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If you ask any UI or UX designer about the interface of Teams, absolutely zero will say it's good. You're giving it the blessing of designers based on your assu

If you ask any UI or UX designer about the interface of Teams, absolutely zero will say it's good. You're giving it the blessing of designers based on your assumption that designers approve of MS UI and UX practices. They don't. Sure, some flagship products are pretty decent, but they've famously sucked at UI (and all other sorts of) design since forever. Here's one (made by an MS designer as a joke) from 2006 talking about their entirely marketing-department-driven packaging design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k We use SO MANY interfaces every day-- every screen on every app and every webpage you use... text messages, ATM, ordering terminals, shopping carts, ad infinitum-- and using those is almost universally intuitive enough to be invisible. Designers use things like implied lines, gestalt, type variance, value contrast, and things like that to make a sane data hierarchy and give users signals for what's happening in the program and what they need to do to influence that. Good practices say they should then test and refine their designs for various kinds of users to make the best interface possible. If the UI design is invisible and users can just solve their problem without having to think about it, that's good design. When design "sticks out," it's usually for the wrong reasons. While bad designers exist, 99% of all "bad design" decisions cited by developers when talking trash about modern UI design were probably not made by designers-- they were likely made by project managers or developers that insisted their way was better, or they didn't need to check with the designer to modify something because they can make it "looks designed." If the interface looks "cluttered", they might remove useful things probably just needs to be organized. That's bad design.

AlotOfReading 2y ago
I don't get the point of this semantic distinction between the people producing (bad) designs and the ivory tower label you're calling "designers". If they're producing designs, are they not designers too? If none of the people with the title "designer" are meaningfully impacting products, who's employing them and why do they not have the same obligation other technical experts have of ensuring that meddling managers are steered in the direction of correct decisions?
- chefandy 2y ago
  > I don't get the point of this semantic distinction between the people producing (bad) designs and the ivory tower label you're calling "designers". If they're producing designs, are they not designers too? Is everybody that has written code a software developer? >If none of the people with the title "designer" are meaningfully impacting products, who's employing them and why do they not have the same obligation other technical experts have of ensuring that meddling managers are steered in the direction of correct decisions? As I said, you use so many interfaces every day that are so well designed you don't even notice them. That's good interface design, and executing it takes years of learning and practice. The developers that think their interface design skills are objectively good because of what they've gleaned from working with designs, and knowing how they're implemented are like the designers that call themselves web developers because they cargo-cult copy and paste code from tutorials into WordPress plugins. Their end goals are largely the same, but to equate them is pretty ridiculous.
- causal 2y ago
  Designers try? It's not like engineers can always prevent bad management from interfering with good product

AlotOfReading 2y ago

I don't get the point of this semantic distinction between the people producing (bad) designs and the ivory tower label you're calling "designers". If they're producing designs, are they not designers too? If none of the people with the title "designer" are meaningfully impacting products, who's employing them and why do they not have the same obligation other technical experts have of ensuring that meddling managers are steered in the direction of correct decisions?

chefandy 2y ago
> I don't get the point of this semantic distinction between the people producing (bad) designs and the ivory tower label you're calling "designers". If they're producing designs, are they not designers too? Is everybody that has written code a software developer? >If none of the people with the title "designer" are meaningfully impacting products, who's employing them and why do they not have the same obligation other technical experts have of ensuring that meddling managers are steered in the direction of correct decisions? As I said, you use so many interfaces every day that are so well designed you don't even notice them. That's good interface design, and executing it takes years of learning and practice. The developers that think their interface design skills are objectively good because of what they've gleaned from working with designs, and knowing how they're implemented are like the designers that call themselves web developers because they cargo-cult copy and paste code from tutorials into WordPress plugins. Their end goals are largely the same, but to equate them is pretty ridiculous.
causal 2y ago
Designers try? It's not like engineers can always prevent bad management from interfering with good product