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There are certainly trade-offs to consider which is one of the reasons UX design demands so much expertise no matter how many HNers dismiss it as some trivial p

There are certainly trade-offs to consider which is one of the reasons UX design demands so much expertise no matter how many HNers dismiss it as some trivial practice (that they, conveniently, never want to do). Maintaining N versions of your application has costs that aren't necessarily great for your customers either. In my experience it usually cashes out into one version (either mobile or desktop) getting all the support and features while they slowly drip down into the other versions. Meanwhile a responsive design can have the upside of forcing support and feature rollout for all devices simultaneously. None of this is easy.

andrewprock 3y ago
You're more than correct. In practice, working in small and medium organizations, I have met very few UX designers. Instead I have met plenty of graphical designers that know almost nothing about UX design. I've been at places where I - as a backend developer - know more about practical UX design than anyone on the design team. I think the reason why we have "bad mobile first design with awful desktop UX" is because very few of the people designing these experiences are UX designers. I was surprised the article didn't highlight the horror show that is Vector22 at Wikipedia, a design so colossally bad that after three years of suck costs the only path to saving face was to make it the default theme for all users: "Mission Accomplished!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vector_2022 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vector_2022
- pmontra 3y ago
  I read that page, then browsed Wikipedia a little on desktop. It's a site that I use very often and I didn't notice anything weird. I could have sworn that it has been the theme of Wikipedia for at least 10 years. I also checked if I had created some rules for that site in Stylus and uBlock Origin, nothing. For once I'm lucky that a change didn't destroy one of my workflows. One could say that if I didn't notice the transition they could have spared themselves all the work, or one could argue that they performed a perfect job. Anyway, I get directly to the page I need from Google. I found several threads on Reddit complaining about the change and this one https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/10g2cir/im_pretty_bummed_about_the_new_update/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/10g2cir/im_prett... I see a different usage pattern "all I had to do was open the site and use the search bar. And then from there it was easy to get to the main page, current events, etc." The home page, current events? I'm sure I never heard about current events before now and about the home page, I know that there is one but the search bar of my browser is closer to Wikipedia's internal pages.
  - andrewprock 3y ago
    Without going into details about Vector22, it's certainly better today than it was at launch. It still has a very poor floating ToC UX.
- nicoburns 3y ago
  Agreed. I had the pleasure to work with talented specialist UX designers early in my careers, and their designs were really fantastic. They also worked really closely with the developers, both to understand the medium they were designing for and as a first line of feedback before things got to real users/clients. Unfortunately some of the designers I've worked with more recently were primarily graphic designers without a UX background, and actually became an impediment to good design because they were given authority over it despite not really know what they were doing. I think it's probably an unfortunate consequence of there being more demand for UX designers then there are good UX designers, and simultaneously being a lack of jobs available for graphic designers. And a lot of hiring companies not really understanding what makes a good UX designer.
- rerdavies 3y ago
  Not getting it. They increased readability, by limiting maximum line length! That is a colossally good thing. Surely, that's like a graphic design 101 kind of decision. (It's a design rule that significantly predates "UX"). The issue at hand is that overly long lines reduce reading speed and comprehension of the content[1]. The optimum length for a digital line of text is somewhere between 66 characters per line and 100 characters per line. I personally use the 100cpl rule. For reference, this HN page has ~185 characters per line on my 1920x1080 display at default scaling. I do actually remember un-minimizing my browser in order to improve the rate at which I could read the text of ur-Wiki pages. And then they provided an escape for old men shaking their fists at the sky. Given a choice, I would, without hesitation, choose the new design. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_length#:~:text=characters.%5B7%5D-,Electronic%20text,-%5Bedit%5D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_length#:~:text=characters...
- robertoandred 3y ago
  How is Vector2022 bad? Text columns that are 100 words wide is bad desktop UX.
bigDinosaur 3y ago
People tend to dismiss UX 'experts' because frequently they end up being the ones who destroy perfectly good interfaces based on trends or similar. The principled ones who adopt a scientific approach are much rarer.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  The ones who adopt a scientific approach are by far the worst. Design is ultimately all about how things ought to be, an act of judgement, meanwhile science is wholly unsuitable for such questions, since it only tells us what is, which following Hume, cannot on its own lead to conclusions about what ought to be. You get a sort of garbage-in-garbage-out effect if you apply science to a field like design, where it only serves to amplify your own convictions, as what is being fed into the scientific process as unquestioned assumptions inevitably fall out of it as conclusions. At best you get KPI driven design, which is a vehicle for enshittification, not for building great design.
  - bigDinosaur 3y ago
    The core of science is iteration based on experiment and hypothesis generation. The scientific approach to UX is simply a hypothesis that a UX change is superior, and an experiment with a measure as to whether or not this is true. Yes, of course you can optimise scientifically for user-antagonistic KPI's (no need to invoke Hume, his point is true and also useless) but the alternative to not adopting a scientific approach is literally just opinion which on the whole is far worse (would you want your airline cockpit's UX to be designed based on a designer's opinion, or real scientific approaches to how people process information and intuit controls?). Of course one would take a good designer's opinion over some MBA-ridden process but a good designer is likely intuiting what would be validated by a more scientific approach anyway.
  - itishappy 3y ago
    Can you relate that to specifics from the article? To my (admittedly non-designer) eyes it appears to be a great example of how science can be used to improve design, and I happen to agree with the findings presented, so I'm curious where you see this breaking down.

andrewprock 3y ago

You're more than correct. In practice, working in small and medium organizations, I have met very few UX designers. Instead I have met plenty of graphical designers that know almost nothing about UX design. I've been at places where I - as a backend developer - know more about practical UX design than anyone on the design team. I think the reason why we have "bad mobile first design with awful desktop UX" is because very few of the people designing these experiences are UX designers. I was surprised the article didn't highlight the horror show that is Vector22 at Wikipedia, a design so colossally bad that after three years of suck costs the only path to saving face was to make it the default theme for all users: "Mission Accomplished!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vector_2022 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vector_2022

pmontra 3y ago
I read that page, then browsed Wikipedia a little on desktop. It's a site that I use very often and I didn't notice anything weird. I could have sworn that it has been the theme of Wikipedia for at least 10 years. I also checked if I had created some rules for that site in Stylus and uBlock Origin, nothing. For once I'm lucky that a change didn't destroy one of my workflows. One could say that if I didn't notice the transition they could have spared themselves all the work, or one could argue that they performed a perfect job. Anyway, I get directly to the page I need from Google. I found several threads on Reddit complaining about the change and this one https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/10g2cir/im_pretty_bummed_about_the_new_update/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/10g2cir/im_prett... I see a different usage pattern "all I had to do was open the site and use the search bar. And then from there it was easy to get to the main page, current events, etc." The home page, current events? I'm sure I never heard about current events before now and about the home page, I know that there is one but the search bar of my browser is closer to Wikipedia's internal pages.
- andrewprock 3y ago
  Without going into details about Vector22, it's certainly better today than it was at launch. It still has a very poor floating ToC UX.
nicoburns 3y ago
Agreed. I had the pleasure to work with talented specialist UX designers early in my careers, and their designs were really fantastic. They also worked really closely with the developers, both to understand the medium they were designing for and as a first line of feedback before things got to real users/clients. Unfortunately some of the designers I've worked with more recently were primarily graphic designers without a UX background, and actually became an impediment to good design because they were given authority over it despite not really know what they were doing. I think it's probably an unfortunate consequence of there being more demand for UX designers then there are good UX designers, and simultaneously being a lack of jobs available for graphic designers. And a lot of hiring companies not really understanding what makes a good UX designer.
rerdavies 3y ago
Not getting it. They increased readability, by limiting maximum line length! That is a colossally good thing. Surely, that's like a graphic design 101 kind of decision. (It's a design rule that significantly predates "UX"). The issue at hand is that overly long lines reduce reading speed and comprehension of the content[1]. The optimum length for a digital line of text is somewhere between 66 characters per line and 100 characters per line. I personally use the 100cpl rule. For reference, this HN page has ~185 characters per line on my 1920x1080 display at default scaling. I do actually remember un-minimizing my browser in order to improve the rate at which I could read the text of ur-Wiki pages. And then they provided an escape for old men shaking their fists at the sky. Given a choice, I would, without hesitation, choose the new design. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_length#:~:text=characters.%5B7%5D-,Electronic%20text,-%5Bedit%5D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_length#:~:text=characters...
robertoandred 3y ago
How is Vector2022 bad? Text columns that are 100 words wide is bad desktop UX.

bigDinosaur 3y ago

People tend to dismiss UX 'experts' because frequently they end up being the ones who destroy perfectly good interfaces based on trends or similar. The principled ones who adopt a scientific approach are much rarer.

marginalia_nu 3y ago
The ones who adopt a scientific approach are by far the worst. Design is ultimately all about how things ought to be, an act of judgement, meanwhile science is wholly unsuitable for such questions, since it only tells us what is, which following Hume, cannot on its own lead to conclusions about what ought to be. You get a sort of garbage-in-garbage-out effect if you apply science to a field like design, where it only serves to amplify your own convictions, as what is being fed into the scientific process as unquestioned assumptions inevitably fall out of it as conclusions. At best you get KPI driven design, which is a vehicle for enshittification, not for building great design.
- bigDinosaur 3y ago
  The core of science is iteration based on experiment and hypothesis generation. The scientific approach to UX is simply a hypothesis that a UX change is superior, and an experiment with a measure as to whether or not this is true. Yes, of course you can optimise scientifically for user-antagonistic KPI's (no need to invoke Hume, his point is true and also useless) but the alternative to not adopting a scientific approach is literally just opinion which on the whole is far worse (would you want your airline cockpit's UX to be designed based on a designer's opinion, or real scientific approaches to how people process information and intuit controls?). Of course one would take a good designer's opinion over some MBA-ridden process but a good designer is likely intuiting what would be validated by a more scientific approach anyway.
- itishappy 3y ago
  Can you relate that to specifics from the article? To my (admittedly non-designer) eyes it appears to be a great example of how science can be used to improve design, and I happen to agree with the findings presented, so I'm curious where you see this breaking down.