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It's very sad, I agree that aesthetics/artistic sense of UX designers is absoutely trumping usability in very many modern applications. I always point to wikip

It's very sad, I agree that aesthetics/artistic sense of UX designers is absoutely trumping usability in very many modern applications. I always point to wikipedia as something that has great UX (though I think some of their recent choices have worsened usability). Like making their table of contents a hamburger dropdown.

StableAlkyne 3y ago
Part of it is that UX/UI designers are hired based on their portfolio. This imposes a bias towards those who can wow their interviews with flashy mockups/workflows on figma. If it comes down between someone whose design looks like it came out of Win98 but has the information density of a terminal, and someone whose design looks cool but has the information density of a picture book, most teams pick the latter. Those same people go on to design the applications that get shipped. The OP is right in that we lost the ability to design something like mIRC - the people doing the hiring value form over function.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  > This imposes a bias towards those who can wow their interviews with flashy mockups/workflows on figma. Sounds a hell of a lot like leetcode-optimized interviewees...
  - theLiminator 3y ago
    I think a major part of UX design is that a lot of people enter the field thinking it's an art-adjacent field because they want to do something similar to art. They often lose sight of the goal of usability in pursuit of their own aesthetic sensibilities. A lot of UX designers hate that the most usable designs are actually some of the ugliest/plainest.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
      Yup. Don Norman got a lot of blowback from designers, when he published The Psychology of Everyday Things (which was changed to The Design of Everyday Things). He even wrote a sort of “let me explain” follow-up book, called Emotional Design. But I am actually going through exactly this, right now. I just got off a Zoom call, with our designer, because the first batch of test users couldn’t figure out that there are action buttons. Many designers want users to admire the UX; not use it.
- esafak 3y ago
  Does anyone have a better idea for interviewing designers then?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
myth2018 3y ago
> aesthetics/artistic sense of UX designers is absoutely trumping usability in very many modern applications Indeed. And I get totally stupefied by how much freedom and authority they are given in relation to the other people supposed to provide inputs for the project. My stock broker did that. They had a web app that didn't just work -- it was acknowledged as very good. Fully customizable, you could open many sub-windows and monitor an arbitrary number of quotes depending on your strategy. The screen could turn into a mess, but it was your mess, and that's ok as long as it made sense to you, the user. I used their web app for more than a decade. Last year they replaced it by something they have the guts to call "the enhanced experience". That fuming pile of sh*t enforces a certain geometry for the screen that makes it absolutely clear that the kids who designed that garbage never traded stocks in their lives. But what scares me most is: what the hell the managers who approved that crap had in their minds?
hotnfresh 3y ago
> Like making their table of contents a hamburger dropdown I still go hunting for the TOC, get confused, and take a second to remember they hid it. Like, daily. It’s a couple extra seconds but it’s all the damn time.

StableAlkyne 3y ago

Part of it is that UX/UI designers are hired based on their portfolio. This imposes a bias towards those who can wow their interviews with flashy mockups/workflows on figma. If it comes down between someone whose design looks like it came out of Win98 but has the information density of a terminal, and someone whose design looks cool but has the information density of a picture book, most teams pick the latter. Those same people go on to design the applications that get shipped. The OP is right in that we lost the ability to design something like mIRC - the people doing the hiring value form over function.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
> This imposes a bias towards those who can wow their interviews with flashy mockups/workflows on figma. Sounds a hell of a lot like leetcode-optimized interviewees...
- theLiminator 3y ago
  I think a major part of UX design is that a lot of people enter the field thinking it's an art-adjacent field because they want to do something similar to art. They often lose sight of the goal of usability in pursuit of their own aesthetic sensibilities. A lot of UX designers hate that the most usable designs are actually some of the ugliest/plainest.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
    Yup. Don Norman got a lot of blowback from designers, when he published The Psychology of Everyday Things (which was changed to The Design of Everyday Things). He even wrote a sort of “let me explain” follow-up book, called Emotional Design. But I am actually going through exactly this, right now. I just got off a Zoom call, with our designer, because the first batch of test users couldn’t figure out that there are action buttons. Many designers want users to admire the UX; not use it.
esafak 3y ago
Does anyone have a better idea for interviewing designers then?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

myth2018 3y ago

> aesthetics/artistic sense of UX designers is absoutely trumping usability in very many modern applications Indeed. And I get totally stupefied by how much freedom and authority they are given in relation to the other people supposed to provide inputs for the project. My stock broker did that. They had a web app that didn't just work -- it was acknowledged as very good. Fully customizable, you could open many sub-windows and monitor an arbitrary number of quotes depending on your strategy. The screen could turn into a mess, but it was your mess, and that's ok as long as it made sense to you, the user. I used their web app for more than a decade. Last year they replaced it by something they have the guts to call "the enhanced experience". That fuming pile of sh*t enforces a certain geometry for the screen that makes it absolutely clear that the kids who designed that garbage never traded stocks in their lives. But what scares me most is: what the hell the managers who approved that crap had in their minds?

hotnfresh 3y ago

> Like making their table of contents a hamburger dropdown I still go hunting for the TOC, get confused, and take a second to remember they hid it. Like, daily. It’s a couple extra seconds but it’s all the damn time.