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> “No designer is given promotion for sticking to conventional designs. It's their creative & clever designs that get them attention and career incentives.” Th
by pavlov 3y ago
> “No designer is given promotion for sticking to conventional designs. It's their creative & clever designs that get them attention and career incentives.”
This is a massive change from my first software industry job in 1997.
I was essentially a “design intern who knows HTML” on a team that built a shrinkwrap Windows application for enterprises. The core of the design team was a graphic designer, a cognitive scientist, an industrial designer, and a product manager with industry experience in the customer domain.
The application was Windows native. User research was conducted on site with scientific rigor. Adhering to platform guidelines and conventions was a priority. I think I spent a few weeks redrawing hundreds of toolbar icons so they’d be in line with the Office 97 look (the kind of boring job you give to the junior). If the app stood out on the Windows desktop, that would have been considered problematic.
Today a similar design team would only have a graphic designer and a PM, and neither of them would care the slightest about platform guidelines or customer domain. The UI is primarily an extension of the corporate brand. Hiring a cognitive scientist? Forget about it…
Everything certainly wasn’t perfect in the Windows/Mac desktop golden era. But the rise of the web wiped out a lot of good industry practices too.
- aldanor 3y agoToday they might have a psychologist on the team to research which buttons may serve as dopamine triggers so you're a lot more likely to upgrade to Premium before thinking it over
- pavlov 3y agoRight. Making people click on things they didn’t mean to and buy things they didn’t want — those goals were not even a part of the 1990s UI paradigm.
- hnlmorg 3y ago1990s design was all about preventing people from accidentally doing actions they might not have wanted to. Even down to the “Are you sure you want to quit” dialogues that were all the rage. It’s sad just where we are now compared to the design goals of old.
- lewisjoe 3y agoFrom a person who started using computers from the early 2000s era: THANK YOU! None of the current SaaS apps I use can come close to the experience of using softwares from that era. Take a simple list view of a typical Windows/Mac software? 1. Command clicking selected multiple objects 2. Shift clicking selected a range. 3. Right clicking brought up selection actions. 4. Double clicking opened an object. This pattern was followed in almost list views and there was no re-learning and surprises. Now can you say the same about the list views of modern web apps? Can you apply the same list selection experience across Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive and Apple iCloud? Nope. That's were we failed as an industry. We let a lot of designers run too wild with their ideas, to put it bluntly.
- lfowles 3y agoThose four actions worked for me on the Google Drive web interface
- lewisjoe 3y agoGreat! Now try it in any other list view in any other app. Maybe the list of docs in https://docs.google.com https://docs.google.com?
- evandale 3y agoOn my phone so it's hard to check, but Gmail's ctrl and shift clicks work really well and is intuitive to me. I'm shocked they wouldn't use the same mechanics everywhere. Best example: Gmail is one of the only webapps I'll ctrl click a few items at the top of the list, ctrl click a few in the middle, and then shift click to the bottom and it works exactly how I'd expect - everything stays selected and the shift+click selects from your previous click to the next item. I think it gets wonky if you change directions but I can't imagine how I'd expect ctrl+click item 1, 2, 9, 10, then shift click on 4 would work.
- cwillu 3y agoFor myself, I'd expect the items between 4 and 10 to be added to the selection: everything but 3 would be selected. Having just checked, this is indeed what the file explorer on my desktop does, and I'm pretty sure windows file explorer does the same.
- ilyt 3y agoRemember times where you could change the theme and all of the apps followed suit ? Even in Linux there were tools to sync gnome with QT look so you could have one theme applied to every app for nice and consistent look, all the way to how the common icons look. Nowadays ? Every fucking app gotta have their own different styling. Will the setting icon be three dots, gear, or honey badger ? WHO FUCKING KNOWS. You'd be lucky if you even get a choice between light and dark theme But hey, we can write same code to work on windows, mac and mobile ! It will work shit in all of them and be slow but we don't care!
- thwarted 3y agoAnd it got worse with client side decorations. Now even window interactions are app-specific and don't adhere to global settings.
- nicoco 3y ago> Even in Linux there were tools to sync gnome with QT look There are still such tools, you don't have to use the past tense here.
- pdntspa 3y agoEven better, every app is doing their own styling so they can all look like Discord
- noisy_boy 3y agoIs it just me or there are others who find discords handling of threads terrible?! I mean Slack is far from my favourite but at least they treat a thread like a thread where I can see the entire conversation in one place instead of visually parsing questions and replies while frantically scrolling up and down.
- farhanhubble 3y agoDiscord and Teams both have terrible UX. Discord has the look and feel of a poorly designed game and Teams can't even get highlight and focus right.
- WinLychee 3y agoThere's been a large influx of people chasing dollars and status, they could not care less about the product or who uses it. You can still find orgs that do care, but they're swiftly pushed out by the VC-funded "growth at any cost" model or are acquired into oblivion. The indie scene is looking excellent however, a lot of programmers who have already made their money seem to be pushing excellent hobby projects out.
- jakubmazanec 3y agoI have another theory: it's all about the screen size. When you had only 320x240—1014x768, you simply MUST have thought about UX (in the sense of "How can I fit all this info in this little space?" Now you don't have to. So no one does.
- selcuka 3y agoThis is true in a sense, but we now have a different restriction, called a mobile view.
- SanderNL 3y agoThat sounds expensive AF though. Was that really necessary? I’m all for craftsmanship, but having four top guys fiddling with design.. it all depends on the domain I guess.
- Dalewyn 3y agoConsidering most of us here are ready to murder a few designers for wasting so much of our time now? Yes, absolutely necessary cost.
- Sakos 3y agoUh ... plenty of companies have a UX team. They're mostly all graphic designers. "four guys fiddling with design" is nothing. Either you care about having a well-designed UI or you just want a pretty one with a high conversion rate, and who you hire reflects what you really value.
- PeterStuer 3y agoThere is a fundamental difference between working on software products vs bespoke software development: In the former you make money from selling the result, in the latter you make money from selling the hours spent creating the thing. If the former is unusable it will lead to bad sales. In the latter it might even lead to additional hours sold in change requests. The former is bought often after evaluation and comparison by the user of the software. The latter is sold to an executive that will never have to use the software as a project.
- Sakos 3y agoMicrosoft basically used to do this too. We can see that they clearly don't anymore.