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This problem is endemic to the industry. All mainstream operating systems have been done products for quite a while. But because full-time designers need to be

This problem is endemic to the industry. All mainstream operating systems have been done products for quite a while. But because full-time designers need to be designing something even when nothing in the company needs designed any more, they start redesigning existing products. And the more radical and courageous the redesign, the better for their performance review.

mlinhares 1y ago
Performance review driven development is the bane of the whole industry. People inventing bullshit work for absolutely no reason other than to pad their yearly reviews. I've been through two large useless rewrites at my current job just so a bunch of folks could get promoted.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  Well, if the big tech mass layoffs go as planned, the problem should work itself out naturally. You can't have designers messing with the UI every performance review cycle, if you have no designers. Win-win for the shareholders who want to save money and for the consumers who want the UI to stay the same as they got used to.
tokioyoyo 1y ago
Not introducing any changes can lead to becoming “uncool” among the younger generation, which can be detrimental to the longevity of the business. Generally I agree with you, but it’s not that simple as our (HN crowd’s?) attitude of “function over form” is not that common out in the wild. People will spend money on stuff that makes them feel or look better. However, designers can screw that up too, and make the new”thing” uncool.
- the_snooze 1y ago
  At least when it comes to smartphones, they're basically commodities these days. Everyone has them. It's hard to see what "wow" factor a mere UI redesign has when everyone and their mother (quite literally) will get it. If Apple wants to make iPhones cool again, my suggestion would be to loosen their iron grip on it and let people customize and build wacky new experiences around it with no corporate oversight. People on the ground know what's cool better than some trillion dollar company. Similar to the Windows theming and shareware scene of the 90s. But that would kill Apple's golden goose, and they'll have none of that.
mingus88 1y ago
I'm not sure I entirely agree. The design of smartphones has largely been unchanged for a decade. Prior to that there was a renaissance of various designs, shapes, folds, panels, buttons, keyboards, etc. Today everyone carries around rectangular slab. What is happening here is Apple is unifying their product lines. All OS versions have converged to 26, 27, 28. The M processor runs iPads, Laptops and Vision. You can install iOS apps on macOS. The headset is not a hit but it's a sign of things to come. The hardware will get better and I'm expecting seamless handoff between all your apple devices. Start a facetime call on your laptop in your office? Transfer that to your visionOS headset and start walking. Move to the living room and toss that app at your apple TV and finish up the call from the couch. We've seen apple move toward unifying their various OS interfaces for a long time. People were forecasting this when OS X 10.6 started using the app store and app icons taken straight from the iPhone. As the article says, liquid glass works best for spatial computing. That's apple's next big bet and the whole ecosystem is going to cater to it.
- queenkjuul 1y ago
  I love applying the solution that works best for the least used case to the most used case, where it decidedly does not work best
- grishka 1y ago
  > What is happening here is Apple is unifying their product lines. Who asked for this? What do the end users have to gain from this? So far, I've seen the macOS design steadily regress for no good reason whatsoever. The new settings app in particular is a disaster. Not only is it a UI that scrolls, a big no-no in desktop UI design, it also severely lacks affordances, and the hierarchy of the settings themselves feels rather arbitrary. What I've seen of macOS Tahoe goes even further with this touchscreenification. I've never used an iPhone as my main phone and never owned an iPad so I don't feel qualified to speak about them. I've also never seen a Vision Pro in person, but I treat it as a cool tech demo that solves no real practical problems. So far, VR has been mostly used for gaming, but Apple doesn't seem very interested in that use case.
  - 1y ago
asoneth 1y ago
I hear this complaint about designers wanting radical redesigns or chasing trends, but the actual UX designers I've worked with seem to prefer spending time on usability testing, eliminating workflow steps, clarifying hierarchy, making consistent design systems, that sort of thing. True, some of them make things too minimal or rearrange the layout for minimal gain. However, in my experience the mandate to drastically redesign a product or "make it look more modern" have always come from sales and/or product owners, and in turn they're driven by competitors and customer choices.
- JohnFen 1y ago
  Well, whoever is responsible, there's far too much "change for change's sake" going on. And the vast majority of those changes are degradations of the user experience.
npteljes 1y ago
This is a tired take, not unlike when people bash web developers to make slow and bloated web pages. Completely disregards how little say the individual has in the final product, and especially in the design of that product. What's actually happening is that companies are expected to a different standards, by customers and other companies alike. By trying to anticipate these expectations, companies go ahead and do the changes that they think will strengthen the brand that they are trying to project. That's all there is to it, the rest is implementation.
- grishka 1y ago
  Huh??? Have you actually tried talking to non-tech people? Customers hate software updates. Especially the kind that change the design for no reason and/or break their established muscle memory by rearranging the UI layout. And third-party app developers hate OS updates too, especially, again, the kind that change the UI design. Apple is the most expensive company in the world so the cost of these redesigns is a rounding error for them. For smaller app developers, this incurs significant extra costs for the only reason of Apple just feeling like it.
  - npteljes 1y ago
    Insult aside, consider the following. Are almost all companies doing this much effort just because of some rouge elements within the company, or are they doing it because they see a direct benefit from it with regarding to sales? What people tell, and how people act are two very different things. For multiple reasons too, I'm not meaning this in a malicious way at all. Feedback is very useful, but needs careful interpretation. Tangential, but this is why telemetry works very well: it paints a more realistic picture compared to what people report.
    - hobs 1y ago
      Competition forces innovation, but in the absence of real innovation you get this crap. Change for changes sake. Nobody is really competing anymore - oh a ANOTHER camera? It's 10 nm thinner! Literally almost all these features are who cares to users, they are just creating an update treadmill for a product that proxies as a social status symbol.
cut3 1y ago
As a designer I can say that the truth is that customers expect things to get remade and updated and if you wait too long the stale aesthetic begins driving away new AND existing users who want to try out shiny new things. Nice hallucination though blaming it on designers, the folks with no decision making abilties who are often blocked by PMs and devs.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- CRConrad 1y ago
  As a useer I can say that the truth is that customers expect things to stay put and keep working, and if you futz around with that just because you think "the aesthetic" is "stale", that sure as fuck begins driving away existing users who don't want to "try out shiny new things" but just want their shit to work. (And whaddoIknow, perhaps also potential new users who also want just that, but have caught wind of your software having unneccesary UI design changes all the time.) Nice hallucination though, thinking that re-designs for no other purpose than re-designing are and should universally be acknowledged as the bee's knees. Maybe the world really just doesn't need as many designers as you seem to think it does.
citrin_ru 1y ago
IMHO it's not specific to design - in big companies incentives (for unknown to me reason) set in a way that small incremental improvements are discouraged by managers and delivery of a big shiny project is the best way to get a bonus/promotion. Managers don't want designers and developers to keep improving things, they want something completely new (a project they can attach their name to) or at lest some big change - the bigger the better.

mlinhares 1y ago

Performance review driven development is the bane of the whole industry. People inventing bullshit work for absolutely no reason other than to pad their yearly reviews. I've been through two large useless rewrites at my current job just so a bunch of folks could get promoted.

FirmwareBurner 1y ago
Well, if the big tech mass layoffs go as planned, the problem should work itself out naturally. You can't have designers messing with the UI every performance review cycle, if you have no designers. Win-win for the shareholders who want to save money and for the consumers who want the UI to stay the same as they got used to.

tokioyoyo 1y ago

Not introducing any changes can lead to becoming “uncool” among the younger generation, which can be detrimental to the longevity of the business. Generally I agree with you, but it’s not that simple as our (HN crowd’s?) attitude of “function over form” is not that common out in the wild. People will spend money on stuff that makes them feel or look better. However, designers can screw that up too, and make the new”thing” uncool.

the_snooze 1y ago
At least when it comes to smartphones, they're basically commodities these days. Everyone has them. It's hard to see what "wow" factor a mere UI redesign has when everyone and their mother (quite literally) will get it. If Apple wants to make iPhones cool again, my suggestion would be to loosen their iron grip on it and let people customize and build wacky new experiences around it with no corporate oversight. People on the ground know what's cool better than some trillion dollar company. Similar to the Windows theming and shareware scene of the 90s. But that would kill Apple's golden goose, and they'll have none of that.

mingus88 1y ago

I'm not sure I entirely agree. The design of smartphones has largely been unchanged for a decade. Prior to that there was a renaissance of various designs, shapes, folds, panels, buttons, keyboards, etc. Today everyone carries around rectangular slab. What is happening here is Apple is unifying their product lines. All OS versions have converged to 26, 27, 28. The M processor runs iPads, Laptops and Vision. You can install iOS apps on macOS. The headset is not a hit but it's a sign of things to come. The hardware will get better and I'm expecting seamless handoff between all your apple devices. Start a facetime call on your laptop in your office? Transfer that to your visionOS headset and start walking. Move to the living room and toss that app at your apple TV and finish up the call from the couch. We've seen apple move toward unifying their various OS interfaces for a long time. People were forecasting this when OS X 10.6 started using the app store and app icons taken straight from the iPhone. As the article says, liquid glass works best for spatial computing. That's apple's next big bet and the whole ecosystem is going to cater to it.

queenkjuul 1y ago
I love applying the solution that works best for the least used case to the most used case, where it decidedly does not work best
grishka 1y ago
> What is happening here is Apple is unifying their product lines. Who asked for this? What do the end users have to gain from this? So far, I've seen the macOS design steadily regress for no good reason whatsoever. The new settings app in particular is a disaster. Not only is it a UI that scrolls, a big no-no in desktop UI design, it also severely lacks affordances, and the hierarchy of the settings themselves feels rather arbitrary. What I've seen of macOS Tahoe goes even further with this touchscreenification. I've never used an iPhone as my main phone and never owned an iPad so I don't feel qualified to speak about them. I've also never seen a Vision Pro in person, but I treat it as a cool tech demo that solves no real practical problems. So far, VR has been mostly used for gaming, but Apple doesn't seem very interested in that use case.
- 1y ago

asoneth 1y ago

I hear this complaint about designers wanting radical redesigns or chasing trends, but the actual UX designers I've worked with seem to prefer spending time on usability testing, eliminating workflow steps, clarifying hierarchy, making consistent design systems, that sort of thing. True, some of them make things too minimal or rearrange the layout for minimal gain. However, in my experience the mandate to drastically redesign a product or "make it look more modern" have always come from sales and/or product owners, and in turn they're driven by competitors and customer choices.

JohnFen 1y ago
Well, whoever is responsible, there's far too much "change for change's sake" going on. And the vast majority of those changes are degradations of the user experience.

npteljes 1y ago

This is a tired take, not unlike when people bash web developers to make slow and bloated web pages. Completely disregards how little say the individual has in the final product, and especially in the design of that product. What's actually happening is that companies are expected to a different standards, by customers and other companies alike. By trying to anticipate these expectations, companies go ahead and do the changes that they think will strengthen the brand that they are trying to project. That's all there is to it, the rest is implementation.

grishka 1y ago
Huh??? Have you actually tried talking to non-tech people? Customers hate software updates. Especially the kind that change the design for no reason and/or break their established muscle memory by rearranging the UI layout. And third-party app developers hate OS updates too, especially, again, the kind that change the UI design. Apple is the most expensive company in the world so the cost of these redesigns is a rounding error for them. For smaller app developers, this incurs significant extra costs for the only reason of Apple just feeling like it.
- npteljes 1y ago
  Insult aside, consider the following. Are almost all companies doing this much effort just because of some rouge elements within the company, or are they doing it because they see a direct benefit from it with regarding to sales? What people tell, and how people act are two very different things. For multiple reasons too, I'm not meaning this in a malicious way at all. Feedback is very useful, but needs careful interpretation. Tangential, but this is why telemetry works very well: it paints a more realistic picture compared to what people report.
  - hobs 1y ago
    Competition forces innovation, but in the absence of real innovation you get this crap. Change for changes sake. Nobody is really competing anymore - oh a ANOTHER camera? It's 10 nm thinner! Literally almost all these features are who cares to users, they are just creating an update treadmill for a product that proxies as a social status symbol.

cut3 1y ago

As a designer I can say that the truth is that customers expect things to get remade and updated and if you wait too long the stale aesthetic begins driving away new AND existing users who want to try out shiny new things. Nice hallucination though blaming it on designers, the folks with no decision making abilties who are often blocked by PMs and devs.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
CRConrad 1y ago
As a useer I can say that the truth is that customers expect things to stay put and keep working, and if you futz around with that just because you think "the aesthetic" is "stale", that sure as fuck begins driving away existing users who don't want to "try out shiny new things" but just want their shit to work. (And whaddoIknow, perhaps also potential new users who also want just that, but have caught wind of your software having unneccesary UI design changes all the time.) Nice hallucination though, thinking that re-designs for no other purpose than re-designing are and should universally be acknowledged as the bee's knees. Maybe the world really just doesn't need as many designers as you seem to think it does.

citrin_ru 1y ago

IMHO it's not specific to design - in big companies incentives (for unknown to me reason) set in a way that small incremental improvements are discouraged by managers and delivery of a big shiny project is the best way to get a bonus/promotion. Managers don't want designers and developers to keep improving things, they want something completely new (a project they can attach their name to) or at lest some big change - the bigger the better.