5 ms·

There's no shame in being homogenous and obvious, though. If I'm building out an internal tool for, say, a hospital lawyer to search through malpractice lawsui

by mjr00 6mo ago

There's no shame in being homogenous and obvious, though. If I'm building out an internal tool for, say, a hospital lawyer to search through malpractice lawsuits, I want my tool to be the most familiar, obvious, least-surprising UI/UX possible. Just stay out of the way and do what it's supposed to do. The trick is, of course, that the human is still responsible for knowing when homogenous is fine, or when there's real value in the presentation. If you're making a website for, say, a VST plugin for musicians, your site may need to have a little more "pizzazz" to make your product more attractive to the target audience.

Fordec 6mo ago
Of course, there is indeed no shame. There is also no pride. Standardized interfaces are as exciting as kettle thermal switches or physical knobs in cars. Useful, probably optimal and will be around for decades to come. Also nobody talks about it, treats it with interest, or pays above market rate to work on it. The value becomes the architecture of the value of the tool, not the interface. There is still value being generated, but the need for a highly paid UX designer evaporates, and is ultimately replaced by the above.
- jrimbault 6mo ago
  > Of course, there is indeed no shame. There is also no pride. But there's is "pride" in making tools people actually use without issue
  - lwhi 6mo ago
    But it's possible to have usability and a unique design character, if you use a human designer.
    - whatever1616 6mo ago
      not only possible but sometimes necessary because sometimes you need to sacrifice familiarity and question the assumptions we have to truly make meaningful improvements
    - afro88 6mo ago
      If you work with an exceptional one, sure
  - Thanemate 6mo ago
    True, but why would people use yet another lookalike tool over the one they're currently using? Or is the implication that looks don't matter as long as it works? Because if that's the case, Why do we need CSS?
    - prmph 6mo ago
      the beauty is in the consistency. why do we build with right angles, straight lines, regular curves, etc? Why not random angles, crooked lines, etc for style and "excitement"? Why don't we assemble a furniture set from a random assortment of pieces from flea markets? People sense that that is ugly.
      - caseyohara 6mo ago
        A better example might be why we build stairs with a standard riser height and tread run. If you've ever accidentally tripped on an unusual or non-standard stair, you already know this. Users don't need to think about how to use them; they are ubiquitous and familiar, and therefore intuitive and automatic. If every set of stairs (or, worse, if every stair in a set) was radically different, every time you approached some stairs you would have to think carefully about how to use them so you don't fall.
        prmph 6mo ago
        Your point is true, but the one I was replying to was focusing on the aesthetic aspect. For them, the sameness of UIs, while functional, make for a drab experience. My point is that I don't find this to be case. Rather, consistent UIs, while functional, are also beautiful to me. The constituents of the UI can be designed with aesthetic taste, but the way it is all put together consistently and functionally has a beauty all its own.
      - hackable_sand 6mo ago
        [flagged]
        6mo ago
- enraged_camel 6mo ago
  >> Of course, there is indeed no shame. There is also no pride. I disagree completely. The pride should come from the value that is delivered. Specifically, this: >> Useful, probably optimal and will be around for decades to come. Is something to be proud of, full stop.
  - threatofrain 6mo ago
    I think there's something nice about the idea of a store owner which has unnecessarily decorated the store with love, even with the liability of a cat; it's not delivering the product better and the cat may actually make things worse because of allergies. A cold American convenience store may be delivering the fundamental value at American prices, but there's something to be said about that "extra" human or creative element. One might say the same thing about the changing nature of the web over time, less individual CSS chaos and more Facebook aesthetics.
    - darth_aardvark 6mo ago
      There's nothing stopping people from decorating their boutique stores (or personal blogs, portfolios, and fan websites) the way they want. And that's fun and delightful for me, as a visitor, just like boutique shops are IRL. But I really don't need that quirkiness at Home Depot, the DMV or my bank (or Amazon, or government websites, or my banking site). I'm there to purchase some screws, register my car or pick up some checks. I just need a storefront (or a website) that lets me do that as fast and homogenously as possible. 99.9% of stores (and UIs) are the latter, not the former.
- soraki_soladead 6mo ago
  > There is also no pride. Is the pride not in solving the users' problems? > nobody talks about it, treats it with interest, or pays above market rate to work on it. Definitely needs a citation for this one. For so many products the user isn't paying for standout design. They're paying for insight, leverage, velocity, convenience, whatever. The market definitely supports this by paying above market salaries. Good design can be a useful differentiator but it isn't the only way for a tool or product to "spark joy" and often _fancy_ design (not good design) is used as a crutch for a subpar product.
  - rustystump 6mo ago
    To prove the above person’s point, sap and salesforce have some of the most notoriously bad ux in the market and yes they make bank. Design is much harder for power user tools compared to consumer. There is far more complexity and the expectation often is users must be trained to even use the tool. Design only goes so far.
    - whatever1616 6mo ago
      > sap and salesforce have some of the most notoriously bad ux in the market and yes they make bank. Why ? Since its so notoriously bad why have there been no attempts to improve it ?
      - dragonwriter 6mo ago
        Because the people making purchasing decisions for SAP and Salesforce are not people who spend any substantial share of their time using it directly or care about the UX.
      - rustystump 6mo ago
        There have been but the strength isnt in the ux. Both are effectively enterprise ruby on rails where you can customize and integrate with anything. That is also why they are sticky. They become part of core business pipelines. It is hilarious because the performance is terrible too.
- the__alchemist 6mo ago
  I don't take pride in having an original UI for most tasks: I take pride in having one that's easy to use and gets the job done. I am not disrespecting people who are making a creative/artistic UI: That adds fun and life to the world. But it's not required for every project.
- pc86 6mo ago
  > There is also no pride. Respectfully disagree. You should feel pride when you deliver the easiest-to-use system that the hospital lawyer has ever used. When you get them in and out of the system quickly because it's intuitive and has an appropriate architecture.
  - ramakrishna2002 6mo ago
    > You should feel pride when you deliver the easiest-to-use system If there is no person in the team who prides themselves to deliver interesting/elegant product, then it is very unlikely the product will be interesting/elegant. I believe this is not something we want to happen, a world with no interesting/elegant products.
- jimbokun 6mo ago
  I think many companies need a UX professional to stop developers from deploying bespoke interfaces and forcing them to follow whatever idioms and patterns the users are most familiar with.
- ItsClo688 6mo ago
  agree that fancy ≠ good. some of the most satisfying tools i've used look like they were designed in 1995.
ezst 6mo ago
That's why I miss the days of old fashioned GUI toolkits (before the web thought of itself as an application distribution platform): you would just design any app as a bag of typical controls in typical containers, and you and your users would live with the expectation that they would look and feel just like the rest of the operating system, nothing more, nothing less. Frivolity would be generally frowned upon, with the result that applications were overall more homogeneous, effective, discoverable and efficient (also in dev time).
- cruffle_duffle 6mo ago
  Shadcn and friends are the modern equivalent of old vb custom controls.
- jerf 6mo ago
  I remember when people would vigorously complain that Toolkit X was simply unsuitable for any task because it did not conform to the operating system's standard visual appearance. Now I struggle to even define what an "operating system's standard visual appearance" is. Apple's still the best but not what they used to be on that front even so.
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    I don't remember people complaining about Winamp being a non-standard UI, but if it were slow then there'd be tons of complaints - and many of the "fancy" UIs were terribly slow (or the programs were, hard for a user to tell the difference).
    - ShroudedNight 6mo ago
      Quite the opposite, people worked very, very hard to make Winamp even more non-standard via skinning.
    - jbs789 6mo ago
      didn't winamp look like an... amp?
ilikecakeandpie 6mo ago
There's a real problem with everything looking the same though. For a consumer product, you lose brand recognition. For a B2B product, you can confuse your users because Tool A and Tool B look exactly the same. You have to look hard at the name, kind of like prescription pill bottles.
- Qasaur 6mo ago
  There is little reason to invent a completely new design system if your goal is to encourage brand recognition and prevent an operator from confusing tools. Apple/SwiftUI has accentColor for example where you can inject a brand colour. This is subtle but effective for UI differentiation - colour is a design primitive that evokes subconscious pattern recognition and can be more effective than a complicated design framework that forces a larger context switch in the user's mind.
raffael_de 6mo ago
there is no problem with yellow, but if everything is yellow then that's a problem. that's the point.
- pc86 6mo ago
  Why? At the risk of straining the example, "everything is yellow" is only a problem if there's a better color for a particular problem. Maybe it's true that yellow is just the best, and should be used in 99% of circumstances?
levmiseri 6mo ago
This is reducing the role of Design as some lego-blocks assembling process. And higher quality being seen as adding ‘pizzazz’. You are right, though. Many products don’t need more than that. But I fear that this will greatly impact design innovation and progress. We might get stuck in the current UI paradigm for a long time.
- ljm 6mo ago
  We can skip Web3... Web 4.0 is twilight gradients, glassmorphism, text size xs in tailwind, and cards and pills for every UI component. Along with self-explanatory help text acting as filler under every header.
- slopinthebag 6mo ago
  It's no different to people trying to reduce the role of Programming to the same lego-block assembling process. And I believe the same conclusion follows.
- pc86 6mo ago
  Is "design innovation" a thing we really need? I'm not trying to be flippant, but every time I've come across an "innovative" design the only thing it's done is made me spend time learning whatever bespoke conventions the designer put in.
  - whatever1616 6mo ago
    Thats rather unavoidable to some extent anything thats better is going to be somewhat different
slopinthebag 6mo ago
The issue is that you actually don't want it to look like the modern ubiquitous UI we see everywhere, because it's some of the most jarring, least-intuitive crap we could possibly design. Even I struggle with it when trying to help my parents out, so of course they have no chance, and if they have no chance neither does the hospital lawyer. Modern UI is garbage, and thus this just outputs garbage. Believe it or not, creating good UI takes real skill and experience. You can't just slop it out and expect your tool to do what it's supposed to do.
AstroBen 6mo ago
"attractive things work better" There have been studies showing aesthetics matter quite a bit for UX - users perceive things that are attractive as being easier to use and less frustrating.
thewebguyd 6mo ago
Agreed. I only make internal tools where I work, and homogeneity is great here. These apps should be the most boring apps, yet clear, easy to use, and importantly, consistent across the company. Bootstrap was great for this. You got a clean web interface that was simple, yet didn't have to be completely ugly. Basic and functional. A form to submit POs doesn't have to stand out, be glassy, or have animations. It needs to be easy to parse and stay out of the way.
Bombthecat 6mo ago
There is more to design then just buttons and colour... Like menus, options, how, where, when etc. But I reckon, nobody cares. Just let Claude decide and go with it... Sad state for UX designers / researchers.
- thevinter 6mo ago
  And no-one is preventing you from caring about those things. I build UIs with Claude a lot and I still spend a lot of the time thinking about the user experience and working with Claude to make an app as intuitive and easy to use as possible.
  - ljm 6mo ago
    I do similar, but I dislike writing CSS because it's practically impossible to keep up with the standards. And because I dislike writing CSS I don't feel like writing HTML that much either. Web Components were a bit too slow to take off so the mental model of JSX has stuck with me, even if the ecosystem with hooks and various approaches towards reactive state are in many ways inferior to a problem Smalltalk already solved back in the day.
mbesto 6mo ago
> There's no shame in being homogenous and obvious, though. The real world analog is this... The reason people (especially Americans) stay in Marriott property hotels is because they are homogenous. If all I want to do is travel to Phoenix, AZ for work I want to know that the hotel room has the same mattress, desk, TV, customer service, etc. There is real legitimate value to that. So I'll book the Courtyard in Phoenix because I know exactly what I'm going to get. On the other hand, when I'm traveling the Amalfi Coast in Italy, I want the Airbnb experience. Sure the bed is stiff, there's no A/C, and the 80 year old door frame is hard to close, but there is something magical about it.
- 3sdfs 6mo ago
  Trade-offs.
  - pen1sl1cker 6mo ago
    [dead]
- sdoering 6mo ago
  It is actually a rational choice. It is a defense against extremely bad experiences. A personal example from a few weeks back. My SO booked a hotel for a weekend as a birthday present. We went there, it had a fantastic spa, dinner was delicious, the room great, clean, and so on. Individually designed, well thought out, friendly staff. Breakfast came around and the coffee was abysmal. Really truly abysmal. What did we do? While eating breakfast we looked for a McDonalds, as we know for sure, that regardless where you are - you will at least find an okay and drinkable coffee at McDonalds. It is not a great coffee. And will never be. But the likelyhood is very low that you will find a shit coffee. Marriott is basically the same for hotels. Or MotelOne in Germany. It is the power of brand - you get a solid 7 out of ten. And to be honest - when I am traveling for work, this is all I want. I want to know, that I will have a clean room, a bed that is good to sleep in. And the knowledge, that I will likely wake up rested the next day when I have to be at my best for my clients. The risk of ending in a shit-hole got smaller because nowadays people write their experiences - but on the other hand, having seen how many of my reviews were being deleted by Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor and the likes because some lawyer requested it - I don't give a rat's shit for online reviews.
linkjuice4all 6mo ago
For internal stuff you’re absolutely correct - but using “main stream” design language (the current trend of rounded 3 column AI layouts, corporate Memphis, skeuomorphism, stock photos of help desk workers, wordart, etc) that isn’t unique makes your brand forgettable. Sure it was mind blowing when it first came out but it quickly loses its uniqueness and starts becoming a sign of crapiness/scaminess/enshitificarion. Your users will never make it to your no-nonsense backend if your marketing is completely cookie cutter.
jakehop 6mo ago
I get your point _and_ I do empathise with it. But that said, for a UX'er I believe there should be a bit of shame in just doing the obvious amalgam of whatever 2-3 most popular things that already exist. If you take on the UX lens, there's a lot of flaws in a lot of popular products, but they are accepted by the market because competition is not perfect. Copying that is not great, and I do think there is a point to be made on how "fine" shouldn't be the goal.
makingstuffs 6mo ago
Yeah I think the web is more a tool than anything else nowadays and it being homogeneous is a good thing. Think of roads. It’s one of few things that humans have managed to agree on across the planet and there’s a good reason for that. The system (regardless of which side you drive on) works. Signs, markings and materials are all pretty much identical wherever you go.
- aworks 6mo ago
  Hmm. The design of left turns on "stroads" seems to vary in the US. Mostly left-turn/U-turn lights in California, loop arounds in suburban Detroit, unprotected left turn lights in Kentucky, differs if the route is a national, state or local road etc. On the other hand, right turn on road now seems to be universal unless a sign prohibits it. And all states apparently enforce slowing down or moving to the adjacent lane for stopped emergency vehilces.
sergiodlopes 6mo ago
Yeah. It's kinda funny we read blog posts, or comments complaining about the lack of a good consistent UI and then, complain that on the web "everything is boring because it's homogenous". If people wanna have fun designing a cool, original website design, go for it. But if we need a fast, easy UI for someone that just needs get the job done, consistency/familiarity is obviously important.
gdilla 6mo ago
absolutely no shame, it's good engineering. it's not even about homogeneity, it's about recognizability and lowering cognitive load for your users who, let's face it, don't give a fuck about how hard you worked on the UI they just want to do what they need and return their attention to the 99% of stuff that is not-your-app. That's their normal.
BorisMelnik 6mo ago
you are absolutely right, standards are so important in web design esp when you take into consideration ppl with ADA needs, elderly people having a familiar env etc

by mjr00 6mo ago

Fordec 6mo ago

Of course, there is indeed no shame. There is also no pride. Standardized interfaces are as exciting as kettle thermal switches or physical knobs in cars. Useful, probably optimal and will be around for decades to come. Also nobody talks about it, treats it with interest, or pays above market rate to work on it. The value becomes the architecture of the value of the tool, not the interface. There is still value being generated, but the need for a highly paid UX designer evaporates, and is ultimately replaced by the above.

jrimbault 6mo ago
> Of course, there is indeed no shame. There is also no pride. But there's is "pride" in making tools people actually use without issue
- lwhi 6mo ago
  But it's possible to have usability and a unique design character, if you use a human designer.
  - whatever1616 6mo ago
    not only possible but sometimes necessary because sometimes you need to sacrifice familiarity and question the assumptions we have to truly make meaningful improvements
  - afro88 6mo ago
    If you work with an exceptional one, sure
- Thanemate 6mo ago
  True, but why would people use yet another lookalike tool over the one they're currently using? Or is the implication that looks don't matter as long as it works? Because if that's the case, Why do we need CSS?
  - prmph 6mo ago
    the beauty is in the consistency. why do we build with right angles, straight lines, regular curves, etc? Why not random angles, crooked lines, etc for style and "excitement"? Why don't we assemble a furniture set from a random assortment of pieces from flea markets? People sense that that is ugly.
    - caseyohara 6mo ago
      A better example might be why we build stairs with a standard riser height and tread run. If you've ever accidentally tripped on an unusual or non-standard stair, you already know this. Users don't need to think about how to use them; they are ubiquitous and familiar, and therefore intuitive and automatic. If every set of stairs (or, worse, if every stair in a set) was radically different, every time you approached some stairs you would have to think carefully about how to use them so you don't fall.
      - prmph 6mo ago
        Your point is true, but the one I was replying to was focusing on the aesthetic aspect. For them, the sameness of UIs, while functional, make for a drab experience. My point is that I don't find this to be case. Rather, consistent UIs, while functional, are also beautiful to me. The constituents of the UI can be designed with aesthetic taste, but the way it is all put together consistently and functionally has a beauty all its own.
    - hackable_sand 6mo ago
      [flagged]
      - 6mo ago
enraged_camel 6mo ago
>> Of course, there is indeed no shame. There is also no pride. I disagree completely. The pride should come from the value that is delivered. Specifically, this: >> Useful, probably optimal and will be around for decades to come. Is something to be proud of, full stop.
- threatofrain 6mo ago
  I think there's something nice about the idea of a store owner which has unnecessarily decorated the store with love, even with the liability of a cat; it's not delivering the product better and the cat may actually make things worse because of allergies. A cold American convenience store may be delivering the fundamental value at American prices, but there's something to be said about that "extra" human or creative element. One might say the same thing about the changing nature of the web over time, less individual CSS chaos and more Facebook aesthetics.
  - darth_aardvark 6mo ago
    There's nothing stopping people from decorating their boutique stores (or personal blogs, portfolios, and fan websites) the way they want. And that's fun and delightful for me, as a visitor, just like boutique shops are IRL. But I really don't need that quirkiness at Home Depot, the DMV or my bank (or Amazon, or government websites, or my banking site). I'm there to purchase some screws, register my car or pick up some checks. I just need a storefront (or a website) that lets me do that as fast and homogenously as possible. 99.9% of stores (and UIs) are the latter, not the former.
soraki_soladead 6mo ago
> There is also no pride. Is the pride not in solving the users' problems? > nobody talks about it, treats it with interest, or pays above market rate to work on it. Definitely needs a citation for this one. For so many products the user isn't paying for standout design. They're paying for insight, leverage, velocity, convenience, whatever. The market definitely supports this by paying above market salaries. Good design can be a useful differentiator but it isn't the only way for a tool or product to "spark joy" and often _fancy_ design (not good design) is used as a crutch for a subpar product.
- rustystump 6mo ago
  To prove the above person’s point, sap and salesforce have some of the most notoriously bad ux in the market and yes they make bank. Design is much harder for power user tools compared to consumer. There is far more complexity and the expectation often is users must be trained to even use the tool. Design only goes so far.
  - whatever1616 6mo ago
    > sap and salesforce have some of the most notoriously bad ux in the market and yes they make bank. Why ? Since its so notoriously bad why have there been no attempts to improve it ?
    - dragonwriter 6mo ago
      Because the people making purchasing decisions for SAP and Salesforce are not people who spend any substantial share of their time using it directly or care about the UX.
    - rustystump 6mo ago
      There have been but the strength isnt in the ux. Both are effectively enterprise ruby on rails where you can customize and integrate with anything. That is also why they are sticky. They become part of core business pipelines. It is hilarious because the performance is terrible too.
the__alchemist 6mo ago
I don't take pride in having an original UI for most tasks: I take pride in having one that's easy to use and gets the job done. I am not disrespecting people who are making a creative/artistic UI: That adds fun and life to the world. But it's not required for every project.
pc86 6mo ago
> There is also no pride. Respectfully disagree. You should feel pride when you deliver the easiest-to-use system that the hospital lawyer has ever used. When you get them in and out of the system quickly because it's intuitive and has an appropriate architecture.
- ramakrishna2002 6mo ago
  > You should feel pride when you deliver the easiest-to-use system If there is no person in the team who prides themselves to deliver interesting/elegant product, then it is very unlikely the product will be interesting/elegant. I believe this is not something we want to happen, a world with no interesting/elegant products.
jimbokun 6mo ago
I think many companies need a UX professional to stop developers from deploying bespoke interfaces and forcing them to follow whatever idioms and patterns the users are most familiar with.
ItsClo688 6mo ago
agree that fancy ≠ good. some of the most satisfying tools i've used look like they were designed in 1995.

ezst 6mo ago

That's why I miss the days of old fashioned GUI toolkits (before the web thought of itself as an application distribution platform): you would just design any app as a bag of typical controls in typical containers, and you and your users would live with the expectation that they would look and feel just like the rest of the operating system, nothing more, nothing less. Frivolity would be generally frowned upon, with the result that applications were overall more homogeneous, effective, discoverable and efficient (also in dev time).

cruffle_duffle 6mo ago
Shadcn and friends are the modern equivalent of old vb custom controls.
jerf 6mo ago
I remember when people would vigorously complain that Toolkit X was simply unsuitable for any task because it did not conform to the operating system's standard visual appearance. Now I struggle to even define what an "operating system's standard visual appearance" is. Apple's still the best but not what they used to be on that front even so.
- bombcar 6mo ago
  I don't remember people complaining about Winamp being a non-standard UI, but if it were slow then there'd be tons of complaints - and many of the "fancy" UIs were terribly slow (or the programs were, hard for a user to tell the difference).
  - ShroudedNight 6mo ago
    Quite the opposite, people worked very, very hard to make Winamp even more non-standard via skinning.
  - jbs789 6mo ago
    didn't winamp look like an... amp?

ilikecakeandpie 6mo ago

There's a real problem with everything looking the same though. For a consumer product, you lose brand recognition. For a B2B product, you can confuse your users because Tool A and Tool B look exactly the same. You have to look hard at the name, kind of like prescription pill bottles.

Qasaur 6mo ago
There is little reason to invent a completely new design system if your goal is to encourage brand recognition and prevent an operator from confusing tools. Apple/SwiftUI has accentColor for example where you can inject a brand colour. This is subtle but effective for UI differentiation - colour is a design primitive that evokes subconscious pattern recognition and can be more effective than a complicated design framework that forces a larger context switch in the user's mind.

raffael_de 6mo ago

there is no problem with yellow, but if everything is yellow then that's a problem. that's the point.

pc86 6mo ago
Why? At the risk of straining the example, "everything is yellow" is only a problem if there's a better color for a particular problem. Maybe it's true that yellow is just the best, and should be used in 99% of circumstances?

levmiseri 6mo ago

This is reducing the role of Design as some lego-blocks assembling process. And higher quality being seen as adding ‘pizzazz’. You are right, though. Many products don’t need more than that. But I fear that this will greatly impact design innovation and progress. We might get stuck in the current UI paradigm for a long time.

ljm 6mo ago
We can skip Web3... Web 4.0 is twilight gradients, glassmorphism, text size xs in tailwind, and cards and pills for every UI component. Along with self-explanatory help text acting as filler under every header.
slopinthebag 6mo ago
It's no different to people trying to reduce the role of Programming to the same lego-block assembling process. And I believe the same conclusion follows.
pc86 6mo ago
Is "design innovation" a thing we really need? I'm not trying to be flippant, but every time I've come across an "innovative" design the only thing it's done is made me spend time learning whatever bespoke conventions the designer put in.
- whatever1616 6mo ago
  Thats rather unavoidable to some extent anything thats better is going to be somewhat different

slopinthebag 6mo ago

The issue is that you actually don't want it to look like the modern ubiquitous UI we see everywhere, because it's some of the most jarring, least-intuitive crap we could possibly design. Even I struggle with it when trying to help my parents out, so of course they have no chance, and if they have no chance neither does the hospital lawyer. Modern UI is garbage, and thus this just outputs garbage. Believe it or not, creating good UI takes real skill and experience. You can't just slop it out and expect your tool to do what it's supposed to do.

AstroBen 6mo ago

"attractive things work better" There have been studies showing aesthetics matter quite a bit for UX - users perceive things that are attractive as being easier to use and less frustrating.

thewebguyd 6mo ago

Agreed. I only make internal tools where I work, and homogeneity is great here. These apps should be the most boring apps, yet clear, easy to use, and importantly, consistent across the company. Bootstrap was great for this. You got a clean web interface that was simple, yet didn't have to be completely ugly. Basic and functional. A form to submit POs doesn't have to stand out, be glassy, or have animations. It needs to be easy to parse and stay out of the way.

Bombthecat 6mo ago

There is more to design then just buttons and colour... Like menus, options, how, where, when etc. But I reckon, nobody cares. Just let Claude decide and go with it... Sad state for UX designers / researchers.

thevinter 6mo ago
And no-one is preventing you from caring about those things. I build UIs with Claude a lot and I still spend a lot of the time thinking about the user experience and working with Claude to make an app as intuitive and easy to use as possible.
- ljm 6mo ago
  I do similar, but I dislike writing CSS because it's practically impossible to keep up with the standards. And because I dislike writing CSS I don't feel like writing HTML that much either. Web Components were a bit too slow to take off so the mental model of JSX has stuck with me, even if the ecosystem with hooks and various approaches towards reactive state are in many ways inferior to a problem Smalltalk already solved back in the day.

mbesto 6mo ago

> There's no shame in being homogenous and obvious, though. The real world analog is this... The reason people (especially Americans) stay in Marriott property hotels is because they are homogenous. If all I want to do is travel to Phoenix, AZ for work I want to know that the hotel room has the same mattress, desk, TV, customer service, etc. There is real legitimate value to that. So I'll book the Courtyard in Phoenix because I know exactly what I'm going to get. On the other hand, when I'm traveling the Amalfi Coast in Italy, I want the Airbnb experience. Sure the bed is stiff, there's no A/C, and the 80 year old door frame is hard to close, but there is something magical about it.

3sdfs 6mo ago
Trade-offs.
- pen1sl1cker 6mo ago
  [dead]
sdoering 6mo ago
It is actually a rational choice. It is a defense against extremely bad experiences. A personal example from a few weeks back. My SO booked a hotel for a weekend as a birthday present. We went there, it had a fantastic spa, dinner was delicious, the room great, clean, and so on. Individually designed, well thought out, friendly staff. Breakfast came around and the coffee was abysmal. Really truly abysmal. What did we do? While eating breakfast we looked for a McDonalds, as we know for sure, that regardless where you are - you will at least find an okay and drinkable coffee at McDonalds. It is not a great coffee. And will never be. But the likelyhood is very low that you will find a shit coffee. Marriott is basically the same for hotels. Or MotelOne in Germany. It is the power of brand - you get a solid 7 out of ten. And to be honest - when I am traveling for work, this is all I want. I want to know, that I will have a clean room, a bed that is good to sleep in. And the knowledge, that I will likely wake up rested the next day when I have to be at my best for my clients. The risk of ending in a shit-hole got smaller because nowadays people write their experiences - but on the other hand, having seen how many of my reviews were being deleted by Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor and the likes because some lawyer requested it - I don't give a rat's shit for online reviews.

linkjuice4all 6mo ago

For internal stuff you’re absolutely correct - but using “main stream” design language (the current trend of rounded 3 column AI layouts, corporate Memphis, skeuomorphism, stock photos of help desk workers, wordart, etc) that isn’t unique makes your brand forgettable. Sure it was mind blowing when it first came out but it quickly loses its uniqueness and starts becoming a sign of crapiness/scaminess/enshitificarion. Your users will never make it to your no-nonsense backend if your marketing is completely cookie cutter.

jakehop 6mo ago

I get your point _and_ I do empathise with it. But that said, for a UX'er I believe there should be a bit of shame in just doing the obvious amalgam of whatever 2-3 most popular things that already exist. If you take on the UX lens, there's a lot of flaws in a lot of popular products, but they are accepted by the market because competition is not perfect. Copying that is not great, and I do think there is a point to be made on how "fine" shouldn't be the goal.

makingstuffs 6mo ago

Yeah I think the web is more a tool than anything else nowadays and it being homogeneous is a good thing. Think of roads. It’s one of few things that humans have managed to agree on across the planet and there’s a good reason for that. The system (regardless of which side you drive on) works. Signs, markings and materials are all pretty much identical wherever you go.

aworks 6mo ago
Hmm. The design of left turns on "stroads" seems to vary in the US. Mostly left-turn/U-turn lights in California, loop arounds in suburban Detroit, unprotected left turn lights in Kentucky, differs if the route is a national, state or local road etc. On the other hand, right turn on road now seems to be universal unless a sign prohibits it. And all states apparently enforce slowing down or moving to the adjacent lane for stopped emergency vehilces.

sergiodlopes 6mo ago

Yeah. It's kinda funny we read blog posts, or comments complaining about the lack of a good consistent UI and then, complain that on the web "everything is boring because it's homogenous". If people wanna have fun designing a cool, original website design, go for it. But if we need a fast, easy UI for someone that just needs get the job done, consistency/familiarity is obviously important.

gdilla 6mo ago

absolutely no shame, it's good engineering. it's not even about homogeneity, it's about recognizability and lowering cognitive load for your users who, let's face it, don't give a fuck about how hard you worked on the UI they just want to do what they need and return their attention to the 99% of stuff that is not-your-app. That's their normal.

BorisMelnik 6mo ago

you are absolutely right, standards are so important in web design esp when you take into consideration ppl with ADA needs, elderly people having a familiar env etc