4 ms·

I got into interaction design and UX design because so much of it was so bad. At some point along the way it seems we got too good at it. Many of the points in

by tobr 2y ago

I got into interaction design and UX design because so much of it was so bad. At some point along the way it seems we got too good at it. Many of the points in this article frankly makes me feel somewhat embarrassed to describe myself as a UX designer. Maybe I should start to think of myself as a… personal computing designer? small software designer? dignity designer? (No, surely designing ”dignity” is somehow an even worse pretense than designing ”experience”.)

atoav 2y ago
UX can be used and abused. The biggest sin is that instead of thinking about the big picture of someone sitting at their computer and trying to do a thing that requires multiple programs to work together, bad UX designers assume they start from scratch without any existing environment and have only to anseer to their own project. Imagine if something like Command line pipes would exist for GUI applications and then ask yourself why it does not (the closest thing might be copy/paste). If you as an UX designer try to empower your users and do that in a way that does not break all existing convention without a good reason, you will be fine. A industrial designer can design medical injection systems for drug cartels with the goal of catching more sheep or for a medical non-profit with the goal of making actual medical help cheaper — design is not the problem, the business interest it might be used for is. Designers aren't always in the position to make their decisions freely, but you can put your weight behind the right side and everybody in here will appreciate you for doing so.
ben_w 2y ago
> No, surely designing ”dignity” is somehow an even worse pretense than designing ”experience” Much. "Dignity" seems be be mostly used when it is missing — without any dignity, lost their dignity, helping others regain their dignity… And Dignitas. "Experience" seems still positive to me, at worst a bit cliché.
gyomu 2y ago
We lost the plot when interface design became UI/UX (and all the associated modern variants on this terminology). The goal of an interface is clear: it is how a human interacts with a machine. Buttons, dials, latches, sliders - those are interfaces. We can reason about them, make taxonomies, determine what operations they are appropriate for (or not), and so on. “User experience” tries to capture everything into a nebulous haze that exists not to serve a human with a task to accomplish that a tool will assist with - but a business and how it will capture “users” and guide them on the “journey” it deems most appropriate to reach its sales goals. Design students won’t be able to formulate a cogent thought on what the properties of appropriate interface feedback are, but they’ll be great at cranking out “personas” and sleek landing pages that enumerate marketing points. Something’s rotten.
- andrepd 2y ago
  > Something's rotten It's called late capitalism. We cannot structure a society around not only profit, but infinite growth, and expect that not to give us any problems. It does. You cannot just sell as many copies of Photoshop as last year: you must sell more, each quarter, and more expensive. You cannot sell as many phones as last year: you must make batteries non-removable so phones break quicker, you must spend 3x your R&D budget on ads to manipulate people on buying an identical phone to last year. Etc etc
- slfnflctd 2y ago
  I feel compelled to say that this is the most concise and accurate summary of the whole mess I've yet seen. When you take something straightforward which is grounded in hard logic and measurable outcomes, and try to combine it with abstract concepts about feelings and organizational goals that overlap with multiple philosophies, a massive amount of space for endless argument over details is created.
  - card_zero 2y ago
    I found an archive of Apple's Human Interface Guidelines. Here's 1985: https://archive.org/details/apple-hig/1985_Apple_II_Human_Interface_Guidelines/page/n13/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/apple-hig/1985_Apple_II_Human_In... Here's 2013: https://archive.org/details/apple-hig/MacOSX_HIG_2013_10_22/page/36/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/apple-hig/MacOSX_HIG_2013_10_22/... (More in sidebar) Do they still have these? Anyway I present it as a curiosity. Maybe they're heroes for sticking relatively closely to objective considerations like how a slider should behave and when to go fullscreen, or maybe it's all their fault for being pretentious and tastefully elegant and dumbing things down with a 1-button mouse in the first place. Maybe it shows a smooth evolution from good intentions, and successful corralling of terrible erratic interface choices (from the dawn of time, i.e. the 80s and 90s) into something logical and standard, through into an inevitable rise of nebulous "user experience" over function. Or maybe it was all nebulous and abstract from the start, and the high point was in the middle, somewhere around 2000, where it went through a phase of nitty-gritty good sense which faded away again, I don't know.

by tobr 2y ago

atoav 2y ago

UX can be used and abused. The biggest sin is that instead of thinking about the big picture of someone sitting at their computer and trying to do a thing that requires multiple programs to work together, bad UX designers assume they start from scratch without any existing environment and have only to anseer to their own project. Imagine if something like Command line pipes would exist for GUI applications and then ask yourself why it does not (the closest thing might be copy/paste). If you as an UX designer try to empower your users and do that in a way that does not break all existing convention without a good reason, you will be fine. A industrial designer can design medical injection systems for drug cartels with the goal of catching more sheep or for a medical non-profit with the goal of making actual medical help cheaper — design is not the problem, the business interest it might be used for is. Designers aren't always in the position to make their decisions freely, but you can put your weight behind the right side and everybody in here will appreciate you for doing so.

ben_w 2y ago

> No, surely designing ”dignity” is somehow an even worse pretense than designing ”experience” Much. "Dignity" seems be be mostly used when it is missing — without any dignity, lost their dignity, helping others regain their dignity… And Dignitas. "Experience" seems still positive to me, at worst a bit cliché.

gyomu 2y ago

We lost the plot when interface design became UI/UX (and all the associated modern variants on this terminology). The goal of an interface is clear: it is how a human interacts with a machine. Buttons, dials, latches, sliders - those are interfaces. We can reason about them, make taxonomies, determine what operations they are appropriate for (or not), and so on. “User experience” tries to capture everything into a nebulous haze that exists not to serve a human with a task to accomplish that a tool will assist with - but a business and how it will capture “users” and guide them on the “journey” it deems most appropriate to reach its sales goals. Design students won’t be able to formulate a cogent thought on what the properties of appropriate interface feedback are, but they’ll be great at cranking out “personas” and sleek landing pages that enumerate marketing points. Something’s rotten.

andrepd 2y ago
> Something's rotten It's called late capitalism. We cannot structure a society around not only profit, but infinite growth, and expect that not to give us any problems. It does. You cannot just sell as many copies of Photoshop as last year: you must sell more, each quarter, and more expensive. You cannot sell as many phones as last year: you must make batteries non-removable so phones break quicker, you must spend 3x your R&D budget on ads to manipulate people on buying an identical phone to last year. Etc etc
slfnflctd 2y ago
I feel compelled to say that this is the most concise and accurate summary of the whole mess I've yet seen. When you take something straightforward which is grounded in hard logic and measurable outcomes, and try to combine it with abstract concepts about feelings and organizational goals that overlap with multiple philosophies, a massive amount of space for endless argument over details is created.
- card_zero 2y ago
  I found an archive of Apple's Human Interface Guidelines. Here's 1985: https://archive.org/details/apple-hig/1985_Apple_II_Human_Interface_Guidelines/page/n13/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/apple-hig/1985_Apple_II_Human_In... Here's 2013: https://archive.org/details/apple-hig/MacOSX_HIG_2013_10_22/page/36/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/apple-hig/MacOSX_HIG_2013_10_22/... (More in sidebar) Do they still have these? Anyway I present it as a curiosity. Maybe they're heroes for sticking relatively closely to objective considerations like how a slider should behave and when to go fullscreen, or maybe it's all their fault for being pretentious and tastefully elegant and dumbing things down with a 1-button mouse in the first place. Maybe it shows a smooth evolution from good intentions, and successful corralling of terrible erratic interface choices (from the dawn of time, i.e. the 80s and 90s) into something logical and standard, through into an inevitable rise of nebulous "user experience" over function. Or maybe it was all nebulous and abstract from the start, and the high point was in the middle, somewhere around 2000, where it went through a phase of nitty-gritty good sense which faded away again, I don't know.