's. Compared to that, today's interfaces are garbage. And this is especially true for the web or anything that is even remotely in contact with Javascript. Were UX/UI people and researchers in the 90's just better? More competent? More careful in their research? Did the objectives change so much from usability to selling clicks?
- hedora 3y agoIt was standard practice back then to sit non technical and (separately) expert users in front of a product, film their reactions, and then adjust the product design until most of the swearing stopped. Gnome 2 famously did this. Gnome 3 famously threw out the findings, which is why Linux Mint exists, and how KDE (eventually) caught up on usability.
- lmm 3y agoNah. KDE 3 was better than Gnome 2 in the first place. KDE 5 has almost recovered to that level.
- kps 3y agoGNOME is an interesting case, because you can't blame it (directly) on managers pushing dark patterns to maximize conversions. Is it all just trickle-down of user-hostile design philosophy from the commercial web?
- amluto 3y agoMy take is that they had more limited tooling and resources, so they designed a set of controls, made them visually distinct, and used them almost everywhere. It was easy to make radio buttons that looked like radio buttons and worked like radio buttons. It was substantially more difficult to do anything else. Also, the default interface wasn’t composited, so nothing was translucent, so no one layered their controls and content. Sure, it looks kind of pretty in Material Design when a round button with nice antialiased edges sits on top of the content, but it’s terrible UX. In Win2K, if you wanted to do this, you either used “layered” windows (which were no amazingly slow that no one wanted to use them) or you had to go outside the Win32 library entirely and render the whole mess yourself. So designers mostly didn’t do this.
- mrcwinn 3y ago“business > user” - I couldn’t agree more. “Customer-first” has always been a nice storefront design but it’s always been about conversion rate (even if it’s user-hostile). I agree too that UXR is disproportionately impacted, and that UXRs focus way too much on user interviews. The challenge for me is that “macro research” is really market research, and UXRs are not well-suited to conduct this type of work, nor do the teams need to be so large to support that kind of work. I feel for anyone losing their job, but it’s tough to justify.
- jasmer 3y agoIt's not just UX it's everything customer facing. Only organisations with a specific cultural focus on user centrism will have great products. Apple at least has some of this, but not always. Have faith: there is a payoff in the long run for many product focused companies. Not all though.
- wellanyway 3y ago[flagged]
- msla 3y agoApple makes products the Apple Way. Some people think the Apple Way defines good UX, so they think Apple products have good UX. Anyone who prefers a non-Apple UX is setting themselves up for a very condescending rant.
- jasmer 3y agoThe 'Apple Way' is more user centric than 'the short term profit way'. One of Jobs primary philosophies is around 'creating great products' aka 'craftsmanship' which is de facto user centric orientation. If companies made products the Apple Way, they'd probably have better products. The Apple Way is of course going to be a culty foundation for keeping behaviours oriented around a common sentiment, it helps the Apple org focus. It probably will feel a bit odd and constraining in some ways, but that has more advantages than downsides.
- msla 3y agoLet's look at the Magic Mouse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Mouse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Mouse > The charging port of the second-generation Magic Mouse is located on its underside, preventing the mouse from being used while charging. I've never seen another wireless mouse with that problem. Never. Only Apple, it seems, could dream up that specific misdesign. There's no benefit to anyone in that, only detriment, and I am at a loss every time I think about it. Onwards: > The Magic Mouse uses its acrylic multi-touch surface for 360-degree scrolling, replacing the rubber scroll ball on the Mighty Mouse. The mouse does not support left and right-clicking simultaneously, and also removes the ability to middle click without third-party software workarounds. I will be honest: I straight-up don't like the idea of a mouse having a touch pad on its top. I think a touch pad is a poor imitation of a mouse, such that if you have a mouse, using a touch pad (literally) on top of it is using a better interface to replicate a worse one. However, my personal likes and dislikes pale in comparison to the simple fact the touch pad was also a usability regression for clicking. I absolutely cannot see this as user-focused. Did it have good build quality? Maybe, but it hardly matters if something is a good implementation of a bad design.
- waboremo 3y agoI like this article for how devastating it is, while still retaining its optimistic tone. The solutions (on here and in the subsequent reflections article) are hilarious though for how general they are and how little they solve the observed problem (UXR dying/being replaced/not justifying its role/etc.). "You'll be fine: just generate value for the business and learn to say no!" The sort of fluff you tell a naive new graduate about to start an internship in a sinking ship of a company to avoid facing reality. You have to read between the lines to realize how devastating the advice actually is.
- tootie 3y agoMacro research is to help determine what products to build and what users to target. Micro research measures the effectiveness of what's been built. The middle tier is intended for optimizing which features to add. If the economics of middle tier have changed it's because adding features to an existing product had gotten cheaper.
- DHPersonal 3y agoThis reads like a grieving spouse blaming themselves for their partner's cheating behavior. "Maybe if I looked younger, they'd have stuck with me. Maybe if I was more fun, they'd want to be around me. Maybe if I changed, they'd still be here. Maybe if I was different, they would've kept me." OR (and I say that in the angriest way I can manage via text) the business is completely looking out for itself in the short term without consideration of its needs beyond a quarter. When a department has served its useful purpose to the very specific goals of the business then the department gets discarded. When a company needs a design for a website, it pays for a UX designer. When the designs are finished, they fire the designer. Does that mean the business never needed a designer? No, instead, they believe that they _no longer_ need a designer, and continue to profit off of the work that the designer did for them. The designer then gets to leave and write blog posts blaming themselves for the pitfalls of capitalism and the absence of design unions. There is no way to stay around a hungry tiger and survive for long, no matter how one ingratiates themselves to the tiger. Designers, don't write blog posts claiming that getting fired is 100% your fault. You're not Jack Welch, you're the body he spent no time thinking about leaving behind.
- waboremo 3y agoFor clarity, this article is about UX Research not UX or Design in general. Kind of an important distinction, UXR is a small part of the umbrella in jeopardy and one that is probably the easiest to fold into other roles. I agree with the the general message you're conveying though.
- DHPersonal 3y agoThat’s a fair point; I should’ve been more clear that I was coming from the perspective of a similar but not exact field of skill as an example.
- lmeyerov 3y agoI find it interesting they cast data science as some sort of inherently wrong Other When your profession views math on user & business data as the enemy, and it's for a business...
- simulo 3y agoYes, that section seemed to be a bit incoherent to me. However, it was only a brief comment, not even on data science rather but rather the strong confidence in a picking-the-winning version idea of design via A/B tests.
- m0llusk 3y agoInternationalization may contribute to this as it is increasingly necessary for businesses to seek clients globally, but ideas about what makes for simple, clear, easy processes varies hugely between countries. More care needs to be taken to understand and respond to global preferred interaction variations.
- temporallobe 3y agoI only skimmed the article, but it was enough to ignite my fire and actually take the time to write up a response based in my experiences. I can say as a UI/UX specialist myself, a lot of terrible design is due to not putting enough thought into the design and/or not allowing UI/UX engineers to do their jobs. I will also say that UI/UX is very much an art as opposed to a science, and even the best designers can get it wrong or the final product will frustrate someone due to unexpected edge cases or accidental dark patterns. Some observations over the past two or so decades: - Not engaging enough with the customer, i.e., finding out what they actually and truly need as opposed to pandering to their egos because they’re SMEs or whatnot - Engaging too much with the customer by allowing them to have too much say in the design. I’ve seen it go so far as to allow the customer to actually make their own designs (wireframes or mockups, etc.) and then handing that off to the devs to implement, no questions asked, which ended up in a ton of rework for obvious reasons - Relying too heavily on frameworks by allowing yourself to believe that you MUST use one of their built-in widgets or patterns and not create a custom solution that makes sense for the use case - Somewhat contrary to the above, not relying enough on a given framework’s widgets or patterns which can lead to inconsistent design and UX and unnecessary reinventing the wheel - The use of so-called no-code or low-code solutions: Not that these are bad per se, but it leads to the fallacy that a non-engineer (usually mid-level IT manager or “system analyst”) can use these tools to create a complete or even somewhat viable solution (I speak from experience) - Sacrificing a good design for any reason, e.g., ad space requirements, various types of compliance (including even the virtuous ones such as Section 508) - Relying on a framework to do the UX for you, leading to another fallacy that you don't need a UX specialist UX research still very much needs to be a thing, and I don't say that because it benefits me (it does), but because I wholeheartedly believe in the need for it. I wouldn't design a house or even a pool without the expertise of an architect, so why would an entire dev team build a multi-million dollar UI without a UI/UX engineer?
- quacked 3y agoI did a lot of consulting with the design team in my last role. My company was creating a "builder" app, where you can use a GUI to create and deploy custom clinical research mobile and web apps. The way I was finally able to get through to the design team was by showing them an image of a Tesla interior and saying "this is what you guys have built", and then I showed them an image of a well-organized woodshop with hundreds of tools on the walls and saying "this is what the people using our software to build custom apps actually need". Maybe non-technical end users really do like having all features hidden beneath unlabelled flat buttons, I don't know. But it doesn't work for people using software GUIs to do technical work. I'd go back to 90s-00s style clunky menus in an instant if I could. Just the ability to see what's clickable and what isn't is worth the downgrade in appearance.
- chunkyks 3y agoMy observation is that once "UI" became "UX", interfaces turned terrible across the board. When I did the human interface course in my comp.sci degree, there was a lot of attention on standardization, making things people could effectively interact with, consistent feature widgets that are clearly those widgets. Remember "HIG"s? Nowadays, instead of trying to find a way to make an interface pleasant and consistent, it has to be a unique butterfly of some glorious design that just sucks. Next time you're designing something with a button that doesn't have a border and isn't clearly a button... Step back and have a rethink. Radio buttons indistinguishable from checkboxes? Your design is bad. Now get off my lawn
- eska 3y agoIn the follow up post he writes that many people commented this kind of work is beneath them and can be done by anyone and will just be automated away by ChatGPT. Say that at my company and I’ll reconsider working with you. So out of touch..
- chunkyks 3y agoOh, it's super hard to build good interfaces, I'd never claim otherwise. Everything user facing I build is trash and I know it, so I work with UI people. I would assert that most of what's made under the banner of "UX" by people who think they're good is also trash from a usability perspective. (it's possible that the ux people are optimizing for something other than end users getting their stuff done, like conversion rate. But that doesn't make a trash interface good, it just means you get to pay your mortgage this month.)
- eska 3y agoSorry, I wasn’t being clear. The “you” in my last sentences wasn’t directed at you, but at people sending such replies to the author! I agree with you wholeheartedly.
- pcurve 3y agoWith all the virtue ux espouses, usability of digital products is worse than ever. I resigned from my ux director position a few months ago partly because of what the profession degenerated into.
- eska 3y ago>I personally helped grow Facebook’s UXR team from a dozen to over 100, then did the same for Airbnb in the same amount of time it took Facebook/Meta to go from 100 to over 1000 researchers. Lots of open headcount everywhere, highly competitive hiring, and blank checks galore. What, why are you hiring this many people.. >Incentivized to empire-build, some thought UX leaders (especially at a few larger companies) were disproportionately responsible for over-hiring and creating the market we are in. …ok, the jokes write themselves.
- wellanyway 3y agoAlso, people working for facebook are seriously trying to complain about morality. Lmao.
- somedude895 3y agoFlex gone wrong
- ryanSrich 3y agoI’m not even that old, but I despise the entire UX industry for what they did to quality, fun UI work. They stole every ounce of soul from interfaces in the name of “research”. I’m glad the reckoning is happening. I’ve not met a single UX researcher that could actually design anything. They’re glorified business analysts and they clearly can’t even do that right because at least business analysts can create requirements from real customer problems. UX research exists purely to only serve itself.
- Dalewyn 3y agoBeing honest, I don't know where the UX industry even came from. They just appeared one day in the early to mid 2010s and proceeded to ruin every single piece of good and usable UI known to mankind. The computing world was at peace until then, we had UI designers and engineers who through much research and trial-and-error produced very nice UIs for us to use. The UX industry came in and destroyed all that for shits and profits; literal decades of experience and precedence thrown out the window in the name of the latest fashion trend.
- graycat 3y agoWhat does UXR (user experience research) think of the user interface of, say, Hacker News or Google?
- devinprater 3y agoSo I was ordering food from Door dash the other day. Being a blind person, I rely on a website to be coded well enough to present all of its content to me. So I'm using the down arrow, using NVDA, or Caps lock + Right Arrow on Voiceover for Mac, going through the items. And I noticed that some items were surely being skipped. And sure enough, when I went back and navigated with the Tab key, there they were, all the other drinks that McDonald's offers. I mean, it's better than on the iPhone, where DoorDash is so awful that it sucks Kaiju dung, but goodness I wish UX folks would just leave stuff alone, or shoot just ask people "Hey, is this what you want?" or "How can we actually improve this thing?" or "Hey, would this break things for you?" I think the only reason why it works so well on Android is because no one has messed with it yet. No, don't do it, please. I mean, Door dash is far from the only mess I've come across in my like 15 years using tech as a blind person, But some services, like InstaCart, Door dash, Uber, stuff like that, are a bit more important to be accessible than someone's cat picture gallery. I mean, I wouldn't mind awesome descriptions of cats either, don't get me wrong. And honestly, I don't know if the fault is with Voiceover and its rather bad web support, or NVDA, but I'm pretty sure it's Door dash. And it didn't used to do this. It used to be fine on web browsers on a computer. And now I gotta pull out the Android phone when I want o order food.
- ramraj07 3y agoWhat in your opinion are some of the best designed mobile apps for visually impaired people?
- devinprater 3y agoRedReader is the best Reddit client I've found on Android, Apple's Mail app is really nice, since it lets me navigate within a conversation to the next or previous message (wish Gmail did that), Mona is the best Mastodon client on iOS (I can favorite or reblog just by swiping left or right with three fingers. That's not even possible on Android because TalkBack's scrolling commands work on gesture position not on TalkBack focus position), Feeder is the best RSS reader on Android, Lire is great on iOS although I don't like having to clean up the article list after marking a few as read. Tusky on Android is a good app that uses accessibility actions. I love how in Google's clock app I can dismiss an alarm by using a volume button (while the device's screen is off, but once you hit the power button you have to find and double tap the dismiss button and hope the alarm sound is quieter than your TalkBack voice). I don't know how it is now, but when I was still using Instacart, if I'm in a list of food items and I wanted to add one to my cart, I could just swipe up and it'd be added. If I wanted to remove an item, I'd just swipe down and it'd be removed. That was refreshingly simple. There are a lot of games on iOS that are accessible, like DiceWorld, which is also pretty accessible on Android but doesn't have the nice-to-have features of iOS, like using the Magic Tap (double tap with two fingers) from anywhere on the screen to roll the dice. Android can't do that because its two finger double tap only works as the play/pause button on a headset, just playing/pausing media instead of a more general "make something happen" command in apps. Some more action-oriented games, like Mortal Kombat, are becoming more accessible. On iOS, since apps can define "direct touch interaction" areas of the screen, which makes VoiceOver ignore part of the screen so that a tap is passed directly to the app, rather than going through VoiceOver. Using this, one can attack and block instantly while in action parts of the game, with the game sending announcements through VoiceOver, like "swipe up" or "you win". Then, the screen changes, and direct touch area is deactivated, and VoiceOver control is reassurted, so that the player can navigate the interface. It shows really amazing promise for mobile gaming for the blind in the future. And Android doesn't have anything like the direct touch area, unless the app wants to declar itself an accessibility service, which I believe is how the TalkBack Braille keyboard does it from the code on Github. Of course that code is like 6 months behind the actual release and definitely behind the any betas they've released, but still useful for seeing how TalkBack does things. Of course, each user has differing knowledge of how their screen reader works. I find that many more Android users know more about TalkBack, since it has a built-in tutorial that turns on when TalkBack is launched. VoiceOver on iOS does not have a tutorial that teaches everything one can do, all the commands and such, so are usually unaware of things like image recognition, Braille Screen Input (typing in Braille on the phone screen), or all the commands possible (especially the rotor and using actions within apps).
- keyle 3y ago> I personally helped grow Facebook’s UXR team from a dozen to over 100, then did the same for Airbnb in the same amount of time it took Facebook/Meta to go from 100 to over 1000 researchers. What the? I had no idea it was so colossal. I didn't even know UX "research" was a thing, as in, someone made their career out of it. No wonder it takes 100 engineers to write a website, if it takes 100 researchers to dream up some coconuts for people lacking thumbs. Last I checked, humans haven't changed in centuries. The gestalt is all you need to "research" and understand the human perception, imho. Ok maybe in the field of VR, some research need to be made, but this seems like crazy amounts of people.
- tpxl 3y agoThere's a lot of legitimate UI research. What foreground/background colors are readable (white/black and black/white perform about on par, with yellow/blue being the best IIRC), destructive actions shouldn't be next to constructive (at the minimum there should be a separator between 'Save' and 'Quit'), ... Faffing about with hamburger menus and A/B testing isn't 'UX' research though.
- machinawhite 3y ago> What foreground/background colors are readable (white/black and black/white perform about on par, with yellow/blue being the best IIRC), destructive actions shouldn't be next to constructive (at the minimum there should be a separator between 'Save' and 'Quit'), ... Agreed, but hasn't all of this research already been done? I thought these are well understood already. A/B testing hamburger menus literally sounds insane to me
- blululu 3y agoWhen you have a website & an app that reach >1 Billion people a day there is a strong risk aversion that sets in. People are constantly trying to make improvements, add features, keep up with the competition etc, but the risk of making things worse is very high (A billion pennies a day is still more money than most people will see in their lives). Experimenting in the wild is no longer possible like it is for a startup, so instead a solid research program is needed to test and validate new features before launch. Yes having good designers would obviate a lot of the need for researchers, just like having good engineers would eliminate the need for QC. But realistically QC and UXR are both important parts of the product release process at a large company.
- chambers 3y agoThe author observes that User Experience Research has fallen from grace. They see that UXR has become disconnected from the business. Their belief is that understanding users isn't necessary for making a good product, and that UX Researchers enjoy answering abstract questions around the user that are only marginally useful. They conclude that UX Research needs to to perform low-level user interviews, focus on non-user strategy(?), talk in executive-friendly terms, and prioritize the business above users-- in order to be relevant once again. Ironically, the author is quick to provide answers that please executives, and slow to offer dangerous questions that would displease them. Questions like how the company's short-term optimization was causing a long-term loss on user retention. Or how certain executive-sponsored beliefs were hurting user trust. Researchers who ask those questions tend not to stick around too long, even before 2021. Those who remain self-select into safer "middle" research; they and their department have been pummeled into submission by the organization. The author turns a blind eye to this corruption; the author points the finger at researchers, not executives. The author also forgets the history that users made the business successful [1]. Today, however, the internal hierarchies and forward momentum of many tech companies depends on a selective understanding of users [2]. Good research slows down that momentum, it aims for good-enough understanding, it asks important questions. And when important questions collide with the status quo, they are not tolerated. Or to put in simple terms, from a chief of staff to a middle manager: "Nevermind you 'why', why ain't in your repertoire no more". [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html "Mark Zuckerberg didn't succeed because he was an expert on startups. He succeeded despite being a complete noob at startups, because he understood his users really well." [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35597279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35597279 "The logic that the CPO applied at the time was some pretty sporty mental gymnastics: "we optimize for conversion (looker to booker) because that's a proxy to actually delivering value to the customer."
- atoav 3y agoWhen I read this I can't help about stellar pieces of usable software that have been produced by one person. One knowledgeable individual combining the fields programming, design and usability can sometimes outperform big teams, because there is something to the way big teams decide that dillutes clear ideas and leads to inconsistencies throughout the resulting piece of software. These inconsistencies can be an problem for the user. UX people generally may claim otherwise, but it is easy to make software without them and often the user experience is better when they are not involved. Imagine two situations. We are going to improve the user experience of the famous text editor vim. Who will make a better job: 1. Random dude who has been teaching vim to people, with some experience in creating user interfaces and a lot of experience with terminal based software 2. UX researcher armed with all the newest knowledge in usability My money would be on the former, because the latter has a high chance of misunderstanding why people use vim in the first place. I might be mistaken, but my feeling is that in the past 15 years user interfaces have broadly been "dumbed down" or driven towards the smallest common denominator. That is okay for software that you use once a year and where things should be self explainatory. But there is software where it is okay to have a little hurdle in the start if it means you are going to be so much more productive later. Ideally you will have both a low entrance barrier and a good usability when you use it day in, day out. Newer UX-based software is good at the former, but sucks at the latter.
- simulo 3y agoI agree with the "single people can create good software without involvement of a UX expert". That does not only apply to UX experts, but any other expert role (You do not even need a person who sees themselves as a programmer; a person using Excel, Access, Godot… might create something useful). A lot of roles and best practices are for making software creation work in large organizations. I disagree with the "dumbing down" idea: "old UX" (90s, early 2000s) focussed a lot on beginner-friendlieness and at this time a lot of people might have seen this sofware as being "dumbed down" from its predecessors. Menus e.g. are a staple of making GUIs more discoverable than command line interfaces, and at that time there were already criticism that urged for building more efficient text based interfaces (See "canon cat" and the "anti mac interface")
- abwizz 3y ago
- fnordsensei 3y agoI worked as a UX designer and researcher for about a decade starting at around 2007. First of all, I don't fully recognize TFA's description of what a UX researcher primarily does. It almost sounds like user testing, which shouldn't require a different hat. That's just something you do to evaluate the product. Designers and developers do that anyway (hopefully). What I did when I put on the "researcher" hat was (I guess, after reading this article) more akin to market research, but within the existing market. For example, while working with a big holiday/vacation company (operating flights + resorts), we uncovered that a significant portion of the customers staying at their "family friendly" resorts didn't want to be there. They were typically couples who had done fairly adventurous trips when younger, then they'd married, and had kids. They hated the enclosed, catered, walled feeling of these resorts, but thought it'd be the best they could do with a newborn on their hands. Awareness of this group of people might feel obvious today, but at the time it was a genuine discovery that lead to development of both services and marketing. While you might argue that the company gets their custom anyway, so what does it matter, the fact was that these people left the resort with low ratings, and a low opinion of the company, which they would announce to their peers in $important-demographic on social media and verbally. I.e., long-term damage to brand and customer retention. They freely chose to stay at the resort, and then felt resentment towards the company for it not being a mountain climbing holiday or whatever. It's illogical, but that's what they did. Secondly, these types of discoveries can't be produced predictably. Either there is something you don't know about your customers or competitors, or there isn't. Initial efforts might yield a lot, but perhaps there is a saturation point along the way, where more research of the same nature at that particular point in time will yield diminishing results? Well, that doesn't matter, because these people have been hired to do research, so they will keep doing it, whether it's useful or not. I don't understand the separation of design and research into different roles. To me, a designer should be able to go off and do research if it's warranted. Maybe I'm old school, but separating it feels like separating a developer into two people: one whose only job is to find new libraries and read documentation, and one whose only job it is to type into an editor. Thirdly, to those griping about "UX ruined UI": it did not. UX is what got it to the point you're imagining as "good old days". What damages UX in the long run is shifting incentives (resulting in dark patterns) and a variation of the above, but on the design side: you needed a UX team of a certain size to get to the design you have, but you don't need an engine of that size to maintain it. If your UX department is oversized, I suspect that they will start inventing tasks for themselves and do things that aren't strictly benificial. This goes for all roles, arguably. More people doesn't equal more productivity, and at some ratio of number of people vs. real problems for them to tackle, the productivity becomes negative. Also, a UX department as some kind of "other entity" is not a good setup either, in my opinion. In my experience, UX has worked best when it's a cross-disciplinary focus rather than an isolated group of individuals imposing their will and "owning" the UI. As a UX designer, your most important job is to get people who don't regularly talk to each other into the same room. You don't have to be the cleverest person in the room wrt UI, but you do have to be the person who can bring the user's point of view into a room where other, equally important points of view, are represented. UX can't be effectively done in isolation.
- sharts 3y agoHardly surprising. UX seems to have become far less intuitive over the last decade with so many products making changes for the sake of making changes and most UX positions just glorified product people focusing on UI art rather than having any solid background in human psychology / human factors / perception and information processing / etc. Academically, 98% of UX people don't have the requisite background to be doing what they are doing.
- ttjjtt 3y agoI almost switched careers to UX a couple of times because I obsess over usability of everything, digital & physical, have a flair for visual design, and am often told I’m highly empathetic. I just couldn’t get over how full of shit the UX industry seemed to be. It seemed in thrall to itself, and vastly over-rating its own depth and complexity. Sorry for the negativity. I have huge undying respect for dedicated HCI research experts and massive admiration for talented visual designers. I just couldnt shake the impression that a lot of UX had become a blag, a methodology to sell to business like agile etc, and wasn’t on solid ground. I’m not saying there’s any real insight in that but it was the opinion I formed and this article seems to give some degree of validation to it. The idea of HCI research and usable product design still strike me as noble & important fields of endeavour. I’d hope if you’re a sceptical UX researcher then we’d be in some kind of understanding & agreement. I admire what it can be.
- agumonkey 3y agoI feel this temptation on a daily basis.
- wellanyway 3y agoMany here recall 90ies interfaces and lament thier disappearance. Answer seems obvious to me. Of all UX people I have spoken to, not a single one shared that appreciation. Or any interest in technology. But all of them worship Steve Jobs, Apple and such. It's a culture thing. Now a toxic culture eats their own proponents.
- kps 3y agoJobs always put form over function. He demanded a single-button mouse because it looked cleaner, so we got the entirely undiscoverable double click. It's forgotten now, but when the Mac came out, people had to be trained in double-clicking.
- abwizz 3y agovery nice anecdote! makes me chuckle while using a standard, two-button mouse to double click on windows desktop icons.
- cornfutes 3y agoI worked at Google as an engineer, but I also went to design school. The vast majority of my friends are from art/design school, and my family ran a business in the visual arts. This is to say I have familiarity in and out of the tech space. The problem is the rise of Career Designers™ as opposed student of the arts. The current pipeline is dominated by candidates who realize there are few careers for liberal arts students paying six-figures and also self-aware enough to know they don't enjoy math/programming/excel (although many cashcow masters provide OPT when they don't even any math or even the rigor of a respectable MBA). Google has a propensity to hire people who hold master degrees specifically in UI/UX, but I've found only a small fraction (maybe 1/10, and definitely much lower than 25%) who has any aesthetic intuition. I've seen their non-portfolio work, such as their photography and clothing choices. The average teenager on social media probably have more artistic sensibilities than people who are supposed to be the top-tier designers. Obviously this is subjective and also a proxy metric, but I'd like to believe the ability to compose whether it's photos, interior design, or clothing is strongly correlated to the ability to design a website. Or even just having an appreciation of cinema that isn't Marvel. We end up with people who follow systematic procedure taught in a masters in UI/UX that leads to lots of and lots of overly complicated design patterns that make sense intellectually and in isolation, but will never arrive at something that is hollistically cohesively and usable like Craigslists. Google has grown into a corporation and select for career oriented students who are studious high achievers who focuses on practical matters rather than frivolous things. Maybe that algorithm works well for programmers, where in math/programmer there is a yes/no, but even then school can't indicate who has good intuition about design. I mean the author of Vue is a design major, not computer science. The people who live and breath art aren't being hired by tech companies to be designers, especially the large ones. They don't fit the corporate status quo, but then again they tend to be independently wealthy and never had to treat academia as a means of procuring a job anyways. At least for hackers / cybersecurity / introverted programmers types, tech companies have done a good job at assimilating people were in social outcasts in early decades. The design orgs feels much more political and feels like a grown-up version of a high school popularity contest. Google's recruitment process of emphasizing academic prestige (school, grades, advanced degrees) may work well for other areas, but it's filtering out the best candidates, and selecting for people who are frankly mediocre. In the early days of Google, when Google was a pioneer in design, design was lead by Marissa Meyer, an engineer who had a knack for design. It she an artist? Maybe not, but Google was a pioneer in website design and it's at least in part attributable to her. Engineers who have design sensibilities are probably better for designing websites / apps than career-designers. So that's UI designers. UX Researchers are supposed to be scientific and minor statisticians. They're supposed to glean test hypothesis and make unbiased judgements from a representative sample of the population. The UX Researchers I've worked with were some of the most unscientific and non-quantitative people I've worked in my 10+ professional years. The math stops at basic percentages. I observed some of these surveys and user studies where they prime candidates and ask leading questions towards answers they've pre-assumed, rather than actually listening to the user. That's why there is such a huge and growing disconnect between Google products' usability and the user. Most of the people who advance in this org are unsurprisingly great at talking.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jrm4 3y agoI've been teaching IT for 15 years and have always included a few slides about how the entirety of UI/UX is plainly kind of stupid (to the possible chagrin of others) It can't decide whether it's science or fashion and kind of fails at both. Flat vs. poofy buttons is a fundamentally unserious debate, especially when there's no real barrier to letting the user choose (and not infantilizing them). The "solution" is understanding that what we're talking about here is fundamentally "communication" and most of these things can be solved through semantic ways of defining these things, e.g. what HTML tries to do.
- falcor84 3y ago>letting the user choose Hear! Hear! I would argue that the biggest advance in UX over the last several years was the introduction of the prefers-color-scheme media query and the fact that so many systems respect it now. Let's please have more of this.
- balls187 3y agoI'm astonished at how much UX seems to be universally despised among the commenters here. As a big believer in design, I think the field of UX has collectively allowed it's value to be tarnished by not guarding who is skilled at UX and who is not. We developers got to be gate-keepy for a long time with the ubiquitous "CS Degree" requirement. Obviously with the ultrademand for programmers, that requirement is vestigial at best. But we have a very established bar for quality of engineering.
- dfxm12 3y agoMaybe people see all the dark patterns around the web or commercial OSes and associate them with "UX researchers not doing a good job". It's like if devs were to be judged by sluggish code written to satisfy bad requirements. Devs should understand just as well, it's management's fault, and things will get worse if there's no one to do the actual leg work.
- vogt 3y agoAgreed 100%. Most of the comments here conflate the work of designers with stuff they are _compelled_ to do by marketing, PMs looking to pad their KPIs, “growth” departments (is that term even around anymore), or in many startups cases, bad CEO/head of product decisions. I have been in the design industry as a working professional for over a decade and have never, ever met a designer who willingly implemented a dark pattern. I have, however: -Had a VP who insisted I styled the unsubscribe link to our paid subscriptions 10px font and deliberately violate WCAG contrast guidelines (not that he could be bothered to learn or listen on what that means, he just wanted it invisible) -Had a founder ask me to deliberately bury an app settings button in the primary menu three layers deep to (aspire to) throw folks off the trail of account deletion And I could go on like this.
- milkytron 3y ago> I have been in the design industry as a working professional for over a decade and have never, ever met a designer who willingly implemented a dark pattern. I work for a company that historically avoided dark patterns since I joined. Whenever someone suggested a dark pattern, it would get called out and we would figure out a different solution, it was quite refreshing. Last summer, one of our designers started heavily and repeatedly pushing certain dark patterns to our product team. I'm not sure the product team knew that these were dark patterns, and would get approval. When it came time for the developers to review these changes or additions, we pushed back like we normally would. But since there was no clear definition of "dark pattern" or enforced policy that we would avoid them as a brand/company, we were told that these were not dark patterns despite definitely being such and effectively forced to implement them. I didn't touch that code, and half of the team also refused to take on this work. I've noticed this has become another feud between product/design/ux and engineering. I would think that UX experts would avoid dark patterns because they decrease the quality of the experience, but when the business and product become involved there are competing interests.
- edu 3y agoThere's a lot of bashing on UX/UI design in this post. As former developer that switched careers to it, I think that most of the comments are not being fair. In the 90s most people had a very hard time using a computer, software came with thick manuals and often they found themselves in situation where needed help. Nowadays people from all ages use software for many aspects of their life, they interact with their banks, shop online, do their taxes, communicate, interact with their governments... through software. People ranging from kids to elders. Expecting to open an app/web and being able to use it directly, without reading a manual or a help center. This is a great amount of progress. Over this, you've to take into account that often there's a big gap between the design and the implementation due to many causes (business requirements, deadlines, committees, hurry to release, technical limitations...) Of course, the field it's not perfect and there's many designers that are not great, or are entitled pricks. But I'd say that design (call it UX/UI, product, HCI, IxD, whatever flavour of the day) has added a lot of value to the table and helped make technology as ubiquitous as it's today.
- lucisferre 3y agoThere are certainly a lot of problems with software design and UI design is a key part of that problem, but there is plenty of blame to go around. The software developers in these comments seem to strongly believe that UX research holds a disproportionate portion of the blame rather than seeing the flaws of poor design and a low bar for quality products as a shared responsibility. Perhaps this is simply a product of how we are used to teams running. Not really a cohesive whole focused together on a goal, but rather independent and waring feifdoms: UI/UX, development, QA, management, each focused on their one responsibility and blaming the others for poor results.
- JohnFen 3y ago> I'd say that design (call it UX/UI, product, HCI, IxD, whatever flavour of the day) has added a lot of value to the table and helped make technology as ubiquitous as it's today. Maybe so, maybe not. I don't have data to help me determine that. But what I do know is that software has been getting less usable for me over at least the last decade, and I blame the UX field generally for it. Perhaps it's that what makes something usable for a newcomer does the opposite for a knowledgeable user. Or perhaps it's that the value of technology brings to people means that it's become ubiquitous in spite of modern UX design decisions. All I know is that the majority of the time that software really frustrates me, it's been a direct result of current UX fashions.
- xinayder 3y agoI participated at a Hackathon last year, hosted and sponsored by a big telco at the country I'm living in. Me and my team had an idea for the topic "urban mobility improvements", where every transport app (Uber, nextbike, public transport) would be put together in a single app where you could buy tickets, call a cab, rent a scooter/bike in a single app. We pitched this idea to a mentor at the hackathon that worked for the sponsoring company and had worked with UX. The question he asked "how are you going to make your app sustainable, how are you going to keep a steady flow of new users?". We replied: "because it's convenient", and he immediately replied: "normal users don't care about convenience, they won't stop using 5-10 different apps because it's convenient for them to use a new app where they can find everything they need. They need other incentives to use your app". At that point I couldn't reply back to him saying "well I am a user, we are users of these apps and the UX is simply terrible, if you think this is okay then sorry but you're a dumbass", because we had to finalize our business pitch and we were in a tight deadline, so for nervousness I couldn't say it to the guy that he is wrong. I don't hate UX. I hate people that think it's totally okay to hide important or common things behind 3-5 clicks AND screens. This is the golden standard for UX nowadays: making things complicated for the end user. I don't know if I am just tired of this bullshit they shove at our faces, but a LOT of new major products have a terrible UX now. Examples? I use OneDrive for storing my files. I mainly use the web interface because there's no native Linux client and I keep forgetting about rclone. I used to access office.com, login to my uni account, click on the OneDrive icon on the sidebar and it would redirect me to my OneDrive. Microsoft changed the layout recently, now to access 1Drive, you need to click the sidebar, click on the menu icon, select OneDrive, to a point it will redirect you to a OneDrive page, and then you have to click "My files" to get the default view where all your files are listed. I hated this update and I have no idea what Microsoft was smoking to think to hide the OneDrive button under extra actions. Another example? FIFA 2023. You have lootboxes that contains player cars and utility cards. You can get these card packs by completing objectives. You can complete objectives by doing actions on the main menu (organizing your team, buying a player, etc) or inside a match. And guess what, there's no button to collect all of your pending rewards. And if you have lots of card packs to open, you can't just click a button to open them all, you need to open them one by one. Oh and to make things worse, if you go to any other Ultimate Team menu option, you need to go back to the main Ultimate Team menu, click Store, Packs and then you can open your packs. The game costs $70 and has terrible UX.
- efields 3y agoThis is a fun, spicy comments section! A lot of UX design has been formalized to the point where the UI frameworks really do provide just enough. Even better, the UI available in native options (browser or native apps) has gotten Really Good. Really Good is Good Enough for most consumers, and perfect for businesses/enterprise.
- JohnFen 3y ago> the UI available in native options (browser or native apps) has gotten Really Good. I actively disagree with this assessment. I think they've been getting worse.
- JohnFen 3y agoUX research and design is certainly not my specialty, so this is my "outsider" perspective, purely from my own personal point of view. This is opinion, not the result of research. I think that generally, UX in software is dismal. Modern software tends to be hard to use, hard to figure out how to do things in, and generally opaque and lacking in discoverability. I tend to blame the UX field generally for this, as that seems to be where the things leading to this problem have come from. I disagree with the author, though, in his diagnosis that the issue is a clash between capitalism and UX researchers. I think the issue is that the UX field itself tends to focus on things that don't really matter as much in terms of user experience. There's a huge emphasis on efficiency, for instance, rather than reducing cognitive load, making sure that workflows all follow a common logic, and making things discoverable. I don't know enough about the field to diagnose anything, but this smells suspiciously like a failure of UX research to focus on the most important things, and UX developers simply follow that research.
- diiaann 3y agoI graduated from a HCI program and the problem I continue to see is we turn to UXR in all situations of indecisiveness and not necessarily when it makes sense. UXR is best applied to situations when you have little room to be wrong. It also matters what you are trying to research, not everything lends itself to being researched. In Silicon Valley these past years, companies could be afford to be wrong all the time, whether it was because of overall usefulness or the fact they could afford to throw developer resources.
- dahwolf 3y agoI think the ballooning of the UX field is a sign of prolonged good times where the question "does it make money?" is all but forgotten. Live in these times long enough and it becomes second nature to believe that your profession is essential, its importance proven. Consider Amazon. Not once in their history did they have a "proper" UX. It's always been ugly, unpleasant, inconsistent, messy. And yet they rule. Craig's list is similar. These serve as examples that bare bones UX combined with solid business essentials work. It doesn't mean that UX is a luxury in every context, it's a wake-up call to link the work to real business outcomes. Not to mention, to stand out from the bland average. In this so-called "golden age of UX", I honestly cannot remember a single case where I thought "wow, this is top notch UX, clearly well researched".