5 ms·

I’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 nam

I’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 ago
Being 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.
- rapnie 3y ago
  > The computing world was at peace until then Really? They just came from a war elsewhere. Standing up from XML trenches and walking joyfully into green JSON fields. JSON to hydrate UI's.
  - hulitu 3y ago
    JSON and XML are not UIs ( in the same way the bits scattered on a hard drive platter is not UI).
    - abwizz 3y ago
      if the user is removed from an user interface by means of abstraction, does that change the nature of the interface?
- dlisboa 3y ago
  > we had UI designers and engineers who through much research and trial-and-error produced very nice UIs for us to use. I don't remember that era of great UI. Sites were still inaccessible except no one cared, multitude of dark patterns still exists, confusing design language, no information organization at all. The "trial-and-error" approach was much more "error-and-error" based entirely on guesses by the designer or engineer. I'm an engineer and remember, working through that time period, the horrible sites we created. I had a part in implementing them. Not to mention the idea of "Web Application" was still very much incipiente in the mid-to-late 2000s. Who had great design for that? Go back and look at Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace back then, hardly a great example to be had, regardless of how bad we might think it is today.
tpoacher 3y ago
You seem to be mistaking UX with UI design.
- ryanSrich 3y ago
  You seem to think there’s a legitimate difference that isn’t entirely contrived.
  - tpoacher 3y ago
    I don't think playing "my definition vs your definition" is a fruitful discussion in general, but the answer is, it depends. If you're in the camp who treats UX as a professional title/career, then in principle it has very little to do with UI, and being labelled "UX/UI" is often an "insult" to UX professionals along the same lines as "Computer Scientist / IT support", or "Electrical Engineer/Electrician", "Civil Engineer/Sanitation Engineer", "Pharmacist/Teller at Boots", "Doctor/Medical receptionist". (not to imply that the latter professions are 'lesser', but rather to point out that the former professions in the pairs are typically deemed to require a higher standard of skills/training rather than simply vocational/apprentice-based training). At the same time, I'm not naive to not understand the fact that, if a large number of people start referring to X as Y, then after a while, insisting that X isn't Y is a lost cause, and you might as well start calling it Z instead. But, e.g. my wife was a senior UX professional who is now doing her PhD in Experimental Psychology; the original motivation was that this would make her a better UX researcher when conducting controlled experimental studies on behalf of her employer. She specialises in voice assistive tech, and her topic relates to isolating auditory markers of voice trustworthiness. I can tell you if she applied for a UX job and the interviewers started asking her what css colours she prefers on buttons, she'd be pretty pissed.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      It might be helpful if you explained the difference between UX and UI design here. I'm legitimately fuzzy on what the difference actually is.
      - 3y ago
alxlaz 3y ago
Yeah, I'm with you on this one. The author describes the past 15 years as a "golden age for UX Research". It's been the golden age of dark UX patterns, huge widgets for touch-inadequate applications running on platforms without touch screens, cartoon figures in professional applications (please explain to me how Octocat is different from Clippit), monochrome or bland icons you can't tell apart, surprising interactions through label-looking text that turn out to be buttons, and metrics-driven positive feedback loops. All of which were overwhelmingly validated by the UX research community, which gradually moved away from reproducible, quantifiable experiments (which the author lumps under "micro-research") and embraced a kind of number-backed hoodoo that makes 1980s psychology research look good in comparison.
- fluoridation 3y ago
  >please explain to me how Octocat is different from Clippit * Octocat is the mascot of Github, while Clippit was not only not the mascot of MS Office, it wasn't even the only option of assistant, just the default one. * Octocat is not a functional part of the UI. That is to say, you don't interact with it to do anything. It's just part of the Github logo and it shows up on certain screens, notably the 404 one. Clippit could be used as an additional interface for the application to accomplish tasks. * Octocat isn't animated, Clippit was. It seems to me that the only thing they have in common is that they're cartoon characters that appear somewhere on the interface of software products. You can complain about it on aesthetic grounds, but certainly not on UX grounds. It doesn't make Github any easier or harder to use.
  - alxlaz 3y ago
    > You can complain about it on aesthetic grounds, but certainly not on UX grounds. It doesn't make Github any easier or harder to use. Neither did Clipit -- every function it offered was also accessible through the UI. It was a completely optional element that degraded the user experience exactly the same way Octocat does: you got to look at a goofy, childish character whether you wanted to write a cute check from the tooth fairy for your niee, a report on inappropriate use of company resources, or a death notice for your late father's friends. You could at least turn it off, whereas Octocat is in the top-left corner of literally every Github page, and prominently featured wearing an astronaut's costume (!?) on the homepage.
nelblu 3y ago
I mostly agree with you, there are some really smart UX people out there but the vast majority out there are garbage who can just use figma and make wrong decisions based on incomplete business understanding or technical expertise or sometimes even both
titzer 3y ago
I hate to be that guy, but my silently boiling rage spills over every once in a while. UX designers are so passive aggressive and self-satisfied. They foist change on us dumb users with impunity because they are a better class. The sad truth is that UIs have gotten gradually prettier but less usable since their peak in the mid to late 1990s. I honestly don't know how an entire UXR department can be justified if they just keep making things worse. Frankly I am sick of the utter wasteland that touchscreens have created, the giant crater they blasted in people's imaginations. And I'm sick of this endless cycle of redesign. I do not give two shits about drop shadows or rounded corners or animations. I want to use the frickin software tool to do frickin work. I am not looking to play tiddly winks with an animated brochure. Bring back the damn drop down menus written in my native language with keyboard shortcuts that are right there in the damn menu. I'm sick to death of iconese. I don't speak it. It's not a language, it's alien hieroglyphics. And stop telling me it's for my own good. It's for their good, so the crap fits and they don't have to go to a translation team. Nothing could be lazier or more hostile to users. Which brings me to the final sin: if you are a UXR and you are not polling actual users, talking to actual people, sitting down and actually watching them use the thing, listening to actual words coming out of their mouths when they do so, which include an *&#$ of profanity, and you are instead relying on indirect means, then congrats, you are a trying to scale a process that doesn't. fricking. scale.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I agree with most of what you said, except this > The sad truth is that UIs have gotten gradually prettier I don't think they've become prettier at all. What they've become is bland and uniform. All basically the same look, apparently trying to be inoffensive rather than beautiful.
  - caseyohara 3y ago
    I think people here romanticize the old days of every website and piece of software having its own unique and quirky UI. Sure, it can be fun at first, but learning a million unique UIs that all look and behave differently is exhausting as a user. If "predictability" is a key principle of good User Experience™, then UI uniformity is the best way to achieve it. Consistent interface patterns translate across applications and make software easier to use, on the whole. Users learn the pattern once and can use it everywhere with lower mental overhead. I would take a bland-but-consistent UI across all software over beautiful-but-unique. Modern UI design has taken this stance too for good reason. Also worth pointing out that a "bland" UI of today (let's say macOS or iOS since they are so pervasive) would be stunningly, mind-blowingly beautiful to a user 30 years ago. It's all relative, we've just gotten spoiled by beautiful UIs to the point they are considered bland now.

Dalewyn 3y ago

Being 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.

rapnie 3y ago
> The computing world was at peace until then Really? They just came from a war elsewhere. Standing up from XML trenches and walking joyfully into green JSON fields. JSON to hydrate UI's.
- hulitu 3y ago
  JSON and XML are not UIs ( in the same way the bits scattered on a hard drive platter is not UI).
  - abwizz 3y ago
    if the user is removed from an user interface by means of abstraction, does that change the nature of the interface?
dlisboa 3y ago
> we had UI designers and engineers who through much research and trial-and-error produced very nice UIs for us to use. I don't remember that era of great UI. Sites were still inaccessible except no one cared, multitude of dark patterns still exists, confusing design language, no information organization at all. The "trial-and-error" approach was much more "error-and-error" based entirely on guesses by the designer or engineer. I'm an engineer and remember, working through that time period, the horrible sites we created. I had a part in implementing them. Not to mention the idea of "Web Application" was still very much incipiente in the mid-to-late 2000s. Who had great design for that? Go back and look at Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace back then, hardly a great example to be had, regardless of how bad we might think it is today.

tpoacher 3y ago

You seem to be mistaking UX with UI design.

ryanSrich 3y ago
You seem to think there’s a legitimate difference that isn’t entirely contrived.
- tpoacher 3y ago
  I don't think playing "my definition vs your definition" is a fruitful discussion in general, but the answer is, it depends. If you're in the camp who treats UX as a professional title/career, then in principle it has very little to do with UI, and being labelled "UX/UI" is often an "insult" to UX professionals along the same lines as "Computer Scientist / IT support", or "Electrical Engineer/Electrician", "Civil Engineer/Sanitation Engineer", "Pharmacist/Teller at Boots", "Doctor/Medical receptionist". (not to imply that the latter professions are 'lesser', but rather to point out that the former professions in the pairs are typically deemed to require a higher standard of skills/training rather than simply vocational/apprentice-based training). At the same time, I'm not naive to not understand the fact that, if a large number of people start referring to X as Y, then after a while, insisting that X isn't Y is a lost cause, and you might as well start calling it Z instead. But, e.g. my wife was a senior UX professional who is now doing her PhD in Experimental Psychology; the original motivation was that this would make her a better UX researcher when conducting controlled experimental studies on behalf of her employer. She specialises in voice assistive tech, and her topic relates to isolating auditory markers of voice trustworthiness. I can tell you if she applied for a UX job and the interviewers started asking her what css colours she prefers on buttons, she'd be pretty pissed.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    It might be helpful if you explained the difference between UX and UI design here. I'm legitimately fuzzy on what the difference actually is.
    - 3y ago

alxlaz 3y ago

Yeah, I'm with you on this one. The author describes the past 15 years as a "golden age for UX Research". It's been the golden age of dark UX patterns, huge widgets for touch-inadequate applications running on platforms without touch screens, cartoon figures in professional applications (please explain to me how Octocat is different from Clippit), monochrome or bland icons you can't tell apart, surprising interactions through label-looking text that turn out to be buttons, and metrics-driven positive feedback loops. All of which were overwhelmingly validated by the UX research community, which gradually moved away from reproducible, quantifiable experiments (which the author lumps under "micro-research") and embraced a kind of number-backed hoodoo that makes 1980s psychology research look good in comparison.

fluoridation 3y ago
>please explain to me how Octocat is different from Clippit * Octocat is the mascot of Github, while Clippit was not only not the mascot of MS Office, it wasn't even the only option of assistant, just the default one. * Octocat is not a functional part of the UI. That is to say, you don't interact with it to do anything. It's just part of the Github logo and it shows up on certain screens, notably the 404 one. Clippit could be used as an additional interface for the application to accomplish tasks. * Octocat isn't animated, Clippit was. It seems to me that the only thing they have in common is that they're cartoon characters that appear somewhere on the interface of software products. You can complain about it on aesthetic grounds, but certainly not on UX grounds. It doesn't make Github any easier or harder to use.
- alxlaz 3y ago
  > You can complain about it on aesthetic grounds, but certainly not on UX grounds. It doesn't make Github any easier or harder to use. Neither did Clipit -- every function it offered was also accessible through the UI. It was a completely optional element that degraded the user experience exactly the same way Octocat does: you got to look at a goofy, childish character whether you wanted to write a cute check from the tooth fairy for your niee, a report on inappropriate use of company resources, or a death notice for your late father's friends. You could at least turn it off, whereas Octocat is in the top-left corner of literally every Github page, and prominently featured wearing an astronaut's costume (!?) on the homepage.

nelblu 3y ago

I mostly agree with you, there are some really smart UX people out there but the vast majority out there are garbage who can just use figma and make wrong decisions based on incomplete business understanding or technical expertise or sometimes even both

titzer 3y ago

I hate to be that guy, but my silently boiling rage spills over every once in a while. UX designers are so passive aggressive and self-satisfied. They foist change on us dumb users with impunity because they are a better class. The sad truth is that UIs have gotten gradually prettier but less usable since their peak in the mid to late 1990s. I honestly don't know how an entire UXR department can be justified if they just keep making things worse. Frankly I am sick of the utter wasteland that touchscreens have created, the giant crater they blasted in people's imaginations. And I'm sick of this endless cycle of redesign. I do not give two shits about drop shadows or rounded corners or animations. I want to use the frickin software tool to do frickin work. I am not looking to play tiddly winks with an animated brochure. Bring back the damn drop down menus written in my native language with keyboard shortcuts that are right there in the damn menu. I'm sick to death of iconese. I don't speak it. It's not a language, it's alien hieroglyphics. And stop telling me it's for my own good. It's for their good, so the crap fits and they don't have to go to a translation team. Nothing could be lazier or more hostile to users. Which brings me to the final sin: if you are a UXR and you are not polling actual users, talking to actual people, sitting down and actually watching them use the thing, listening to actual words coming out of their mouths when they do so, which include an *&#$ of profanity, and you are instead relying on indirect means, then congrats, you are a trying to scale a process that doesn't. fricking. scale.

JohnFen 3y ago
I agree with most of what you said, except this > The sad truth is that UIs have gotten gradually prettier I don't think they've become prettier at all. What they've become is bland and uniform. All basically the same look, apparently trying to be inoffensive rather than beautiful.
- caseyohara 3y ago
  I think people here romanticize the old days of every website and piece of software having its own unique and quirky UI. Sure, it can be fun at first, but learning a million unique UIs that all look and behave differently is exhausting as a user. If "predictability" is a key principle of good User Experience™, then UI uniformity is the best way to achieve it. Consistent interface patterns translate across applications and make software easier to use, on the whole. Users learn the pattern once and can use it everywhere with lower mental overhead. I would take a bland-but-consistent UI across all software over beautiful-but-unique. Modern UI design has taken this stance too for good reason. Also worth pointing out that a "bland" UI of today (let's say macOS or iOS since they are so pervasive) would be stunningly, mind-blowingly beautiful to a user 30 years ago. It's all relative, we've just gotten spoiled by beautiful UIs to the point they are considered bland now.