> 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.

> 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.