The article tries really hard to avoid the thing everyone outside this field seems to know: Concurrent with this 15 year golden age, UX has become universally terrible.
Can you go into some more detail as to how "UX has become universally terrible"? I'm a UX person, so I'm always intrigued when I hear people say that UX has become terrible.
The rise of targeted advertising is the main culprit of bad UX.
Everywhere there's dark patterns, performance overhead, mandatory updates degrading user experience, unnecessary JS and walled gardens breaking accessibility/compatibility, online-only etc.
This mostly matches up with the "business > users" point that the author was making. Businesses have decided that degrading the end experience for users through dark patterns, mandatory updates, walled gardens, and online only services is acceptable because users either have to use their product (electric companies, as an example), or because they offer a genuinely compelling product that people want to use despite the terrible experience (another point the authors made).
For performance overhead and unnecessary JS, that sounds like poor development practices that happens to also degrade the end experience for users, although some of that unnecessary JS could be some sort of tracking implementation that was included through business requirements.
I wouldn't say UX has become universally terrible, but the average experience has definitely gotten worse over the last couple years:
- The introduction of several banners/popups/modals, either to shoddily comply with tracking consent laws or to drive up engagement (newsletter subscription, notifications, check out new feature X)
- The display of several, sometimes even nested loading indicators all over the place
- The adoption of "trendy" UI patterns that don't necessarily fit (e.g. "stories", a few years ago)
- An obsession with reducing information density and making everything very sparse
- Rejection of color as a redundant signifier for UI elements, particularly icons
- An overall extremely hostile attitude towards the user, with dark patterns, disregard to preferences and privacy
From my experience the terrible experience is pretty often because of bloated features (and the bad UI that comes with it) that are shipped quickly in order to be first to market and capitalize on the novelty of some new technology. Move fast and break things. Then hardware technology improved so bloated UI etc got a pass because no one needed to optimize anything unless you're developing for 3rd world with outdated hardware and poor internet speeds.
In the 90s people worked really hard to draft up universal standards of what makes UI usable and intuitive. Most of it tends to be ignored nowadays. Try teaching an old person how to use a smart phone some time. Just some bullet points:
* Apps feel generally disorganized. Buttons are unlabled. Many things are hidden somewhere between layers of unlabled buttons. In the past you could count on the menu bar giving you quick access to anything.
* Lack of functionality / composability. Avoidance of the file system. Tunnel menus that you have to take one step at a time.
* Every program has UI that works and looks differently, made worse because even the same programs redesign their own UI periodically.
* Flat design. Lack of 'affordances'. Buttons don't look like buttons, draggable things don't look like they're draggable. E.g. scroll bars in the past had this serration to suggest interaction. This leads to hidden features and surprises, where things that seem like static images suddenly hide important functionality.
* Lack of configurability. Configurable Toolbars, arrangeable view panes, tabs etc. And unnecessary limits even when you can configure things. Like, Firefox only has a list of preset zoom levels, to get finer zoom levels you have to go into about:config. Or the fact that it limits the size of tabs to a rather large minimum. For no reason at all.
* Lack of consistent (or even discoverable) keyboard navigation. Rebinding short cuts is not a thing anyone seems to care about anymore.
* Readability, use of space. This applies more to the web, but grey text, ultra-narrow columns, inconsistent scaling.
My kindergartener definitely picked up conventional linux desktops faster than iPadOS.
(It's whatever Manjaro defaults to. It looks like xfce, but I'm pretty sure it's KDE. The point being that I don't know because it's not configured terribly out of the box like modern gnome.)
The minecraft launcher does regularly bring him to literal tears though. :-(
> Also, try to teach a young person to use an old program
Funny enough, the few times I had to do that, it turned out to be easy.
Why? Because the software may not look shiny, but it's obvious and discoverable. There is the menu-bar. It says "File". The assumption that "File" is the right place to look for the button that saves the work to a file is one that comes pretty naturally. And of course the keybind is written right there next to the menu item.
Ugly? Maybe. But it's obvious and gets the job done.
Now let's look at some "modern" software, and the Button to save is...yeah, anyones guess really where it is.
Might be in some hamburger or sub-hamburger.
Might be in some animated menu that I have to scroll beyond the various cloud-store options to store to disk, which is a common dark pattern, because cloud solutions are something I can sell, while the users disk isn't.
There might be some gesture-based menu, even in desktop apps.
It may be a button in the interface, but which one is anyones guess ... because apparently the floppy disk icon is not "modern" enough, so there may be any combination of boxes, arrows, arrows in boxes, or whatever happened to be the ultimate wisdom in save-button design at the time.
I have seen apps where it was in the "Share" menu, right next to whatsapp and facebook integration, because these are vitally important options for all apps apparently.
Having an actual Save button or shortcut is a luxury nowadays. I will admit autosaving is convenient. But there are still places where network connectivity is spotty and one wants to actually confirm that the thing is saved. You're lucky to have a little icon color change or text that says the stuff on the screen is saved. Even when such text exists, it's often off the visible screen. Worse, sometimes a form button will not work and the error message is not visible until you look for it at the bottom or the top of the page where it's not visible.
My other usability pet peeve. Traversing a big number if things by paging. The UI will not give you the total number of pages anymore. You can increment 2 pages at a time. Sometimes you can change the url to try later pages but not always. Sometimes there will be a button for the last (final) page but when you click it, it doesn't exist. To make this even worse most times this is loaded via JavaScript so if you're on the equivalent of page 50. The next time you get there you have to keep loading more until you're on 50 again. There is no way to bookmark state or go there directly. I am assuming this is a JavaScript Json thing that somehow became a pattern, like getting a total count is now impossible or something.
> Buttons are unlabled. Many things are hidden somewhere between layers of unlabled buttons.
My car hides map functionality in buttons that are simply not present until you interact with the map in some magic way that triggers a heuristic that you want the buttons to appear. Slowly.
When I want to see chargers drawn on the map, I don’t want to move the map. So why TF do I have to move the map to convince the software to draw the button so I can tap it? While driving or perhaps waiting at a red light.
Not the author of the above post, but happy to answer:
- Essential functionality shoved into some sub-hamburger-menu because it "didn't fit the design".
- Low information density
- Pointless cruft like animated menus and hero images + resource intensive pseudo-minimalism, where the app/page/whatever, despite the low information density, somehow still manages to load ungodly amounts of data, or eats tons of resources, or both.
- The latter point contributing to the situation where we have apps that run worse on 2022 hardware, than apps in the early 90s did on a Pentium I. I know that design isn't solely to blame for this, but it certainly played a part.
- Circumventing OS or browser default functionality. Example: Webpages that hijack the onscroll event. I use my mousewheel to scroll, not to advance through whatever the designer thought was a must-see presentation about their companies "values".
- Smooth UX breaking down the instant the user leaves the happy path. Trying to setup an account? Easy. Trying to change the auth method to MFA? A hellride.
- Modals. Modals everywhere
- Everything trying to look like a smartphone app, no matter the viewing device. I have a high resolution screen and a high precision pointing device in front of me. Why are half the webpages and many apps presenting buttons the size of texas?
- Super smart designs causing the page layout to change after it's loaded. Nothing more fun than to accidentially click the wrong thing and then having to reload the previous page because the layout changed under my thumb.
- Next to zero configurability.
Apps are tools. Webpages are tools. I am not starting a program to look at it's amazing design, same as I don't pick up a hammer to marvel at the color choice of the handle. I pick up a hammer to hammer at nails. If I get the impression that the process of picking the handle-color was getting more attention than the process of making a good, sturdy, serviceable and reliable hammer, then I will not use that hammer.
What web browser are you using? Option arrow works right for DDG's location bar on safari + firefox, and duckduckgo.com and google.com's search bar's option arrow works properly under safari.
If you are in the pull down of search suggestions and in the search field is standing (copied) the suggestion where you currently are, then when you hit arrow, the search field jumps back to your search string. It should instead led you edit the selected suggestion.
Also, everything has to have an account now. I just got fined $8 by a movie theater for buying a ticket without an account.
Of course, with the rise of microservices, everything that requires an account is also unreliable.
Also, there's the dark pattern of returning incorrect results during partial outages, so even when stuff is "working", it's mostly gaslighting the end user. This was pioneered by Netflix's frontend team, but it's seeped into all sorts of inappropriate things. A surefire sign of this is opening up an online-only app, and having it report stale data until it updates. My car does this. I don't care what its charge level was sixteen hours ago (typically displayed by my phone for 10-60 seconds), or four days ago (from my watch).
Netflix has done far more damage to the software industry compared to any other large modern company. The whole microservices nonsense and the myriad of complicated tools to solve their own customer complicated situations, gosh, thankfully the company is dying out now.
It's even older than that: Amazon began doing this in the 90s.
Their initial idea was to synchronize warehouse inventory with the online store in realtime, so that users would never buy anything out of stock. That proved logistically difficult and expensive, so they decided that the frontend would merely checkpoint inventory levels at intervals. When someone inevitably ordered something that was no longer in stock, they simply sent a robo-apology note and refunded the order.
Mitigating the hit to customer satisfaction was deemed cheaper than the very expensive proposition of synchronizing distributed warehouse inventory levels in realtime over unreliable networks.
> - Super smart designs causing the page layout to change after it's loaded.
This seems to happen far too much. Nowadays usually causes me to give up on a site and go somewhere else. Feels like eliminating stuff like this should be low-hanging fruit UX-wise (albeit not especially exciting, I guess)
I strongly believe that's the main problem. Today UX thinks of computers as Assistants. It is clippy all over again.
That is why tech is so exited about Amazon Echo, ChatGPT.. It's the ultimate assistant.
Nobody wants to teach their users anymore, it's supposed to work out of the box. Easy, simple. There should be one button or one way of doing something (the dreaded User Story). Otherwise the user will go elsewhere. So we get these one trick apps.
In the 90s the user was seen as an intermediate user. Today it's all about onboarding.
I'll take it a step further and say most "UX" designers think of everything as an Experience. That's fine if I want to watch a movie but not if I want to do a thing.
- Desperately trying to make everything from PCs to cars to refrigerators to space capsules look and behave like a mobile phone for no reason on (or off) God's green Earth except "Woah, trendy."
> - Everything trying to look like a smartphone app, no matter the viewing device. I have a high resolution screen and a high precision pointing device in front of me. Why are half the webpages and many apps presenting buttons the size of texas?
You're making a very broad assumption here that everyone is like you. The fact is, they aren't. Big click targets are important for accessibility (if you want to read more, theres a pretty good article on the topic here: https://ishadeed.com/article/clickable-area/)
> Big click targets are important for accessibility
Apparently not, because we went for decades without them, and no one complained about a bad UX from buttons that are too small to click. Which could have something to do with the aforementioned high-precision pointing device, which btw. can be configured to the motoric requirements of the individual user.
However, a lot of people complain about UX gone to hell as of right now. So I'd say its a pretty safe bet that things, as a whole, didn't go into the right direction
Besides, a requirement on a PHONE is not an excuse to do the same thing on a DESKTOP. My desktop PC isn't a phone, and I value information density more than click-area. If an interface ignores these facts, then it is a bad UX for me.
This article, like seemingly ever design-focused article in the last decade, parrots Fitts' Law but doesn't run any numbers:
> An important law to be followed in UX design. In simple words, the larger and closer the touch or click target is, the less time it will require the user to interact with it.
...and mistakenly concludes that, if you just make buttons bigger and add more whitespace everywhere, you get widgets that are easier to click.
If you try to run the numbers on "facelifted" modern interfaces vs. their older counterparts, you'll find that many of them actually fare worse even in terms of Fitts' model.
E.g. if you have three equally-sized widgets side by side -- three buttons, for instance -- simply making them wider by some proportion of the initial width increases the difficulty of getting from the center of the leftmost widget to the center of the rightmost widget, because the distance (up in the nominator) increases by a higher factor than the width (in the denominator). In practice, increasing widget sizes increases the index difficulty in basically every UI that has more than two widgets laid out along a given direction, because it causes the distance to targets to grow by more than the widget size.
(Edit: this is commonly forgotten because "literature" drones about Fitt's conclusion without explaining the context in which it was determined: repetitive motion over a single direction between two already widely-spaced physical items. Making the items bigger resulted in lower distance because, unlike in a modern fluid UI, where widgets are placed at constant paddings that are a fraction of their physical size, that did not cause their centers to drift further apart. Whereas in practical UI cases, increased paddings and widget sizes often result in the average distance to widget centers increasing by way more than (half) the widget width, so the ID actually grows).
The example shown in the article just so happens to fare better because it makes a widget taller by about 10%, while reducing the distance between the only two widgets shown on screen about three times. IRL padding between widgets has steadily grown, so while the numbers line up, this isn't a very representative example -- in fact, many designers would probably object that the design on the right is also bad because there's not enough space between the text field and the button.
But even if we take the design example at face value, generalizing from it is a really bad idea. Because the ID is logarithmically-derived, if you were to take the "narrow" button on the left and just bring it 16px away from the text field, the difference would be minute -- no more than 5% (assuming strictly vertical motion between the midline of the text field and the midline of the button; in practice it's probably way lower than that, since LTR users tend to click towards the left of the field; although FWIW I bet in practice moving the two widgets close together has barely any impact at all, as the text field is likely auto-focused, so motion will commonly happen between wherever the cursor happens to be on the screen and the center of the button).
That's a good trade-off if you only have two widgets on the screen, as in a form -- you don't lose anything other than some whitespace by making a widget bigger. If you have more elements to show, though, that's a very bad trade-off to make. An ID difference of 5% is barely noticeable (IIRC it's just above the "noise floor" in a standard Fitts experiment), which is more than offset by the additional difficulty introduced by scrolling (because you can fit fewer elements on the screen).
Not to mention essentially nonexistent window borders and putting active controls in the title bar. Have people forgotten that those are click targets, too? Sometimes I want to move the window or resize it, and Windows makes that hard.
It seems like in your experience, either UX did it's job and came up with all the wrong solutions, or UX wasn't involved and all the gripes you listed would have been alleviated by true UX professionals.
"Lets optimize for mobile" with the implications that come with it, e.g. extra snooping and dark patterns, while simultaneously leading to a shit desktop experience.
the need for "new", when in most cases something vaguely similar to WinXP or OSX is fine for 90% of things.
I’d guess it is in terms of user experience, which is hard to achieve if you are optimizing for looks or journey path.
The article mentions this in the Business > User section, saying (removing euphemism and double negatives) the prevailing wisdom is that you will probably be fired unless you actively worsen the product, and provide metrics to explain how you did it.
I’d think that companies with customer bases that don’t actively hate them are less likely to have big layoff rounds, but I am not a UX expert.
My favourite website that was designed "mobile first" is the English Cities Fund site[1]. Why? Because the site is supposed to be the primary site for a Government-supported fund distributing millions of £££ to English towns and cities to help them regenerate (or "level up" in today's political Jargonese). The primary audience for such a site should - one assumes - be people who want to gain access to that funding: town planners, local authority CFO staff, etc[2]. People who are most likely to access the site while at work, viewing the site on their out-of-date workstations or non-touchscreen laptops.
Maybe some out-of-work UXRs would like to offer views on how to fix the site?
[2] - my (very personal) view is that the site was in fact designed to showcase work done, so it could be referenced in the Annual Reports of the Fund's partner companies, allowing them to check whatever corporate checkboxes they needed to check that year during their AGMs. Though people tell me that I am too cynical so I could be wrong.
I half agree, UX seems to be being optimized for the new user and common workflows. This is great, because every user starts as a new user, so it makes onboarding easier. It does not seem to be optimized for experts and novel ways of completing tasks that were not explicitly thought of.
Consider the power of piping a few unix commands together, this is an advanced task that enables power users, but is nearly impossible for a new user.
tldr;
For the common cases and beginners UX has improved, but dropped off for users that go beyond that.
- Daily essentials / safety-critical stuff that requires an account and/or doesn't work reliably anymore (pay for parking, pay to charge car, call 911, etc...)
- infantilization of interface to treat everyone 'like a 5 year old'
- removal of functionality , homogeneous bootstrap-like interfaces with rounded corners everywhere, to the point where you no longer recognize which system you re using
- "mobilification" of the desktop
- no more rational organization: no hierarchical menus, only the top 5 buttons survive
It has become terrible. My best guess is that there is little else to do, and UX professionals keep changing things to justify their jobs. Nothing personal, maybe your job requires you, but we don't need a brand new UX every 3-4 years on every product. Incremental improvements, rounded edges, some smoother animation and better accessibility. But not changing everything, one gazillion new buttons and features.
We need simplicity and stability - the latter being the most important for user interfaces.
Let me give a concrete example: I have had iPad Pro for years now. A primary use case for me is to watch a lecture and take notes, or read a book and take notes. The way this should obviously work is that I have my iPad in portrait orientation, split the screen vertically so that I have the video playing or the book open on the top half and notes on the bottom half. This was solved perfectly by the original Macintosh. It is still not solved by iOS (even though I've had tickets for years in Radar).
For some reason I cannot comprehend, I can split the screen horizontally, which results in two thin strips side-by-side that are useless for anything that I can think of. It is not possible to split it vertically so that I would have two reasonable aspect ratio apps on top of each other. Now they added a convoluted "multitasking" mechanism that kind of lets me solve this for reading, where I can have two 3/4 sized apps overlapping each other, but I still cannot just split the screen or have freely resizable apps (which, again, is a problem solved already in the original Macintosh).
This type of terrible UX has become endemic, and is even worse in non-Apple products. The root cause I believe is "authoritarian simplicity", where some UX designer or team thinks they know the best and force a single, over-simplified, over-specified solution on everyone.
1 px borders on 4k screens.
Bad contrast which you cannot change because colors are not configurable.
Need to scale my monitor (Windows) because i cannot use custom fonts.
Titlebar cluttered with other GUI elements.
Ribbon using a good amount of vertical space.
Unusable scrollbars - too small/no scroll buttons at end - good luck scrolling through a 500 pages pdf.
Settings resetted with updates.
Automatic updates which change the way the programm works.
And so on and so fort.
Not showing the interact-able parts of the UI. Sometimes buttons will have a large colored area, but only the text at the center is clickable. More often the opposite, a chunk of text with no indication of where the clickable/tappable area begins and ends. Even worse is when there are multiple options in a row with no way to see the boundaries between, or if there is any dead space. Fitt's Law has been a thing since before these designers were born!
The worst example I encounter on a daily basis is Twitter. Each tweet has at least 8 sections that do different things when tapped. I never know quite where to long-press with my thumb over the tiny timestamp to open it in a new tab, or where the boundary is between the single line of text and the username.
Generally speaking in B2B Apps, I think UX has improved quite a bit. End user workflows have improved in both usability and beauty for the masses (10-100's of Millions)
Yes, although the important question here is how much of this can be attributed to UXR and not the roles it works alongside? It's one the article struggles with answering, and I expect why most businesses are trimming UXR teams as much as they can.
In some B2B apps, a good UX can be the primary marketed feature. B2B app space is wonderful when it comes to UX engineering... You still have to think about some edges, but depending on your customer you will probably find you can skip a lot of painful items due to their unique organizational constraints.
We sell software to financial institutions and our mission is to provide low-skill hourly hires the ability to reliably open complex accounts. Clearly, focusing on the ability of your target audience is really important if you want to go to this kind of an extreme. For me, this is what "UXR" is - Our team sitting down and asking "how does it feel to use that workflow?" and "If I were walking out of HS graduation, could I understand what I am looking at?".
I don't think this is really complicated stuff at the end of the day. If you let the customers harass the developers just a tiny bit, you might find high quality UXR occurs automagically.
> End user workflows have improved in both usability and beauty for the masses (10-100's of Millions)
Can you cite a single example? Web browsers, mail, event ticket purchases, window managers, music playback, file management, maps, televisions, kitchen appliances, paying for parking, paying for gas / EV charge, credit card checkouts, and banks have all enshittened in the last 15 years.
That's just stuff that actively wasted my time this week.
I really wonder how they made something like the windows2k interface in the 90's.
Compared to that, today's interfaces are garbage. And this is especially true for the web or anything that is even remotely in contact with Javascript.
Were UX/UI people and researchers in the 90's just better? More competent? More careful in their research?
Did the objectives change so much from usability to selling clicks?
It was standard practice back then to sit non technical and (separately) expert users in front of a product, film their reactions, and then adjust the product design until most of the swearing stopped.
Gnome 2 famously did this. Gnome 3 famously threw out the findings, which is why Linux Mint exists, and how KDE (eventually) caught up on usability.
GNOME is an interesting case, because you can't blame it (directly) on managers pushing dark patterns to maximize conversions. Is it all just trickle-down of user-hostile design philosophy from the commercial web?
My take is that they had more limited tooling and resources, so they designed a set of controls, made them visually distinct, and used them almost everywhere. It was easy to make radio buttons that looked like radio buttons and worked like radio buttons. It was substantially more difficult to do anything else.
Also, the default interface wasn’t composited, so nothing was translucent, so no one layered their controls and content. Sure, it looks kind of pretty in Material Design when a round button with nice antialiased edges sits on top of the content, but it’s terrible UX. In Win2K, if you wanted to do this, you either used “layered” windows (which were no amazingly slow that no one wanted to use them) or you had to go outside the Win32 library entirely and render the whole mess yourself. So designers mostly didn’t do this.
No. People were not just "better" and I also think that the core motivation was and is making money.
However, how companies earn money changed. In the 80s and 90s computers were marketed at professionals working in offices. Software was sold shrink-wrapped on disks. It was very costly to change software later (send disks?), you better tested it really, really carefully. The promise was often to make experts more efficient at their tasks: Software was customizable, had macro recorders and had a familiar interface of buttons, menus and docking sub-windows. Computers were used with keyboards and (finally!) mouse: Two very efficient input devices. People (including me) are nostalgic for that time, and that makes memory very selective: We probably remember the best software created by large companies with great teams. We also remember software created for specifically for professionals working with computers, many HN readers will be that people. And, last but not least, there were a lot of terrible UIs too, that we gladly forgot and for every fondly remembered non-standard, fun UI (bryce?) there are sooooo many terrible ones.
A lot of what irks people can be explained with shifts in how software got made, for which audience and for which devices: Having many small teams working independently makes a coherent vision for a product more difficult (but has other advantages), user customization became less important since products were more targeted to non-experts and it also can mess with your automated testing; moving to the web as main way to deliver software meant that some types of interactions (drag and drop, using large amounts of data directly) were harder to create than others; on the web, advertisement and subscription models became popular, leading to very different ways to advertise software in contrast to the former "buy the bi-yearly upgrade in a big box" and the web was more OS independent so the old one-system, one UI-standard did not match anymore.
So, a lot of what "got worse" can be explained by changes in the ecosystem that software-creation and software-use happens in and by the position of people that assume it "got worse".
There are many things that I find worse now than in the 90s but this perspective can help to see if software got worse just for people similar to me and it can also help to find ways to make sustainable changes that fit the ecosystem that exists today.
I agree, good things still exist when it is B2B or only designed for a highly trained or professional users. But, when we need to design things for 80 IQ crowd, everything suffers. RGB lighting and diamond studded so to speak in UI/UX field.
My point was that "good" is good only in connection to an ecosystem of tech, values, practices and the people judging what is "good". I personally do not think any group of users "drags the field down".
Yes it does. A certain group of people definitely drags the entire field down. It’s not a nice thing to think about but it’s a fact and the reality IMO. You can continue to lie to yourself but eventually you realize that you need to dumb things down for the below 2 std deviation folks or you won’t get them as users.
"Products targeted to non-experts" bears emphasizing: prior to the early 2000s, "using computers" (for any purpose) was a very niche activity, not a mainstream thing that everyone did all the time every day.
Either you were a highly trained professional using a computer for serious work, or else you were a dedicated hobbyist. Either way, you expected to put in significant time to learn and understand how this magically complex machine worked before you could actually accomplish anything. "Normal people" without strong motivation to study the computer simply did not use computers much during that era.
Fast forward to the smartphone era, and "using computers" has become a casual everyday activity for normal people. Companies are now incentivized to produce software for a mass audience with UIs that require as close to zero thought, study, or technical skill as possible.
All the computer nerds were shocked when Google came out with just a single bare text input as its primary UI. Surely we needed the Baroque masterpiece that was AltaVista's UI to ever gain useful work from a search engine; there are so many parameters the user might wish to vary! But no; as it turns out, the new Eternal September mass computer user audience strongly prefers slightly less control in favor of less time spent thinking.
I think you're off by a decade there, in the early 2000s computers at home and in any kind of white collar (and many blue collar) professions were normal and common.
“business > user” - I couldn’t agree more. “Customer-first” has always been a nice storefront design but it’s always been about conversion rate (even if it’s user-hostile).
I agree too that UXR is disproportionately impacted, and that UXRs focus way too much on user interviews. The challenge for me is that “macro research” is really market research, and UXRs are not well-suited to conduct this type of work, nor do the teams need to be so large to support that kind of work. I feel for anyone losing their job, but it’s tough to justify.
The 'Apple Way' is more user centric than 'the short term profit way'.
One of Jobs primary philosophies is around 'creating great products' aka 'craftsmanship' which is de facto user centric orientation.
If companies made products the Apple Way, they'd probably have better products.
The Apple Way is of course going to be a culty foundation for keeping behaviours oriented around a common sentiment, it helps the Apple org focus. It probably will feel a bit odd and constraining in some ways, but that has more advantages than downsides.
> The charging port of the second-generation Magic Mouse is located on its underside, preventing the mouse from being used while charging.
I've never seen another wireless mouse with that problem. Never. Only Apple, it seems, could dream up that specific misdesign. There's no benefit to anyone in that, only detriment, and I am at a loss every time I think about it.
Onwards:
> The Magic Mouse uses its acrylic multi-touch surface for 360-degree scrolling, replacing the rubber scroll ball on the Mighty Mouse. The mouse does not support left and right-clicking simultaneously, and also removes the ability to middle click without third-party software workarounds.
I will be honest: I straight-up don't like the idea of a mouse having a touch pad on its top. I think a touch pad is a poor imitation of a mouse, such that if you have a mouse, using a touch pad (literally) on top of it is using a better interface to replicate a worse one.
However, my personal likes and dislikes pale in comparison to the simple fact the touch pad was also a usability regression for clicking. I absolutely cannot see this as user-focused.
Did it have good build quality? Maybe, but it hardly matters if something is a good implementation of a bad design.
I often feel that UX refuse to listen to ideas unless it originated in their kabal. They can completely ignore obvious points even if users themselves are pointing it out. And in this I think the underlying criticism is that they have forgotten or deemphasized the U in UX. Resulting in poor meshing with the rest of the organisation.
The justification I've heard here is that one person's feedback shouldn't trump the research and feedback of dozens of users over many months. Seems reasonable but feels like there's a blind spot here too imo.
I like this article for how devastating it is, while still retaining its optimistic tone.
The solutions (on here and in the subsequent reflections article) are hilarious though for how general they are and how little they solve the observed problem (UXR dying/being replaced/not justifying its role/etc.). "You'll be fine: just generate value for the business and learn to say no!" The sort of fluff you tell a naive new graduate about to start an internship in a sinking ship of a company to avoid facing reality. You have to read between the lines to realize how devastating the advice actually is.
Macro research is to help determine what products to build and what users to target. Micro research measures the effectiveness of what's been built. The middle tier is intended for optimizing which features to add. If the economics of middle tier have changed it's because adding features to an existing product had gotten cheaper.
This reads like a grieving spouse blaming themselves for their partner's cheating behavior. "Maybe if I looked younger, they'd have stuck with me. Maybe if I was more fun, they'd want to be around me. Maybe if I changed, they'd still be here. Maybe if I was different, they would've kept me."
OR (and I say that in the angriest way I can manage via text) the business is completely looking out for itself in the short term without consideration of its needs beyond a quarter. When a department has served its useful purpose to the very specific goals of the business then the department gets discarded. When a company needs a design for a website, it pays for a UX designer. When the designs are finished, they fire the designer. Does that mean the business never needed a designer? No, instead, they believe that they _no longer_ need a designer, and continue to profit off of the work that the designer did for them. The designer then gets to leave and write blog posts blaming themselves for the pitfalls of capitalism and the absence of design unions.
There is no way to stay around a hungry tiger and survive for long, no matter how one ingratiates themselves to the tiger. Designers, don't write blog posts claiming that getting fired is 100% your fault. You're not Jack Welch, you're the body he spent no time thinking about leaving behind.
For clarity, this article is about UX Research not UX or Design in general. Kind of an important distinction, UXR is a small part of the umbrella in jeopardy and one that is probably the easiest to fold into other roles.
I agree with the the general message you're conveying though.
Yes, that section seemed to be a bit incoherent to me. However, it was only a brief comment, not even on data science rather but rather the strong confidence in a picking-the-winning version idea of design via A/B tests.
Internationalization may contribute to this as it is increasingly necessary for businesses to seek clients globally, but ideas about what makes for simple, clear, easy processes varies hugely between countries. More care needs to be taken to understand and respond to global preferred interaction variations.
I only skimmed the article, but it was enough to ignite my fire and actually take the time to write up a response based in my experiences. I can say as a UI/UX specialist myself, a lot of terrible design is due to not putting enough thought into the design and/or not allowing UI/UX engineers to do their jobs. I will also say that UI/UX is very much an art as opposed to a science, and even the best designers can get it wrong or the final product will frustrate someone due to unexpected edge cases or accidental dark patterns. Some observations over the past two or so decades:
- Not engaging enough with the customer, i.e., finding out what they actually and truly need as opposed to pandering to their egos because they’re SMEs or whatnot
- Engaging too much with the customer by allowing them to have too much say in the design. I’ve seen it go so far as to allow the customer to actually make their own designs (wireframes or mockups, etc.) and then handing that off to the devs to implement, no questions asked, which ended up in a ton of rework for obvious reasons
- Relying too heavily on frameworks by allowing yourself to believe that you MUST use one of their built-in widgets or patterns and not create a custom solution that makes sense for the use case
- Somewhat contrary to the above, not relying enough on a given framework’s widgets or patterns which can lead to inconsistent design and UX and unnecessary reinventing the wheel
- The use of so-called no-code or low-code solutions: Not that these are bad per se, but it leads to the fallacy that a non-engineer (usually mid-level IT manager or “system analyst”) can use these tools to create a complete or even somewhat viable solution (I speak from experience)
- Sacrificing a good design for any reason, e.g., ad space requirements, various types of compliance (including even the virtuous ones such as Section 508)
- Relying on a framework to
do the UX for you, leading to another fallacy that you
don't need a UX specialist
UX research still very much needs
to be a thing, and I don't say
that because it benefits me (it
does), but because I wholeheartedly believe in the need for it. I wouldn't design a house or even a
pool without the expertise of an architect, so why would an entire dev team build a multi-million dollar UI without a UI/UX engineer?
I did a lot of consulting with the design team in my last role. My company was creating a "builder" app, where you can use a GUI to create and deploy custom clinical research mobile and web apps.
The way I was finally able to get through to the design team was by showing them an image of a Tesla interior and saying "this is what you guys have built", and then I showed them an image of a well-organized woodshop with hundreds of tools on the walls and saying "this is what the people using our software to build custom apps actually need".
Maybe non-technical end users really do like having all features hidden beneath unlabelled flat buttons, I don't know. But it doesn't work for people using software GUIs to do technical work. I'd go back to 90s-00s style clunky menus in an instant if I could. Just the ability to see what's clickable and what isn't is worth the downgrade in appearance.
My observation is that once "UI" became "UX", interfaces turned terrible across the board.
When I did the human interface course in my comp.sci degree, there was a lot of attention on standardization, making things people could effectively interact with, consistent feature widgets that are clearly those widgets. Remember "HIG"s?
Nowadays, instead of trying to find a way to make an interface pleasant and consistent, it has to be a unique butterfly of some glorious design that just sucks.
Next time you're designing something with a button that doesn't have a border and isn't clearly a button... Step back and have a rethink. Radio buttons indistinguishable from checkboxes? Your design is bad.
In the follow up post he writes that many people commented this kind of work is beneath them and can be done by anyone and will just be automated away by ChatGPT. Say that at my company and I’ll reconsider working with you. So out of touch..
Oh, it's super hard to build good interfaces, I'd never claim otherwise. Everything user facing I build is trash and I know it, so I work with UI people. I would assert that most of what's made under the banner of "UX" by people who think they're good is also trash from a usability perspective.
(it's possible that the ux people are optimizing for something other than end users getting their stuff done, like conversion rate. But that doesn't make a trash interface good, it just means you get to pay your mortgage this month.)
Sorry, I wasn’t being clear. The “you” in my last sentences wasn’t directed at you, but at people sending such replies to the author! I agree with you wholeheartedly.
I led a team of 18 designers with several managers in between, supporting large web and mobile products. Chances are you or at least someone you know uses them regularly.
I feel people in the UX profession have a chip on our shoulder and suffer from an inferiority complex. Mind you, to be a really effective UX, you have to be exceedingly intelligent and competent and I'm not questioning the value of what UX people bring to the table.
However, we shot ourselves in the foot by not keeping in check of our ambition and overselling our value to the broader enterprise.
To have better control over the product outcome, we asked to be engaged more upstream sooner and have a seat at the table with executives at the planning stage. And we got it.
For better or worse, UX / Design has been very successful at inserting itself everywhere in the business process, from start to finish. The genericization of our job titles reflect this growing ambition and organizational footprint.
The empire building also continued through the invention of new subdisciplines: DesignOps, then more recently ResearchOps.
It's all well and good, until an overreach happens and you're encroaching into territory that has already existed. For example, UX research asked to do work that traditionally fell on specialized experts, like industry / sector-specific market research or generative research.
Another example is hugely-staffed design systems team with over-engineered systems & control processes that are difficult to use, contribute to and maintain. Mind you, some have their own UX engineers that sit outside the engineering org.
As a result of all these, it has also become exceedingly difficult to hire a perfectly "T-shaped" person, because they just don't exist. (at $130-$150k/year).
Lastly, there's no craftsmanship in the profession anymore, at least not in-house.
Most good designs that you see are still done by outside agencies, who still operate their design shops tightly, hire for very specific skill sets, use project managers (gasp), and waterfall (gasp).
I left my job partly because I realized I had turned into a person espousing very things that I hate in the profession. (I also needed a career break after working nonstop for almost 20 years.)
I think we in design have over complicated things. What I've noticed is we don't speak in plain terms when selling design and to your point it's also down to empire building. And the dribbblisation of design - can't stand it.
I'm in a similar position right now - thinking about quitting this corporate design job and take a sabbatical to focus on refining and expanding my skillset and then join more meaningful projects, e.g. clean/climate-tech related projects.
Do you have a blog or newsletter? I'd love to read more about your design thoughts.
Although personally I find it a bit incoherent (e.g. toolbar versus navigation bar versus tab bar) or (e.g. “buttons” that are just blue text or even grey text in Apple apps).
Agree. "Golden age of UX" is the same age of UX that came up with the hamburger menu? Give me a fucking break. That "golden" age was only gilding the UX researchers themselves.
on phone screen though? I'm not a fan of hamburgers either, but it's still better than something hidden by touch gestures - which for a while was the direction.
Well, a large part of where UX design goes wrong, in my opinion, is because people keep trying to have a "one UI to rule them all" approach. What you inevitably get is a UI that isn't great on any device, or is great on one and really terrible on the others.
As an industry, we need to get rid of the notion that you can have a single sort of user interface that works on every device. A phone is very different than a desktop, and the appropriate compromises for one are not the same as the appropriate compromises for the other.
They had to change the term, because "User Interface" sounded like something that was primarily designed to help the user interface with the computer, where as "User Experience" is clearly something intended to help the user experience as many ads as possible in the shortest time span.
Having standardized design and widgets across all UIs makes it easy for a user to figure out what's going on by making your application look, feel, and work the same as all others. Anyone familiar with the general HIGs can just sit down and start using it with minimal hassle.
Having standardized design and widgets across all UIs makes it harder for a consumer to remember your brand. It's not sticky in their minds, visually speaking. Your application looks, feels, and works exactly the same as your competitors' applications. This has measurable impact on revenue, and it's bad for your bottom line.
Guess which one most businesses choose: easier to use, or better revenue?
Also, not like we have these "color palette" thingies that we, UI designers, already use to establish branding without affecting usability. We have a lot of UI elements we can change their properties of without directly affecting usability like borders, elevations, distances (while maintaining good contrast and looking out for color blindness too). Design systems exist for a reason. Heck, every SaaS and product already has a sales page for marketing content that is entirely designed to drive sales, no need to introduce dark patterns (or invent new crazy patterns that solves an already solved problem) in the application. A lot of interaction has already been solved, I don't see why can't we automate the whole UI process with a given opinionated design system.
> Having standardized design and widgets across all UIs makes it harder for a consumer to remember your brand.
Not automatically. Only if you neglect all of the myriad other ways to make your application stand out. Standardized controls and layout do not have to mean that all applications look the same.
>I personally helped grow Facebook’s UXR team from a dozen to over 100, then did the same for Airbnb in the same amount of time it took Facebook/Meta to go from 100 to over 1000 researchers. Lots of open headcount everywhere, highly competitive hiring, and blank checks galore.
What, why are you hiring this many people..
>Incentivized to empire-build, some thought UX leaders (especially at a few larger companies) were disproportionately responsible for over-hiring and creating the market we are in.
I’m not even that old, but I despise the entire UX industry for what they did to quality, fun UI work. They stole every ounce of soul from interfaces in the name of “research”. I’m glad the reckoning is happening. I’ve not met a single UX researcher that could actually design anything. They’re glorified business analysts and they clearly can’t even do that right because at least business analysts can create requirements from real customer problems. UX research exists purely to only serve itself.
Being honest, I don't know where the UX industry even came from. They just appeared one day in the early to mid 2010s and proceeded to ruin every single piece of good and usable UI known to mankind.
The computing world was at peace until then, we had UI designers and engineers who through much research and trial-and-error produced very nice UIs for us to use. The UX industry came in and destroyed all that for shits and profits; literal decades of experience and precedence thrown out the window in the name of the latest fashion trend.
> we had UI designers and engineers who through much research and trial-and-error produced very nice UIs for us to use.
I don't remember that era of great UI. Sites were still inaccessible except no one cared, multitude of dark patterns still exists, confusing design language, no information organization at all.
The "trial-and-error" approach was much more "error-and-error" based entirely on guesses by the designer or engineer. I'm an engineer and remember, working through that time period, the horrible sites we created. I had a part in implementing them.
Not to mention the idea of "Web Application" was still very much incipiente in the mid-to-late 2000s. Who had great design for that? Go back and look at Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace back then, hardly a great example to be had, regardless of how bad we might think it is today.
I don't think playing "my definition vs your definition" is a fruitful discussion in general, but the answer is, it depends.
If you're in the camp who treats UX as a professional title/career, then in principle it has very little to do with UI, and being labelled "UX/UI" is often an "insult" to UX professionals along the same lines as "Computer Scientist / IT support", or "Electrical Engineer/Electrician", "Civil Engineer/Sanitation Engineer", "Pharmacist/Teller at Boots", "Doctor/Medical receptionist". (not to imply that the latter professions are 'lesser', but rather to point out that the former professions in the pairs are typically deemed to require a higher standard of skills/training rather than simply vocational/apprentice-based training).
At the same time, I'm not naive to not understand the fact that, if a large number of people start referring to X as Y, then after a while, insisting that X isn't Y is a lost cause, and you might as well start calling it Z instead.
But, e.g. my wife was a senior UX professional who is now doing her PhD in Experimental Psychology; the original motivation was that this would make her a better UX researcher when conducting controlled experimental studies on behalf of her employer. She specialises in voice assistive tech, and her topic relates to isolating auditory markers of voice trustworthiness. I can tell you if she applied for a UX job and the interviewers started asking her what css colours she prefers on buttons, she'd be pretty pissed.
It might be helpful to view this from a scientific research perspective. UX research is more about how things should be done to provide a better usability for the user. Like, general respectively abstract concepts (e.g., how should a chatbot present itself when it first "talks" to the user, which UI components could be involved). It's not about how to actually design those things, i.e., applying CSS to an HTML document if you will. UI design is mostly a dev job, while UX design is more of an actual research discipline.
This is often a motte and bailey distinction though, where the "UX" person's background is UI, and they think only about UI. But they can charge more because theoretically UX is everything.
I don't think this is an individual's issue, as if everyone hires UX instead of UI then what do you do? It's a UX consultancy issue.
It used to be something specific, coming from the heritage of HCI and usability engineering. Then every UI designer decided that it sounded cooler on their resumé, and now the concept is completely pointless.
The poor usability of modern interfaces certainly doesn't come from people who care about what it's like to use it in practice. It comes from people whose main skill lies within the field of aesthetics.
What should you call yourself if you're actually interested in working with usability, and happy to leave the visual design to others?
> What should you call yourself if you're actually interested in working with usability, and happy to leave the visual design to others?
UX.
Most serious people in UX who see job postings mentioning "UX/UI" avoid those jobs in the same manner that a C++ coder would avoid "C/C++".
But I agree that doesn't do much to dissuade people who don't quite know the difference (or what it is that they actually need or want) from advertising "UX/UI" or "C/C++" and then people applying to these jobs.
What you're describing isn't UX though. At least not in the way that UX professionals understand it.
There being "impostors" in the field who bluff their way through, while regrettable, does not imply that the whole industry is made up, any more than the existence of people applying to data science jobs with nothing but excel skills says nothing about data science.
And some companies really, really need UX people on board.
Well, I think it's certainly not how UX is sold, but I think it can end up that way, or even worse. I've been in several meetings with expensive UX consultants where we're paying them to run team retros for teams they aren't in, or doing mood board style exercises. Lots of internal work that's invisible but claims to add enough value to pay a large amount of money for.
Now, I'm someone who insists on having a UX/UI person in the team when I'm making an app, as I want it all to go well, and I don't mind spending a chunk to get it, but the number of people I've found who can actually do that is vanishingly small compared to the number of people who are billed out as expensive UX consultants.
Yeah, I'm with you on this one. The author describes the past 15 years as a "golden age for UX Research". It's been the golden age of dark UX patterns, huge widgets for touch-inadequate applications running on platforms without touch screens, cartoon figures in professional applications (please explain to me how Octocat is different from Clippit), monochrome or bland icons you can't tell apart, surprising interactions through label-looking text that turn out to be buttons, and metrics-driven positive feedback loops. All of which were overwhelmingly validated by the UX research community, which gradually moved away from reproducible, quantifiable experiments (which the author lumps under "micro-research") and embraced a kind of number-backed hoodoo that makes 1980s psychology research look good in comparison.
>please explain to me how Octocat is different from Clippit
* Octocat is the mascot of Github, while Clippit was not only not the mascot of MS Office, it wasn't even the only option of assistant, just the default one.
* Octocat is not a functional part of the UI. That is to say, you don't interact with it to do anything. It's just part of the Github logo and it shows up on certain screens, notably the 404 one. Clippit could be used as an additional interface for the application to accomplish tasks.
* Octocat isn't animated, Clippit was.
It seems to me that the only thing they have in common is that they're cartoon characters that appear somewhere on the interface of software products. You can complain about it on aesthetic grounds, but certainly not on UX grounds. It doesn't make Github any easier or harder to use.
> You can complain about it on aesthetic grounds, but certainly not on UX grounds. It doesn't make Github any easier or harder to use.
Neither did Clipit -- every function it offered was also accessible through the UI. It was a completely optional element that degraded the user experience exactly the same way Octocat does: you got to look at a goofy, childish character whether you wanted to write a cute check from the tooth fairy for your niee, a report on inappropriate use of company resources, or a death notice for your late father's friends.
You could at least turn it off, whereas Octocat is in the top-left corner of literally every Github page, and prominently featured wearing an astronaut's costume (!?) on the homepage.
The reason Clippit was so hated was not because it was a cartoon character, it was because it was enabled by default and it would pester you about what you were doing (thus distracting you) until you turned it off, and because the assistance it offered was neither required nor useful. It was a net negative on your usability of the application until you took active steps to turn it off.
>you got to look at a goofy, childish character
Like I said, aesthetic grounds.
>whether you wanted to write a cute check from the tooth fairy for your niee, a report on inappropriate use of company resources, or a death notice for your late father's friends.
>You could at least turn it off, whereas Octocat is in the top-left corner of literally every Github page, and prominently featured wearing an astronaut's costume (!?) on the homepage.
This is quite an inane complaint. Plenty of serious products and companies have cartoon characters as mascots or logos. LLVM has a dragon in the logo; the Go language has a gopher; the Rust language has a crab; the FreeBSD and OpenBSD OSs have a devil and a blowfish respectively. All of these have varying levels of visibility when you visit their web sites.
I'm sorry but I really don't understand the point you're trying to make. Yes, there's a difference in features, but my original point was
> cartoon figures in professional applications (please explain to me how Octocat is different from Clippit)
Is Octocat not a cartoon figure? Is Github not a professional application?
I'm not aware of any authoritative definition of user experience that excludes "aesthetic grounds" from the field of UX. How an interface looks and the feeling it conveys is a part of the user experience. The UX industry doesn't operate with this distinction -- see e.g. NN Group's oft-quoted definition (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/definition-user-experience/), which considers aesthetics, and UI design in general a component of UX, or the ISO 9241 definition.
A tongue-in-cheek logo is one thing, but a goofy interface, from the ever-present logo to the overall widget design, is way out there in kindergarten land. The comparison between Octocat's use and, say, that of the Rust crab, is itself unwarranted: you can (in fact, I do) write Rust all the time and not see the crab for weeks, whereas that goofy cat critter is literally on every Github page.
As for Clippit specifically, while its graphical design was obviously not the primary reason why it was hated, it was definitely one component of it -- in fact, it's one of the reasons why it was specifically considered distracting. Contemporary studies, like Swartz's notorious dissertation about why everyone hated Clippit, obviously focused on the functional aspect, but it's telling that the quantitative framework in use at the time put "fun" and "useful" in separate categories.
I mostly agree with you, there are some really smart UX people out there but the vast majority out there are garbage who can just use figma and make wrong decisions based on incomplete business understanding or technical expertise or sometimes even both
I hate to be that guy, but my silently boiling rage spills over every once in a while. UX designers are so passive aggressive and self-satisfied. They foist change on us dumb users with impunity because they are a better class.
The sad truth is that UIs have gotten gradually prettier but less usable since their peak in the mid to late 1990s. I honestly don't know how an entire UXR department can be justified if they just keep making things worse. Frankly I am sick of the utter wasteland that touchscreens have created, the giant crater they blasted in people's imaginations. And I'm sick of this endless cycle of redesign.
I do not give two shits about drop shadows or rounded corners or animations. I want to use the frickin software tool to do frickin work. I am not looking to play tiddly winks with an animated brochure.
Bring back the damn drop down menus written in my native language with keyboard shortcuts that are right there in the damn menu. I'm sick to death of iconese. I don't speak it. It's not a language, it's alien hieroglyphics. And stop telling me it's for my own good. It's for their good, so the crap fits and they don't have to go to a translation team. Nothing could be lazier or more hostile to users.
Which brings me to the final sin: if you are a UXR and you are not polling actual users, talking to actual people, sitting down and actually watching them use the thing, listening to actual words coming out of their mouths when they do so, which include an *&#$ of profanity, and you are instead relying on indirect means, then congrats, you are a trying to scale a process that doesn't. fricking. scale.
> The sad truth is that UIs have gotten gradually prettier
I don't think they've become prettier at all. What they've become is bland and uniform. All basically the same look, apparently trying to be inoffensive rather than beautiful.
I think people here romanticize the old days of every website and piece of software having its own unique and quirky UI. Sure, it can be fun at first, but learning a million unique UIs that all look and behave differently is exhausting as a user.
If "predictability" is a key principle of good User Experience™, then UI uniformity is the best way to achieve it. Consistent interface patterns translate across applications and make software easier to use, on the whole. Users learn the pattern once and can use it everywhere with lower mental overhead.
I would take a bland-but-consistent UI across all software over beautiful-but-unique. Modern UI design has taken this stance too for good reason.
Also worth pointing out that a "bland" UI of today (let's say macOS or iOS since they are so pervasive) would be stunningly, mind-blowingly beautiful to a user 30 years ago. It's all relative, we've just gotten spoiled by beautiful UIs to the point they are considered bland now.
We aren't actually disagreeing here, but you're addressing aspects other than what I was talking about.
> Sure, it can be fun at first, but learning a million unique UIs that all look and behave differently is exhausting as a user.
Absolutely. I wasn't calling for anything like that.
Uniformity in behavior is highly desirable. Uniformity in the general location of controls and general workflow is also highly desirable. Also highly desirable (but not in fashion anymore, so isn't really done) is the ability to easily tell how to accomplish things.
But you can have that without being visually bland and without looking essentially indistinguishable from everything else.
> Also worth pointing out that a "bland" UI of today (let's say macOS or iOS since they are so pervasive) would be stunningly, mind-blowingly beautiful to a user 30 years ago.
I'm old enough to remember being a user 30 years ago, and you do have a point. But the most beautiful painting in the world looks a lot less beautiful when every other painting looks just like it.
Also, I would argue that the "beautiful" days of UI design are over. What is in fashion now wouldn't really have been considered mind-blowingly beautiful 30 years ago. Technically impressive, sure, but aesthetically neutral at best.
> we've just gotten spoiled by beautiful UIs
Not spoiled. Habituated. It's the way people are. If you eat nothing but your favorite food every day, you will eventually reach a point where you dislike it.
Variety is an important design goal, too. You can have variety without sacrificing beauty or consistency. You jsut have to break out of using UI frameworks or slavishly following guidelines like "Material Design", or whatever the flavor of the day is.
Regardless, I'll take the UIs of 30 years ago over those of today even though they were uglier. They were also more powerful and generally easier to use.
So I was ordering food from Door dash the other day. Being a blind person, I rely on a website to be coded well enough to present all of its content to me. So I'm using the down arrow, using NVDA, or Caps lock + Right Arrow on Voiceover for Mac, going through the items. And I noticed that some items were surely being skipped. And sure enough, when I went back and navigated with the Tab key, there they were, all the other drinks that McDonald's offers. I mean, it's better than on the iPhone, where DoorDash is so awful that it sucks Kaiju dung, but goodness I wish UX folks would just leave stuff alone, or shoot just ask people "Hey, is this what you want?" or "How can we actually improve this thing?" or "Hey, would this break things for you?" I think the only reason why it works so well on Android is because no one has messed with it yet. No, don't do it, please. I mean, Door dash is far from the only mess I've come across in my like 15 years using tech as a blind person, But some services, like InstaCart, Door dash, Uber, stuff like that, are a bit more important to be accessible than someone's cat picture gallery. I mean, I wouldn't mind awesome descriptions of cats either, don't get me wrong. And honestly, I don't know if the fault is with Voiceover and its rather bad web support, or NVDA, but I'm pretty sure it's Door dash. And it didn't used to do this. It used to be fine on web browsers on a computer. And now I gotta pull out the Android phone when I want o order food.
RedReader is the best Reddit client I've found on Android, Apple's Mail app is really nice, since it lets me navigate within a conversation to the next or previous message (wish Gmail did that), Mona is the best Mastodon client on iOS (I can favorite or reblog just by swiping left or right with three fingers. That's not even possible on Android because TalkBack's scrolling commands work on gesture position not on TalkBack focus position), Feeder is the best RSS reader on Android, Lire is great on iOS although I don't like having to clean up the article list after marking a few as read. Tusky on Android is a good app that uses accessibility actions. I love how in Google's clock app I can dismiss an alarm by using a volume button (while the device's screen is off, but once you hit the power button you have to find and double tap the dismiss button and hope the alarm sound is quieter than your TalkBack voice). I don't know how it is now, but when I was still using Instacart, if I'm in a list of food items and I wanted to add one to my cart, I could just swipe up and it'd be added. If I wanted to remove an item, I'd just swipe down and it'd be removed. That was refreshingly simple.
There are a lot of games on iOS that are accessible, like DiceWorld, which is also pretty accessible on Android but doesn't have the nice-to-have features of iOS, like using the Magic Tap (double tap with two fingers) from anywhere on the screen to roll the dice. Android can't do that because its two finger double tap only works as the play/pause button on a headset, just playing/pausing media instead of a more general "make something happen" command in apps.
Some more action-oriented games, like Mortal Kombat, are becoming more accessible. On iOS, since apps can define "direct touch interaction" areas of the screen, which makes VoiceOver ignore part of the screen so that a tap is passed directly to the app, rather than going through VoiceOver. Using this, one can attack and block instantly while in action parts of the game, with the game sending announcements through VoiceOver, like "swipe up" or "you win". Then, the screen changes, and direct touch area is deactivated, and VoiceOver control is reassurted, so that the player can navigate the interface. It shows really amazing promise for mobile gaming for the blind in the future. And Android doesn't have anything like the direct touch area, unless the app wants to declar itself an accessibility service, which I believe is how the TalkBack Braille keyboard does it from the code on Github. Of course that code is like 6 months behind the actual release and definitely behind the any betas they've released, but still useful for seeing how TalkBack does things.
Of course, each user has differing knowledge of how their screen reader works. I find that many more Android users know more about TalkBack, since it has a built-in tutorial that turns on when TalkBack is launched. VoiceOver on iOS does not have a tutorial that teaches everything one can do, all the commands and such, so are usually unaware of things like image recognition, Braille Screen Input (typing in Braille on the phone screen), or all the commands possible (especially the rotor and using actions within apps).
A big part of my job is to make sure our applications are accessible. You wouldn't believe how, even though legally required to do so, I have to prove time and time again that further work needs to be done in order to make our application accessible.
Please keep complaining out loud, I feel so many people are suffering in silence.
Oh yes. Several blind people have a Victor Reader or some such device that's a portable book player, basically, made for blind people. Amazon, of course, would never let their Kindle content onto that player, although Audible is okay for some reason. Kindle on Android still uses an instance of the Android speech engine to read books, and still won't continue reading while the screen is off, which is honestly one of the only good uses for spawning another speech engine and not using TalkBack to speak. Oh and Kindle for Mac's speech function is complete broken as of Ventura cause Apple changed a lot about the speech engine. I mean I know there's more on DRM than books, but that's what I've been dealing with for the past like year. Kindle has all the stuff I like though. sigh
I am not sure if Librera HD is usable in terms of accessibility but it seems to handle text to speech pretty well when I tested it just now. It works with the screen turned off too. The software is available in F-droid without restriction.
Thank you so much. A lot of the time, in blind culture, a lot of people feel like developers are tired of hearing us. Others are like "well we should just be greatful for what we have." And sometimes I feel like a lot of feedback I give, either on social media or through dedicated feedback forms (Apple, Google), are just not seen or actioned by anyone, or got lost somewhere up the chain.
Please keep complaining. Many developers want to do better, but aren't able to put in the work because management does not see accessibility as important.
Feedback forums are generally useless. They are barely monitored by low-level contractors who only pass up the most common complaints.
As someone who built many UIs at Google, the reason it works is because Google's UX teams take accessibility very seriously. At the OS level especially.
As an anecdote, I was upgrading some outdated code for the dialpad in the phone app and we worked closely with some blind Googlers to understand how they place calls and make sure we weren't breaking it for them. Really interesting stuff.
Oh wow, that is really nice. I love how stable Android, and Android accessibility, is. No speech engine crashing while feeling around the home screen for no reason, Braille input (for the displays that are supported grumble grumble), is fast and clean and never slows down after like 20 words. Still trying to get into the TalkBack beta program though, since they're probably testing support for the display I own now. But anyway, thank you so much for working on this. Now if only Youtube supported accessibility actions instead of having buttons everywhere on each video widget in the list of videos.
Everything is overbuilt and over designed now. No one even uses native drop down menus anymore. I remember, years ago, selecting Oregon was _always_ tab, “o”, down, down, down. Now I have to figure out the bespoke widget that’s being drawn directly to the canvas, probably requiring a reach for the mouse, hopefully with a scroll wheel or you’re gonna be pecking at a tiny little scroll bar that may or may not even be there.
Yes and no. In a way it's the same problem we (engineering) has always had. That is, technical decisions are made based on (engineers') egos and not on the needs of the client / product.
Those used to be mainly decisions that impacted hardware and/or backend. Now they mainfest on the frontend. UX and QA should be speaking up but either don't exist (in some products), don't have the experience, or don't have the juice / power to say "this is crap. Fix it."
Objectively speaking, entering the first character in a select should bring you to the first option with that letter. For example, a select of States or Countries. Yet, that's too often not the case anymore. That is, you have to scroll over the list.
How does anyone - engineers included - believe that's not shite?
Oh yeah, those dropdowns, where it's just a text field but you can arrow through it like a dropdown. Except it'll say "<item> selected" or some such, and gives this long hint on how to use it. I believe [UberDuck](https://app.uberduck.ai/speak#mode=tts-basic&voice=zwf) still uses it. And we have this Attendance on Demand app we use to clock in and out at work, and it's pretty darn bad, with several buttons that have text labels beside the button instead of on the button, and don't even get me started about the calendar widget on there. I mean, you never know what component or framework or whatever will be used in an important product.
Dropdowns often suck even when they're using native widgets. Almost every time, even on a 4K monitor, you get just 3 lines of a 100-long list diplayed.
> I remember, years ago, selecting Oregon was _always_ tab, “o”, down, down, down.
OT but being from Switzerland it wasn't UX that screwed that up for me, it was Swaziland renaming to Eswatini. Sure "s", "w", down is slightly quicker than "s", "w", down, down but some forms haven't updated the name yet.
Could "t", "up", "up" be a workaround? Syria (the name in between) is not the stablest state in the world but its name is more than 2000 years old so it shouldn't change anytime soon.
Seeing as it seems (from my experience at least) an old-school, "HTML 3.0" website with no javascript and minimal markup (make sure all pictures get alt text) tend to work very well for accessibility, I personally think governments should just say all websites that are businesses have to either be accessible, or have an accessible version -- and that accessible version should be kept up to date.
You can, and people do, make fairly fancy websites with Javascript that still work well (a blind friend told me Amazon is quite good, for example), but really this is the bare minimum. As a bonus, it will help all of us as we find ourselves getting less physically able as we age, even if we don't need the support right now.
Building rich web UI that conforms to accessibility guidelines is nontrivial. A single violation of a WCAG 2.1 success criterion is considered a failure to conform. For example, you can fail if any part of your UI doesn't handle reflow correctly on a 1280x1024px resolution at 400% zoom (equivalent to 320x256px). A government mandate requiring corporate-owned websites be made accessible would require a small army of auditors to enforce.
The rules might need tweaking, but honestly I have limited sympathy.
There are standards on the building of my house, the gas, the electricity, the plumbing. They all have to be carefully followed. Why should computing, when provided by multi billion dollar businesses, be such a free for all in comparison?
> I personally helped grow Facebook’s UXR team from a dozen to over 100, then did the same for Airbnb in the same amount of time it took Facebook/Meta to go from 100 to over 1000 researchers.
What the? I had no idea it was so colossal. I didn't even know UX "research" was a thing, as in, someone made their career out of it.
No wonder it takes 100 engineers to write a website, if it takes 100 researchers to dream up some coconuts for people lacking thumbs. Last I checked, humans haven't changed in centuries. The gestalt is all you need to "research" and understand the human perception, imho. Ok maybe in the field of VR, some research need to be made, but this seems like crazy amounts of people.
There's a lot of legitimate UI research. What foreground/background colors are readable (white/black and black/white perform about on par, with yellow/blue being the best IIRC), destructive actions shouldn't be next to constructive (at the minimum there should be a separator between 'Save' and 'Quit'), ...
Faffing about with hamburger menus and A/B testing isn't 'UX' research though.
> What foreground/background colors are readable (white/black and black/white perform about on par, with yellow/blue being the best IIRC), destructive actions shouldn't be next to constructive (at the minimum there should be a separator between 'Save' and 'Quit'), ...
Agreed, but hasn't all of this research already been done? I thought these are well understood already. A/B testing hamburger menus literally sounds insane to me
When you have a website & an app that reach >1 Billion people a day there is a strong risk aversion that sets in. People are constantly trying to make improvements, add features, keep up with the competition etc, but the risk of making things worse is very high (A billion pennies a day is still more money than most people will see in their lives). Experimenting in the wild is no longer possible like it is for a startup, so instead a solid research program is needed to test and validate new features before launch. Yes having good designers would obviate a lot of the need for researchers, just like having good engineers would eliminate the need for QC. But realistically QC and UXR are both important parts of the product release process at a large company.
The author observes that User Experience Research has fallen from grace. They see that UXR has become disconnected from the business. Their belief is that understanding users isn't necessary for making a good product, and that UX Researchers enjoy answering abstract questions around the user that are only marginally useful. They conclude that UX Research needs to to perform low-level user interviews, focus on non-user strategy(?), talk in executive-friendly terms, and prioritize the business above users-- in order to be relevant once again.
Ironically, the author is quick to provide answers that please executives, and slow to offer dangerous questions that would displease them. Questions like how the company's short-term optimization was causing a long-term loss on user retention. Or how certain executive-sponsored beliefs were hurting user trust. Researchers who ask those questions tend not to stick around too long, even before 2021. Those who remain self-select into safer "middle" research; they and their department have been pummeled into submission by the organization.
The author turns a blind eye to this corruption; the author points the finger at researchers, not executives. The author also forgets the history that users made the business successful [1]. Today, however, the internal hierarchies and forward momentum of many tech companies depends on a selective understanding of users [2]. Good research slows down that momentum, it aims for good-enough understanding, it asks important questions. And when important questions collide with the status quo, they are not tolerated.
Or to put in simple terms, from a chief of staff to a middle manager: "Nevermind you 'why', why ain't in your repertoire no more".
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html "Mark Zuckerberg didn't succeed because he was an expert on startups. He succeeded despite being a complete noob at startups, because he understood his users really well."
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35597279 "The logic that the CPO applied at the time was some pretty sporty mental gymnastics: "we optimize for conversion (looker to booker) because that's a proxy to actually delivering value to the customer."
When I read this I can't help about stellar pieces of usable software that have been produced by one person.
One knowledgeable individual combining the fields programming, design and usability can sometimes outperform big teams, because there is something to the way big teams decide that dillutes clear ideas and leads to inconsistencies throughout the resulting piece of software. These inconsistencies can be an problem for the user.
UX people generally may claim otherwise, but it is easy to make software without them and often the user experience is better when they are not involved. Imagine two situations. We are going to improve the user experience of the famous text editor vim. Who will make a better job:
1. Random dude who has been teaching vim to people, with some experience in creating user interfaces and a lot of experience with terminal based software
2. UX researcher armed with all the newest knowledge in usability
My money would be on the former, because the latter has a high chance of misunderstanding why people use vim in the first place. I might be mistaken, but my feeling is that in the past 15 years user interfaces have broadly been "dumbed down" or driven towards the smallest common denominator.
That is okay for software that you use once a year and where things should be self explainatory. But there is software where it is okay to have a little hurdle in the start if it means you are going to be so much more productive later. Ideally you will have both a low entrance barrier and a good usability when you use it day in, day out. Newer UX-based software is good at the former, but sucks at the latter.
I agree with the "single people can create good software without involvement of a UX expert". That does not only apply to UX experts, but any other expert role (You do not even need a person who sees themselves as a programmer; a person using Excel, Access, Godot… might create something useful).
A lot of roles and best practices are for making software creation work in large organizations.
I disagree with the "dumbing down" idea: "old UX" (90s, early 2000s) focussed a lot on beginner-friendlieness and at this time a lot of people might have seen this sofware as being "dumbed down" from its predecessors. Menus e.g. are a staple of making GUIs more discoverable than command line interfaces, and at that time there were already criticism that urged for building more efficient text based interfaces (See "canon cat" and the "anti mac interface")
Agreed, but that even affects software used in environments where the tradeoff between ease of onboarding and speed of use after that is not that clear.
> When I read this I can't help about stellar pieces of usable software that have been produced by one person.
A possible example of this is C. E. Steuart Dewar's DateBk for Palm, a Personal Information Manager (PIM) software title he published through his company Pimlico Software [1].
The sheer density of the UX/UI (he packed an enormous amount of visual indicators and manipulables into very few pixels, and the pinpoint precision of the stylus helped here) is anathema to current Web and smartphone sensibilities, but it was the closest I have felt to the intertwingle-ness [2] of the Emacs Org mode experience on a smartphone. If you had a "power user" mindset, then the software was productivity hacking catnip.
Still looking for the data storage layout of the Apple Newton, the densely-packed yet layered feature set (progressive disclosure UX) of Pimlico DateBk3, hackability of GNU Emacs Org mode, and an LLM-powered index to organize my personal information in an open, introspectable, future-proofed format.
I worked as a UX designer and researcher for about a decade starting at around 2007.
First of all, I don't fully recognize TFA's description of what a UX researcher primarily does. It almost sounds like user testing, which shouldn't require a different hat. That's just something you do to evaluate the product. Designers and developers do that anyway (hopefully).
What I did when I put on the "researcher" hat was (I guess, after reading this article) more akin to market research, but within the existing market.
For example, while working with a big holiday/vacation company (operating flights + resorts), we uncovered that a significant portion of the customers staying at their "family friendly" resorts didn't want to be there. They were typically couples who had done fairly adventurous trips when younger, then they'd married, and had kids. They hated the enclosed, catered, walled feeling of these resorts, but thought it'd be the best they could do with a newborn on their hands.
Awareness of this group of people might feel obvious today, but at the time it was a genuine discovery that lead to development of both services and marketing. While you might argue that the company gets their custom anyway, so what does it matter, the fact was that these people left the resort with low ratings, and a low opinion of the company, which they would announce to their peers in $important-demographic on social media and verbally. I.e., long-term damage to brand and customer retention. They freely chose to stay at the resort, and then felt resentment towards the company for it not being a mountain climbing holiday or whatever. It's illogical, but that's what they did.
Secondly, these types of discoveries can't be produced predictably. Either there is something you don't know about your customers or competitors, or there isn't. Initial efforts might yield a lot, but perhaps there is a saturation point along the way, where more research of the same nature at that particular point in time will yield diminishing results? Well, that doesn't matter, because these people have been hired to do research, so they will keep doing it, whether it's useful or not.
I don't understand the separation of design and research into different roles. To me, a designer should be able to go off and do research if it's warranted. Maybe I'm old school, but separating it feels like separating a developer into two people: one whose only job is to find new libraries and read documentation, and one whose only job it is to type into an editor.
Thirdly, to those griping about "UX ruined UI": it did not. UX is what got it to the point you're imagining as "good old days". What damages UX in the long run is shifting incentives (resulting in dark patterns) and a variation of the above, but on the design side: you needed a UX team of a certain size to get to the design you have, but you don't need an engine of that size to maintain it. If your UX department is oversized, I suspect that they will start inventing tasks for themselves and do things that aren't strictly benificial.
This goes for all roles, arguably. More people doesn't equal more productivity, and at some ratio of number of people vs. real problems for them to tackle, the productivity becomes negative.
Also, a UX department as some kind of "other entity" is not a good setup either, in my opinion. In my experience, UX has worked best when it's a cross-disciplinary focus rather than an isolated group of individuals imposing their will and "owning" the UI.
As a UX designer, your most important job is to get people who don't regularly talk to each other into the same room. You don't have to be the cleverest person in the room wrt UI, but you do have to be the person who can bring the user's point of view into a room where other, equally important points of view, are represented. UX can't be effectively do...
Your post seems to reinforce the article to me. There should already be people researching the customer/market. It seems redundant to have product do research and then have UI/UX also do that same research (as in your first example.)
Either way, it's immaterial who does it, only the results matter. Though I agree, it either isn't done, or it's done poorly, with little rigor, or dubious research methodology.
The field of UX is very, very guilty of this as well. Some people seem to think that just because it's qualitative research, you can feel free to go with your gut, or rely on unsubstantiated data. The same methodology that would get you thrown out of a university can thrive in some organizations.
If the users don't equal the customer then UI/UX doesn't matter at all so long as customers keep buying it. In this scenario, firing UI/UX makes the most sense, because it doesn't matter.
If the user IS the customer, then it might matter. But this would be easier handled by product - they would understand their customer's and market's needs. The majority of web/adtech use cases do not need this level of research, hence why they're all getting fired. They aren't doing important work like designing a cockpit. They're just making some changes every few years that frustrate people for a week and then gets redone in another few years.
Hardly surprising. UX seems to have become far less intuitive over the last decade with so many products making changes for the sake of making changes and most UX positions just glorified product people focusing on UI art rather than having any solid background in human psychology / human factors / perception and information processing / etc.
Academically, 98% of UX people don't have the requisite background to be doing what they are doing.
I almost switched careers to UX a couple of times because I obsess over usability of everything, digital & physical, have a flair for visual design, and am often told I’m highly empathetic.
I just couldn’t get over how full of shit the UX industry seemed to be. It seemed in thrall to itself, and vastly over-rating its own depth and complexity. Sorry for the negativity. I have huge undying respect for dedicated HCI research experts and massive admiration for talented visual designers. I just couldnt shake the impression that a lot of UX had become a blag, a methodology to sell to business like agile etc, and wasn’t on solid ground.
I’m not saying there’s any real insight in that but it was the opinion I formed and this article seems to give some degree of validation to it.
The idea of HCI research and usable product design still strike me as noble & important fields of endeavour. I’d hope if you’re a sceptical UX researcher then we’d be in some kind of understanding & agreement. I admire what it can be.
Many here recall 90ies interfaces and lament thier disappearance. Answer seems obvious to me. Of all UX people I have spoken to, not a single one shared that appreciation. Or any interest in technology. But all of them worship Steve Jobs, Apple and such. It's a culture thing. Now a toxic culture eats their own proponents.
Jobs always put form over function. He demanded a single-button mouse because it looked cleaner, so we got the entirely undiscoverable double click. It's forgotten now, but when the Mac came out, people had to be trained in double-clicking.
I worked at Google as an engineer, but I also went to design school. The vast majority of my friends are from art/design school, and my family ran a business in the visual arts. This is to say I have familiarity in and out of the tech space.
The problem is the rise of Career Designers™ as opposed student of the arts. The current pipeline is dominated by candidates who realize there are few careers for liberal arts students paying six-figures and also self-aware enough to know they don't enjoy math/programming/excel (although many cashcow masters provide OPT when they don't even any math or even the rigor of a respectable MBA). Google has a propensity to hire people who hold master degrees specifically in UI/UX, but I've found only a small fraction (maybe 1/10, and definitely much lower than 25%) who has any aesthetic intuition. I've seen their non-portfolio work, such as their photography and clothing choices. The average teenager on social media probably have more artistic sensibilities than people who are supposed to be the top-tier designers. Obviously this is subjective and also a proxy metric, but I'd like to believe the ability to compose whether it's photos, interior design, or clothing is strongly correlated to the ability to design a website. Or even just having an appreciation of cinema that isn't Marvel. We end up with people who follow systematic procedure taught in a masters in UI/UX that leads to lots of and lots of overly complicated design patterns that make sense intellectually and in isolation, but will never arrive at something that is hollistically cohesively and usable like Craigslists.
Google has grown into a corporation and select for career oriented students who are studious high achievers who focuses on practical matters rather than frivolous things. Maybe that algorithm works well for programmers, where in math/programmer there is a yes/no, but even then school can't indicate who has good intuition about design. I mean the author of Vue is a design major, not computer science.
The people who live and breath art aren't being hired by tech companies to be designers, especially the large ones. They don't fit the corporate status quo, but then again they tend to be independently wealthy and never had to treat academia as a means of procuring a job anyways. At least for hackers / cybersecurity / introverted programmers types, tech companies have done a good job at assimilating people were in social outcasts in early decades. The design orgs feels much more political and feels like a grown-up version of a high school popularity contest. Google's recruitment process of emphasizing academic prestige (school, grades, advanced degrees) may work well for other areas, but it's filtering out the best candidates, and selecting for people who are frankly mediocre.
In the early days of Google, when Google was a pioneer in design, design was lead by Marissa Meyer, an engineer who had a knack for design. It she an artist? Maybe not, but Google was a pioneer in website design and it's at least in part attributable to her. Engineers who have design sensibilities are probably better for designing websites / apps than career-designers.
So that's UI designers. UX Researchers are supposed to be scientific and minor statisticians. They're supposed to glean test hypothesis and make unbiased judgements from a representative sample of the population. The UX Researchers I've worked with were some of the most unscientific and non-quantitative people I've worked in my 10+ professional years. The math stops at basic percentages. I observed some of these surveys and user studies where they prime candidates and ask leading questions towards answers they've pre-assumed, rather than actually listening to the user. That's why there is such a huge and growing disconnect between Google products' usability and the user.
Most of the people who advance in this org are...
This really speaks to me as someone from an hci background - are there places that index a bit more on "aesthetic taste?" Also would love to speak with you further about your experiences if you have a chance.
> are there places that index a bit more on "aesthetic taste?"
Startups, especially the ones that have well designed products since that shows the founding team understands. I remember the early days of Yelp having all these "delightful" experiences such as showing a rocket when you scrolled the page. Corporations like Google are too risk averse and Easter Eggs like that have a lot of red-tape.
Also, this pullback in the labor market is probably a good thing for people who are passionate, as it will hopefully prune alot of the competition who have stellar resumes, but only on paper, that was just there for money.
Apple is great. Heck, even Microsoft. There is this defunct blog about industrial design called Minimally Minimal and the person who wrote that got hired to design the Xbox One. That reflects that Microsoft's talent acquisition team has some sense. Meanwhile, Google gets all philosophical and grandiose about the Material "design system". At the end of the day, it doesn't look good and boring. Netflix was good in the beginning, but I also observed they started hiring those Career Designers and it's been mediocre since. Google's Hardware design was pretty original before, but that was only because those people came from HTC. The new Google hardware is the equivalent of Material. Nowadays, the flat and minimalist design isn't an enlightment but just lazy and unimaginative.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadEverywhere there's dark patterns, performance overhead, mandatory updates degrading user experience, unnecessary JS and walled gardens breaking accessibility/compatibility, online-only etc.
For performance overhead and unnecessary JS, that sounds like poor development practices that happens to also degrade the end experience for users, although some of that unnecessary JS could be some sort of tracking implementation that was included through business requirements.
https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/
- The introduction of several banners/popups/modals, either to shoddily comply with tracking consent laws or to drive up engagement (newsletter subscription, notifications, check out new feature X)
- The display of several, sometimes even nested loading indicators all over the place
- The adoption of "trendy" UI patterns that don't necessarily fit (e.g. "stories", a few years ago)
- An obsession with reducing information density and making everything very sparse
- Rejection of color as a redundant signifier for UI elements, particularly icons
- An overall extremely hostile attitude towards the user, with dark patterns, disregard to preferences and privacy
* Apps feel generally disorganized. Buttons are unlabled. Many things are hidden somewhere between layers of unlabled buttons. In the past you could count on the menu bar giving you quick access to anything.
* Lack of functionality / composability. Avoidance of the file system. Tunnel menus that you have to take one step at a time.
* Every program has UI that works and looks differently, made worse because even the same programs redesign their own UI periodically.
* Flat design. Lack of 'affordances'. Buttons don't look like buttons, draggable things don't look like they're draggable. E.g. scroll bars in the past had this serration to suggest interaction. This leads to hidden features and surprises, where things that seem like static images suddenly hide important functionality.
* Lack of configurability. Configurable Toolbars, arrangeable view panes, tabs etc. And unnecessary limits even when you can configure things. Like, Firefox only has a list of preset zoom levels, to get finer zoom levels you have to go into about:config. Or the fact that it limits the size of tabs to a rather large minimum. For no reason at all.
* Lack of consistent (or even discoverable) keyboard navigation. Rebinding short cuts is not a thing anyone seems to care about anymore.
* Readability, use of space. This applies more to the web, but grey text, ultra-narrow columns, inconsistent scaling.
Also, try to teach a young person to use an old program, or an older version of an office program
(It's whatever Manjaro defaults to. It looks like xfce, but I'm pretty sure it's KDE. The point being that I don't know because it's not configured terribly out of the box like modern gnome.)
The minecraft launcher does regularly bring him to literal tears though. :-(
Funny enough, the few times I had to do that, it turned out to be easy.
Why? Because the software may not look shiny, but it's obvious and discoverable. There is the menu-bar. It says "File". The assumption that "File" is the right place to look for the button that saves the work to a file is one that comes pretty naturally. And of course the keybind is written right there next to the menu item.
Ugly? Maybe. But it's obvious and gets the job done.
Now let's look at some "modern" software, and the Button to save is...yeah, anyones guess really where it is.
Might be in some hamburger or sub-hamburger.
Might be in some animated menu that I have to scroll beyond the various cloud-store options to store to disk, which is a common dark pattern, because cloud solutions are something I can sell, while the users disk isn't.
There might be some gesture-based menu, even in desktop apps.
It may be a button in the interface, but which one is anyones guess ... because apparently the floppy disk icon is not "modern" enough, so there may be any combination of boxes, arrows, arrows in boxes, or whatever happened to be the ultimate wisdom in save-button design at the time.
I have seen apps where it was in the "Share" menu, right next to whatsapp and facebook integration, because these are vitally important options for all apps apparently.
My other usability pet peeve. Traversing a big number if things by paging. The UI will not give you the total number of pages anymore. You can increment 2 pages at a time. Sometimes you can change the url to try later pages but not always. Sometimes there will be a button for the last (final) page but when you click it, it doesn't exist. To make this even worse most times this is loaded via JavaScript so if you're on the equivalent of page 50. The next time you get there you have to keep loading more until you're on 50 again. There is no way to bookmark state or go there directly. I am assuming this is a JavaScript Json thing that somehow became a pattern, like getting a total count is now impossible or something.
My car hides map functionality in buttons that are simply not present until you interact with the map in some magic way that triggers a heuristic that you want the buttons to appear. Slowly.
When I want to see chargers drawn on the map, I don’t want to move the map. So why TF do I have to move the map to convince the software to draw the button so I can tap it? While driving or perhaps waiting at a red light.
- Essential functionality shoved into some sub-hamburger-menu because it "didn't fit the design".
- Low information density
- Pointless cruft like animated menus and hero images + resource intensive pseudo-minimalism, where the app/page/whatever, despite the low information density, somehow still manages to load ungodly amounts of data, or eats tons of resources, or both.
- The latter point contributing to the situation where we have apps that run worse on 2022 hardware, than apps in the early 90s did on a Pentium I. I know that design isn't solely to blame for this, but it certainly played a part.
- Circumventing OS or browser default functionality. Example: Webpages that hijack the onscroll event. I use my mousewheel to scroll, not to advance through whatever the designer thought was a must-see presentation about their companies "values".
- Smooth UX breaking down the instant the user leaves the happy path. Trying to setup an account? Easy. Trying to change the auth method to MFA? A hellride.
- Modals. Modals everywhere
- Everything trying to look like a smartphone app, no matter the viewing device. I have a high resolution screen and a high precision pointing device in front of me. Why are half the webpages and many apps presenting buttons the size of texas?
- Super smart designs causing the page layout to change after it's loaded. Nothing more fun than to accidentially click the wrong thing and then having to reload the previous page because the layout changed under my thumb.
- Next to zero configurability.
Apps are tools. Webpages are tools. I am not starting a program to look at it's amazing design, same as I don't pick up a hammer to marvel at the color choice of the handle. I pick up a hammer to hammer at nails. If I get the impression that the process of picking the handle-color was getting more attention than the process of making a good, sturdy, serviceable and reliable hammer, then I will not use that hammer.
Google search bar breaks macOS keybindings eg. option-arrow doesn't work as expected.
Of course, with the rise of microservices, everything that requires an account is also unreliable.
Also, there's the dark pattern of returning incorrect results during partial outages, so even when stuff is "working", it's mostly gaslighting the end user. This was pioneered by Netflix's frontend team, but it's seeped into all sorts of inappropriate things. A surefire sign of this is opening up an online-only app, and having it report stale data until it updates. My car does this. I don't care what its charge level was sixteen hours ago (typically displayed by my phone for 10-60 seconds), or four days ago (from my watch).
Their initial idea was to synchronize warehouse inventory with the online store in realtime, so that users would never buy anything out of stock. That proved logistically difficult and expensive, so they decided that the frontend would merely checkpoint inventory levels at intervals. When someone inevitably ordered something that was no longer in stock, they simply sent a robo-apology note and refunded the order.
Mitigating the hit to customer satisfaction was deemed cheaper than the very expensive proposition of synchronizing distributed warehouse inventory levels in realtime over unreliable networks.
This seems to happen far too much. Nowadays usually causes me to give up on a site and go somewhere else. Feels like eliminating stuff like this should be low-hanging fruit UX-wise (albeit not especially exciting, I guess)
I strongly believe that's the main problem. Today UX thinks of computers as Assistants. It is clippy all over again.
That is why tech is so exited about Amazon Echo, ChatGPT.. It's the ultimate assistant.
Nobody wants to teach their users anymore, it's supposed to work out of the box. Easy, simple. There should be one button or one way of doing something (the dreaded User Story). Otherwise the user will go elsewhere. So we get these one trick apps.
In the 90s the user was seen as an intermediate user. Today it's all about onboarding.
- Desperately trying to make everything from PCs to cars to refrigerators to space capsules look and behave like a mobile phone for no reason on (or off) God's green Earth except "Woah, trendy."
You're making a very broad assumption here that everyone is like you. The fact is, they aren't. Big click targets are important for accessibility (if you want to read more, theres a pretty good article on the topic here: https://ishadeed.com/article/clickable-area/)
Apparently not, because we went for decades without them, and no one complained about a bad UX from buttons that are too small to click. Which could have something to do with the aforementioned high-precision pointing device, which btw. can be configured to the motoric requirements of the individual user.
However, a lot of people complain about UX gone to hell as of right now. So I'd say its a pretty safe bet that things, as a whole, didn't go into the right direction
Besides, a requirement on a PHONE is not an excuse to do the same thing on a DESKTOP. My desktop PC isn't a phone, and I value information density more than click-area. If an interface ignores these facts, then it is a bad UX for me.
> An important law to be followed in UX design. In simple words, the larger and closer the touch or click target is, the less time it will require the user to interact with it.
...and mistakenly concludes that, if you just make buttons bigger and add more whitespace everywhere, you get widgets that are easier to click.
If you try to run the numbers on "facelifted" modern interfaces vs. their older counterparts, you'll find that many of them actually fare worse even in terms of Fitts' model.
E.g. if you have three equally-sized widgets side by side -- three buttons, for instance -- simply making them wider by some proportion of the initial width increases the difficulty of getting from the center of the leftmost widget to the center of the rightmost widget, because the distance (up in the nominator) increases by a higher factor than the width (in the denominator). In practice, increasing widget sizes increases the index difficulty in basically every UI that has more than two widgets laid out along a given direction, because it causes the distance to targets to grow by more than the widget size.
(Edit: this is commonly forgotten because "literature" drones about Fitt's conclusion without explaining the context in which it was determined: repetitive motion over a single direction between two already widely-spaced physical items. Making the items bigger resulted in lower distance because, unlike in a modern fluid UI, where widgets are placed at constant paddings that are a fraction of their physical size, that did not cause their centers to drift further apart. Whereas in practical UI cases, increased paddings and widget sizes often result in the average distance to widget centers increasing by way more than (half) the widget width, so the ID actually grows).
The example shown in the article just so happens to fare better because it makes a widget taller by about 10%, while reducing the distance between the only two widgets shown on screen about three times. IRL padding between widgets has steadily grown, so while the numbers line up, this isn't a very representative example -- in fact, many designers would probably object that the design on the right is also bad because there's not enough space between the text field and the button.
But even if we take the design example at face value, generalizing from it is a really bad idea. Because the ID is logarithmically-derived, if you were to take the "narrow" button on the left and just bring it 16px away from the text field, the difference would be minute -- no more than 5% (assuming strictly vertical motion between the midline of the text field and the midline of the button; in practice it's probably way lower than that, since LTR users tend to click towards the left of the field; although FWIW I bet in practice moving the two widgets close together has barely any impact at all, as the text field is likely auto-focused, so motion will commonly happen between wherever the cursor happens to be on the screen and the center of the button).
That's a good trade-off if you only have two widgets on the screen, as in a form -- you don't lose anything other than some whitespace by making a widget bigger. If you have more elements to show, though, that's a very bad trade-off to make. An ID difference of 5% is barely noticeable (IIRC it's just above the "noise floor" in a standard Fitts experiment), which is more than offset by the additional difficulty introduced by scrolling (because you can fit fewer elements on the screen).
So that's why Microsoft made the calc.exe fill the whole screen. /s
This does not explain however why the scrollbars are so small. Are they no click targets anymore ?
Not to mention essentially nonexistent window borders and putting active controls in the title bar. Have people forgotten that those are click targets, too? Sometimes I want to move the window or resize it, and Windows makes that hard.
the need for "new", when in most cases something vaguely similar to WinXP or OSX is fine for 90% of things.
When you say that being vaguely similar to WinXP or OSX is fine for 90% of programs, is that in terms of looks, journey path, or something else?
The article mentions this in the Business > User section, saying (removing euphemism and double negatives) the prevailing wisdom is that you will probably be fired unless you actively worsen the product, and provide metrics to explain how you did it.
I’d think that companies with customer bases that don’t actively hate them are less likely to have big layoff rounds, but I am not a UX expert.
Maybe some out-of-work UXRs would like to offer views on how to fix the site?
[1] - https://englishcitiesfund.co.uk/ - though when I just revisited, it appears to be broken for both mobile and desktop.
[2] - my (very personal) view is that the site was in fact designed to showcase work done, so it could be referenced in the Annual Reports of the Fund's partner companies, allowing them to check whatever corporate checkboxes they needed to check that year during their AGMs. Though people tell me that I am too cynical so I could be wrong.
Consider the power of piping a few unix commands together, this is an advanced task that enables power users, but is nearly impossible for a new user.
tldr; For the common cases and beginners UX has improved, but dropped off for users that go beyond that.
- content areas that truncate half a sentence
- expanded content that reveals in a different part of the screen from the place where the teaser lives
- cookie notices - when then problem is not cookies but data exfiltration
- opt-in by default instead of opt out
- accept data exfiltration or don’t use our site
- images with rollovers that hide the image when rolled over
- text content that changes when you toll over
- headers that change size as you scroll so content jumps u predictably
- sticky headers
- sticky footers
- footers with useful content that you can’t read because there’s also an infinite scroller above it
- hamburgers on desktop sites
- landing pages that are 70% negative space
- poster/hero images so large there’s no actual content above the fold
- newsletter subscription modal popovers
- any kind of modal popover that appears mid-way through reading the content
- images with CSS that causes them to shrink when you use screen zoom (amazon product images)
- mistimed animations
- logins with the username and password on separate pages
- password fields you can’t paste into
- “repeat your email” fields
- carousels with differently sized panels so the content below shuffles ip and down whilst you’re reading it
- auto-play videos
- ads every fucking where
- social share buttons
Haha, this seems to be a "design guideline" in both iOS and Android.
- infantilization of interface to treat everyone 'like a 5 year old'
- removal of functionality , homogeneous bootstrap-like interfaces with rounded corners everywhere, to the point where you no longer recognize which system you re using
- "mobilification" of the desktop
- no more rational organization: no hierarchical menus, only the top 5 buttons survive
We need simplicity and stability - the latter being the most important for user interfaces.
For some reason I cannot comprehend, I can split the screen horizontally, which results in two thin strips side-by-side that are useless for anything that I can think of. It is not possible to split it vertically so that I would have two reasonable aspect ratio apps on top of each other. Now they added a convoluted "multitasking" mechanism that kind of lets me solve this for reading, where I can have two 3/4 sized apps overlapping each other, but I still cannot just split the screen or have freely resizable apps (which, again, is a problem solved already in the original Macintosh).
This type of terrible UX has become endemic, and is even worse in non-Apple products. The root cause I believe is "authoritarian simplicity", where some UX designer or team thinks they know the best and force a single, over-simplified, over-specified solution on everyone.
The worst example I encounter on a daily basis is Twitter. Each tweet has at least 8 sections that do different things when tapped. I never know quite where to long-press with my thumb over the tiny timestamp to open it in a new tab, or where the boundary is between the single line of text and the username.
We sell software to financial institutions and our mission is to provide low-skill hourly hires the ability to reliably open complex accounts. Clearly, focusing on the ability of your target audience is really important if you want to go to this kind of an extreme. For me, this is what "UXR" is - Our team sitting down and asking "how does it feel to use that workflow?" and "If I were walking out of HS graduation, could I understand what I am looking at?".
I don't think this is really complicated stuff at the end of the day. If you let the customers harass the developers just a tiny bit, you might find high quality UXR occurs automagically.
Can you cite a single example? Web browsers, mail, event ticket purchases, window managers, music playback, file management, maps, televisions, kitchen appliances, paying for parking, paying for gas / EV charge, credit card checkouts, and banks have all enshittened in the last 15 years.
That's just stuff that actively wasted my time this week.
I can't think of any counter examples.
Were UX/UI people and researchers in the 90's just better? More competent? More careful in their research? Did the objectives change so much from usability to selling clicks?
Gnome 2 famously did this. Gnome 3 famously threw out the findings, which is why Linux Mint exists, and how KDE (eventually) caught up on usability.
Also, the default interface wasn’t composited, so nothing was translucent, so no one layered their controls and content. Sure, it looks kind of pretty in Material Design when a round button with nice antialiased edges sits on top of the content, but it’s terrible UX. In Win2K, if you wanted to do this, you either used “layered” windows (which were no amazingly slow that no one wanted to use them) or you had to go outside the Win32 library entirely and render the whole mess yourself. So designers mostly didn’t do this.
However, how companies earn money changed. In the 80s and 90s computers were marketed at professionals working in offices. Software was sold shrink-wrapped on disks. It was very costly to change software later (send disks?), you better tested it really, really carefully. The promise was often to make experts more efficient at their tasks: Software was customizable, had macro recorders and had a familiar interface of buttons, menus and docking sub-windows. Computers were used with keyboards and (finally!) mouse: Two very efficient input devices. People (including me) are nostalgic for that time, and that makes memory very selective: We probably remember the best software created by large companies with great teams. We also remember software created for specifically for professionals working with computers, many HN readers will be that people. And, last but not least, there were a lot of terrible UIs too, that we gladly forgot and for every fondly remembered non-standard, fun UI (bryce?) there are sooooo many terrible ones.
A lot of what irks people can be explained with shifts in how software got made, for which audience and for which devices: Having many small teams working independently makes a coherent vision for a product more difficult (but has other advantages), user customization became less important since products were more targeted to non-experts and it also can mess with your automated testing; moving to the web as main way to deliver software meant that some types of interactions (drag and drop, using large amounts of data directly) were harder to create than others; on the web, advertisement and subscription models became popular, leading to very different ways to advertise software in contrast to the former "buy the bi-yearly upgrade in a big box" and the web was more OS independent so the old one-system, one UI-standard did not match anymore.
So, a lot of what "got worse" can be explained by changes in the ecosystem that software-creation and software-use happens in and by the position of people that assume it "got worse".
There are many things that I find worse now than in the 90s but this perspective can help to see if software got worse just for people similar to me and it can also help to find ways to make sustainable changes that fit the ecosystem that exists today.
I really think that the only way to adequately serve both demographics is to have two different UIs.
Either you were a highly trained professional using a computer for serious work, or else you were a dedicated hobbyist. Either way, you expected to put in significant time to learn and understand how this magically complex machine worked before you could actually accomplish anything. "Normal people" without strong motivation to study the computer simply did not use computers much during that era.
Fast forward to the smartphone era, and "using computers" has become a casual everyday activity for normal people. Companies are now incentivized to produce software for a mass audience with UIs that require as close to zero thought, study, or technical skill as possible.
All the computer nerds were shocked when Google came out with just a single bare text input as its primary UI. Surely we needed the Baroque masterpiece that was AltaVista's UI to ever gain useful work from a search engine; there are so many parameters the user might wish to vary! But no; as it turns out, the new Eternal September mass computer user audience strongly prefers slightly less control in favor of less time spent thinking.
Yes, if by "shocked" you meant "delighted". Not just that it was a single text input, but that it could also do the desired task better.
I agree too that UXR is disproportionately impacted, and that UXRs focus way too much on user interviews. The challenge for me is that “macro research” is really market research, and UXRs are not well-suited to conduct this type of work, nor do the teams need to be so large to support that kind of work. I feel for anyone losing their job, but it’s tough to justify.
Only organisations with a specific cultural focus on user centrism will have great products.
Apple at least has some of this, but not always.
Have faith: there is a payoff in the long run for many product focused companies. Not all though.
Some people think the Apple Way defines good UX, so they think Apple products have good UX.
Anyone who prefers a non-Apple UX is setting themselves up for a very condescending rant.
One of Jobs primary philosophies is around 'creating great products' aka 'craftsmanship' which is de facto user centric orientation.
If companies made products the Apple Way, they'd probably have better products.
The Apple Way is of course going to be a culty foundation for keeping behaviours oriented around a common sentiment, it helps the Apple org focus. It probably will feel a bit odd and constraining in some ways, but that has more advantages than downsides.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Mouse
> The charging port of the second-generation Magic Mouse is located on its underside, preventing the mouse from being used while charging.
I've never seen another wireless mouse with that problem. Never. Only Apple, it seems, could dream up that specific misdesign. There's no benefit to anyone in that, only detriment, and I am at a loss every time I think about it.
Onwards:
> The Magic Mouse uses its acrylic multi-touch surface for 360-degree scrolling, replacing the rubber scroll ball on the Mighty Mouse. The mouse does not support left and right-clicking simultaneously, and also removes the ability to middle click without third-party software workarounds.
I will be honest: I straight-up don't like the idea of a mouse having a touch pad on its top. I think a touch pad is a poor imitation of a mouse, such that if you have a mouse, using a touch pad (literally) on top of it is using a better interface to replicate a worse one.
However, my personal likes and dislikes pale in comparison to the simple fact the touch pad was also a usability regression for clicking. I absolutely cannot see this as user-focused.
Did it have good build quality? Maybe, but it hardly matters if something is a good implementation of a bad design.
Apple is almost biggest company in the world and they command very high margins for a reason that is 'more than marketing'.
Ironically, you're pocking at the 'mouse' when their trackpad is the reason that keeps me on mac notebooks.
Their 'hit rate' is much higher than most.
The solutions (on here and in the subsequent reflections article) are hilarious though for how general they are and how little they solve the observed problem (UXR dying/being replaced/not justifying its role/etc.). "You'll be fine: just generate value for the business and learn to say no!" The sort of fluff you tell a naive new graduate about to start an internship in a sinking ship of a company to avoid facing reality. You have to read between the lines to realize how devastating the advice actually is.
OR (and I say that in the angriest way I can manage via text) the business is completely looking out for itself in the short term without consideration of its needs beyond a quarter. When a department has served its useful purpose to the very specific goals of the business then the department gets discarded. When a company needs a design for a website, it pays for a UX designer. When the designs are finished, they fire the designer. Does that mean the business never needed a designer? No, instead, they believe that they _no longer_ need a designer, and continue to profit off of the work that the designer did for them. The designer then gets to leave and write blog posts blaming themselves for the pitfalls of capitalism and the absence of design unions.
There is no way to stay around a hungry tiger and survive for long, no matter how one ingratiates themselves to the tiger. Designers, don't write blog posts claiming that getting fired is 100% your fault. You're not Jack Welch, you're the body he spent no time thinking about leaving behind.
I agree with the the general message you're conveying though.
When your profession views math on user & business data as the enemy, and it's for a business...
- Not engaging enough with the customer, i.e., finding out what they actually and truly need as opposed to pandering to their egos because they’re SMEs or whatnot - Engaging too much with the customer by allowing them to have too much say in the design. I’ve seen it go so far as to allow the customer to actually make their own designs (wireframes or mockups, etc.) and then handing that off to the devs to implement, no questions asked, which ended up in a ton of rework for obvious reasons - Relying too heavily on frameworks by allowing yourself to believe that you MUST use one of their built-in widgets or patterns and not create a custom solution that makes sense for the use case - Somewhat contrary to the above, not relying enough on a given framework’s widgets or patterns which can lead to inconsistent design and UX and unnecessary reinventing the wheel - The use of so-called no-code or low-code solutions: Not that these are bad per se, but it leads to the fallacy that a non-engineer (usually mid-level IT manager or “system analyst”) can use these tools to create a complete or even somewhat viable solution (I speak from experience) - Sacrificing a good design for any reason, e.g., ad space requirements, various types of compliance (including even the virtuous ones such as Section 508) - Relying on a framework to do the UX for you, leading to another fallacy that you don't need a UX specialist
UX research still very much needs to be a thing, and I don't say that because it benefits me (it does), but because I wholeheartedly believe in the need for it. I wouldn't design a house or even a pool without the expertise of an architect, so why would an entire dev team build a multi-million dollar UI without a UI/UX engineer?
The way I was finally able to get through to the design team was by showing them an image of a Tesla interior and saying "this is what you guys have built", and then I showed them an image of a well-organized woodshop with hundreds of tools on the walls and saying "this is what the people using our software to build custom apps actually need".
Maybe non-technical end users really do like having all features hidden beneath unlabelled flat buttons, I don't know. But it doesn't work for people using software GUIs to do technical work. I'd go back to 90s-00s style clunky menus in an instant if I could. Just the ability to see what's clickable and what isn't is worth the downgrade in appearance.
When I did the human interface course in my comp.sci degree, there was a lot of attention on standardization, making things people could effectively interact with, consistent feature widgets that are clearly those widgets. Remember "HIG"s?
Nowadays, instead of trying to find a way to make an interface pleasant and consistent, it has to be a unique butterfly of some glorious design that just sucks.
Next time you're designing something with a button that doesn't have a border and isn't clearly a button... Step back and have a rethink. Radio buttons indistinguishable from checkboxes? Your design is bad.
Now get off my lawn
(it's possible that the ux people are optimizing for something other than end users getting their stuff done, like conversion rate. But that doesn't make a trash interface good, it just means you get to pay your mortgage this month.)
I resigned from my ux director position a few months ago partly because of what the profession degenerated into.
Did you lead a team of designers?
Or was it people above you pushing for things that went against your principles and you couldn't convince them?
I feel people in the UX profession have a chip on our shoulder and suffer from an inferiority complex. Mind you, to be a really effective UX, you have to be exceedingly intelligent and competent and I'm not questioning the value of what UX people bring to the table.
However, we shot ourselves in the foot by not keeping in check of our ambition and overselling our value to the broader enterprise.
To have better control over the product outcome, we asked to be engaged more upstream sooner and have a seat at the table with executives at the planning stage. And we got it.
For better or worse, UX / Design has been very successful at inserting itself everywhere in the business process, from start to finish. The genericization of our job titles reflect this growing ambition and organizational footprint.
Web Design -> UI Design -> UX Design -> Product Design.
The empire building also continued through the invention of new subdisciplines: DesignOps, then more recently ResearchOps.
It's all well and good, until an overreach happens and you're encroaching into territory that has already existed. For example, UX research asked to do work that traditionally fell on specialized experts, like industry / sector-specific market research or generative research.
Another example is hugely-staffed design systems team with over-engineered systems & control processes that are difficult to use, contribute to and maintain. Mind you, some have their own UX engineers that sit outside the engineering org.
As a result of all these, it has also become exceedingly difficult to hire a perfectly "T-shaped" person, because they just don't exist. (at $130-$150k/year).
Lastly, there's no craftsmanship in the profession anymore, at least not in-house.
Most good designs that you see are still done by outside agencies, who still operate their design shops tightly, hire for very specific skill sets, use project managers (gasp), and waterfall (gasp).
I left my job partly because I realized I had turned into a person espousing very things that I hate in the profession. (I also needed a career break after working nonstop for almost 20 years.)
This is something I see across the board in the software industry, not just in the UX world.
I think we in design have over complicated things. What I've noticed is we don't speak in plain terms when selling design and to your point it's also down to empire building. And the dribbblisation of design - can't stand it.
I'm in a similar position right now - thinking about quitting this corporate design job and take a sabbatical to focus on refining and expanding my skillset and then join more meaningful projects, e.g. clean/climate-tech related projects.
Do you have a blog or newsletter? I'd love to read more about your design thoughts.
Most UX people don't know what that even is.
Although personally I find it a bit incoherent (e.g. toolbar versus navigation bar versus tab bar) or (e.g. “buttons” that are just blue text or even grey text in Apple apps).
They shall RTFM then. /s
But the world is evolving and instead of UX people reading the ICCCM they just moved on and created Wayland.
If you have a leak in a pipe just demolish the whole house and build it again.
I want my Mac OS 7 back!
on phone screen though? I'm not a fan of hamburgers either, but it's still better than something hidden by touch gestures - which for a while was the direction.
As an industry, we need to get rid of the notion that you can have a single sort of user interface that works on every device. A phone is very different than a desktop, and the appropriate compromises for one are not the same as the appropriate compromises for the other.
Having standardized design and widgets across all UIs makes it harder for a consumer to remember your brand. It's not sticky in their minds, visually speaking. Your application looks, feels, and works exactly the same as your competitors' applications. This has measurable impact on revenue, and it's bad for your bottom line.
Guess which one most businesses choose: easier to use, or better revenue?
In my experience, there is far more people that complain about inconsistent UI than those who care about your cute little corporate identity.
Hm, then why does Windows looks like Android ?
Not automatically. Only if you neglect all of the myriad other ways to make your application stand out. Standardized controls and layout do not have to mean that all applications look the same.
What, why are you hiring this many people..
>Incentivized to empire-build, some thought UX leaders (especially at a few larger companies) were disproportionately responsible for over-hiring and creating the market we are in.
…ok, the jokes write themselves.
The computing world was at peace until then, we had UI designers and engineers who through much research and trial-and-error produced very nice UIs for us to use. The UX industry came in and destroyed all that for shits and profits; literal decades of experience and precedence thrown out the window in the name of the latest fashion trend.
Really? They just came from a war elsewhere. Standing up from XML trenches and walking joyfully into green JSON fields. JSON to hydrate UI's.
I don't remember that era of great UI. Sites were still inaccessible except no one cared, multitude of dark patterns still exists, confusing design language, no information organization at all.
The "trial-and-error" approach was much more "error-and-error" based entirely on guesses by the designer or engineer. I'm an engineer and remember, working through that time period, the horrible sites we created. I had a part in implementing them.
Not to mention the idea of "Web Application" was still very much incipiente in the mid-to-late 2000s. Who had great design for that? Go back and look at Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace back then, hardly a great example to be had, regardless of how bad we might think it is today.
If you're in the camp who treats UX as a professional title/career, then in principle it has very little to do with UI, and being labelled "UX/UI" is often an "insult" to UX professionals along the same lines as "Computer Scientist / IT support", or "Electrical Engineer/Electrician", "Civil Engineer/Sanitation Engineer", "Pharmacist/Teller at Boots", "Doctor/Medical receptionist". (not to imply that the latter professions are 'lesser', but rather to point out that the former professions in the pairs are typically deemed to require a higher standard of skills/training rather than simply vocational/apprentice-based training).
At the same time, I'm not naive to not understand the fact that, if a large number of people start referring to X as Y, then after a while, insisting that X isn't Y is a lost cause, and you might as well start calling it Z instead.
But, e.g. my wife was a senior UX professional who is now doing her PhD in Experimental Psychology; the original motivation was that this would make her a better UX researcher when conducting controlled experimental studies on behalf of her employer. She specialises in voice assistive tech, and her topic relates to isolating auditory markers of voice trustworthiness. I can tell you if she applied for a UX job and the interviewers started asking her what css colours she prefers on buttons, she'd be pretty pissed.
With that understanding, it seems to me that many, if not most, of the criticisms being levelled here do, in fact, apply to the field of UX research.
But certainly not all of them.
This is often a motte and bailey distinction though, where the "UX" person's background is UI, and they think only about UI. But they can charge more because theoretically UX is everything.
I don't think this is an individual's issue, as if everyone hires UX instead of UI then what do you do? It's a UX consultancy issue.
The poor usability of modern interfaces certainly doesn't come from people who care about what it's like to use it in practice. It comes from people whose main skill lies within the field of aesthetics.
What should you call yourself if you're actually interested in working with usability, and happy to leave the visual design to others?
UX.
Most serious people in UX who see job postings mentioning "UX/UI" avoid those jobs in the same manner that a C++ coder would avoid "C/C++".
But I agree that doesn't do much to dissuade people who don't quite know the difference (or what it is that they actually need or want) from advertising "UX/UI" or "C/C++" and then people applying to these jobs.
There being "impostors" in the field who bluff their way through, while regrettable, does not imply that the whole industry is made up, any more than the existence of people applying to data science jobs with nothing but excel skills says nothing about data science.
And some companies really, really need UX people on board.
Now, I'm someone who insists on having a UX/UI person in the team when I'm making an app, as I want it all to go well, and I don't mind spending a chunk to get it, but the number of people I've found who can actually do that is vanishingly small compared to the number of people who are billed out as expensive UX consultants.
* Octocat is the mascot of Github, while Clippit was not only not the mascot of MS Office, it wasn't even the only option of assistant, just the default one.
* Octocat is not a functional part of the UI. That is to say, you don't interact with it to do anything. It's just part of the Github logo and it shows up on certain screens, notably the 404 one. Clippit could be used as an additional interface for the application to accomplish tasks.
* Octocat isn't animated, Clippit was.
It seems to me that the only thing they have in common is that they're cartoon characters that appear somewhere on the interface of software products. You can complain about it on aesthetic grounds, but certainly not on UX grounds. It doesn't make Github any easier or harder to use.
Neither did Clipit -- every function it offered was also accessible through the UI. It was a completely optional element that degraded the user experience exactly the same way Octocat does: you got to look at a goofy, childish character whether you wanted to write a cute check from the tooth fairy for your niee, a report on inappropriate use of company resources, or a death notice for your late father's friends.
You could at least turn it off, whereas Octocat is in the top-left corner of literally every Github page, and prominently featured wearing an astronaut's costume (!?) on the homepage.
>you got to look at a goofy, childish character
Like I said, aesthetic grounds.
>whether you wanted to write a cute check from the tooth fairy for your niee, a report on inappropriate use of company resources, or a death notice for your late father's friends.
>You could at least turn it off, whereas Octocat is in the top-left corner of literally every Github page, and prominently featured wearing an astronaut's costume (!?) on the homepage.
This is quite an inane complaint. Plenty of serious products and companies have cartoon characters as mascots or logos. LLVM has a dragon in the logo; the Go language has a gopher; the Rust language has a crab; the FreeBSD and OpenBSD OSs have a devil and a blowfish respectively. All of these have varying levels of visibility when you visit their web sites.
> cartoon figures in professional applications (please explain to me how Octocat is different from Clippit)
Is Octocat not a cartoon figure? Is Github not a professional application?
I'm not aware of any authoritative definition of user experience that excludes "aesthetic grounds" from the field of UX. How an interface looks and the feeling it conveys is a part of the user experience. The UX industry doesn't operate with this distinction -- see e.g. NN Group's oft-quoted definition (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/definition-user-experience/), which considers aesthetics, and UI design in general a component of UX, or the ISO 9241 definition.
A tongue-in-cheek logo is one thing, but a goofy interface, from the ever-present logo to the overall widget design, is way out there in kindergarten land. The comparison between Octocat's use and, say, that of the Rust crab, is itself unwarranted: you can (in fact, I do) write Rust all the time and not see the crab for weeks, whereas that goofy cat critter is literally on every Github page.
As for Clippit specifically, while its graphical design was obviously not the primary reason why it was hated, it was definitely one component of it -- in fact, it's one of the reasons why it was specifically considered distracting. Contemporary studies, like Swartz's notorious dissertation about why everyone hated Clippit, obviously focused on the functional aspect, but it's telling that the quantitative framework in use at the time put "fun" and "useful" in separate categories.
The sad truth is that UIs have gotten gradually prettier but less usable since their peak in the mid to late 1990s. I honestly don't know how an entire UXR department can be justified if they just keep making things worse. Frankly I am sick of the utter wasteland that touchscreens have created, the giant crater they blasted in people's imaginations. And I'm sick of this endless cycle of redesign.
I do not give two shits about drop shadows or rounded corners or animations. I want to use the frickin software tool to do frickin work. I am not looking to play tiddly winks with an animated brochure.
Bring back the damn drop down menus written in my native language with keyboard shortcuts that are right there in the damn menu. I'm sick to death of iconese. I don't speak it. It's not a language, it's alien hieroglyphics. And stop telling me it's for my own good. It's for their good, so the crap fits and they don't have to go to a translation team. Nothing could be lazier or more hostile to users.
Which brings me to the final sin: if you are a UXR and you are not polling actual users, talking to actual people, sitting down and actually watching them use the thing, listening to actual words coming out of their mouths when they do so, which include an *&#$ of profanity, and you are instead relying on indirect means, then congrats, you are a trying to scale a process that doesn't. fricking. scale.
> The sad truth is that UIs have gotten gradually prettier
I don't think they've become prettier at all. What they've become is bland and uniform. All basically the same look, apparently trying to be inoffensive rather than beautiful.
If "predictability" is a key principle of good User Experience™, then UI uniformity is the best way to achieve it. Consistent interface patterns translate across applications and make software easier to use, on the whole. Users learn the pattern once and can use it everywhere with lower mental overhead.
I would take a bland-but-consistent UI across all software over beautiful-but-unique. Modern UI design has taken this stance too for good reason.
Also worth pointing out that a "bland" UI of today (let's say macOS or iOS since they are so pervasive) would be stunningly, mind-blowingly beautiful to a user 30 years ago. It's all relative, we've just gotten spoiled by beautiful UIs to the point they are considered bland now.
> Sure, it can be fun at first, but learning a million unique UIs that all look and behave differently is exhausting as a user.
Absolutely. I wasn't calling for anything like that.
Uniformity in behavior is highly desirable. Uniformity in the general location of controls and general workflow is also highly desirable. Also highly desirable (but not in fashion anymore, so isn't really done) is the ability to easily tell how to accomplish things.
But you can have that without being visually bland and without looking essentially indistinguishable from everything else.
> Also worth pointing out that a "bland" UI of today (let's say macOS or iOS since they are so pervasive) would be stunningly, mind-blowingly beautiful to a user 30 years ago.
I'm old enough to remember being a user 30 years ago, and you do have a point. But the most beautiful painting in the world looks a lot less beautiful when every other painting looks just like it.
Also, I would argue that the "beautiful" days of UI design are over. What is in fashion now wouldn't really have been considered mind-blowingly beautiful 30 years ago. Technically impressive, sure, but aesthetically neutral at best.
> we've just gotten spoiled by beautiful UIs
Not spoiled. Habituated. It's the way people are. If you eat nothing but your favorite food every day, you will eventually reach a point where you dislike it.
Variety is an important design goal, too. You can have variety without sacrificing beauty or consistency. You jsut have to break out of using UI frameworks or slavishly following guidelines like "Material Design", or whatever the flavor of the day is.
Regardless, I'll take the UIs of 30 years ago over those of today even though they were uglier. They were also more powerful and generally easier to use.
Please keep complaining out loud, I feel so many people are suffering in silence.
Feedback forums are generally useless. They are barely monitored by low-level contractors who only pass up the most common complaints.
As an anecdote, I was upgrading some outdated code for the dialpad in the phone app and we worked closely with some blind Googlers to understand how they place calls and make sure we weren't breaking it for them. Really interesting stuff.
Which is all to say; I hate it and I’m sighted.
Yes and no. In a way it's the same problem we (engineering) has always had. That is, technical decisions are made based on (engineers') egos and not on the needs of the client / product.
Those used to be mainly decisions that impacted hardware and/or backend. Now they mainfest on the frontend. UX and QA should be speaking up but either don't exist (in some products), don't have the experience, or don't have the juice / power to say "this is crap. Fix it."
We have met the enemy and he/she/they is us.
as long as only human subjective criteria have to be met, this is easily handled with marketing. </s>
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." -R. Feynman
How does anyone - engineers included - believe that's not shite?
OT but being from Switzerland it wasn't UX that screwed that up for me, it was Swaziland renaming to Eswatini. Sure "s", "w", down is slightly quicker than "s", "w", down, down but some forms haven't updated the name yet.
You can, and people do, make fairly fancy websites with Javascript that still work well (a blind friend told me Amazon is quite good, for example), but really this is the bare minimum. As a bonus, it will help all of us as we find ourselves getting less physically able as we age, even if we don't need the support right now.
There are standards on the building of my house, the gas, the electricity, the plumbing. They all have to be carefully followed. Why should computing, when provided by multi billion dollar businesses, be such a free for all in comparison?
What the? I had no idea it was so colossal. I didn't even know UX "research" was a thing, as in, someone made their career out of it.
No wonder it takes 100 engineers to write a website, if it takes 100 researchers to dream up some coconuts for people lacking thumbs. Last I checked, humans haven't changed in centuries. The gestalt is all you need to "research" and understand the human perception, imho. Ok maybe in the field of VR, some research need to be made, but this seems like crazy amounts of people.
Faffing about with hamburger menus and A/B testing isn't 'UX' research though.
Agreed, but hasn't all of this research already been done? I thought these are well understood already. A/B testing hamburger menus literally sounds insane to me
Ironically, the author is quick to provide answers that please executives, and slow to offer dangerous questions that would displease them. Questions like how the company's short-term optimization was causing a long-term loss on user retention. Or how certain executive-sponsored beliefs were hurting user trust. Researchers who ask those questions tend not to stick around too long, even before 2021. Those who remain self-select into safer "middle" research; they and their department have been pummeled into submission by the organization.
The author turns a blind eye to this corruption; the author points the finger at researchers, not executives. The author also forgets the history that users made the business successful [1]. Today, however, the internal hierarchies and forward momentum of many tech companies depends on a selective understanding of users [2]. Good research slows down that momentum, it aims for good-enough understanding, it asks important questions. And when important questions collide with the status quo, they are not tolerated.
Or to put in simple terms, from a chief of staff to a middle manager: "Nevermind you 'why', why ain't in your repertoire no more".
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html "Mark Zuckerberg didn't succeed because he was an expert on startups. He succeeded despite being a complete noob at startups, because he understood his users really well."
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35597279 "The logic that the CPO applied at the time was some pretty sporty mental gymnastics: "we optimize for conversion (looker to booker) because that's a proxy to actually delivering value to the customer."
One knowledgeable individual combining the fields programming, design and usability can sometimes outperform big teams, because there is something to the way big teams decide that dillutes clear ideas and leads to inconsistencies throughout the resulting piece of software. These inconsistencies can be an problem for the user.
UX people generally may claim otherwise, but it is easy to make software without them and often the user experience is better when they are not involved. Imagine two situations. We are going to improve the user experience of the famous text editor vim. Who will make a better job:
1. Random dude who has been teaching vim to people, with some experience in creating user interfaces and a lot of experience with terminal based software
2. UX researcher armed with all the newest knowledge in usability
My money would be on the former, because the latter has a high chance of misunderstanding why people use vim in the first place. I might be mistaken, but my feeling is that in the past 15 years user interfaces have broadly been "dumbed down" or driven towards the smallest common denominator.
That is okay for software that you use once a year and where things should be self explainatory. But there is software where it is okay to have a little hurdle in the start if it means you are going to be so much more productive later. Ideally you will have both a low entrance barrier and a good usability when you use it day in, day out. Newer UX-based software is good at the former, but sucks at the latter.
A lot of roles and best practices are for making software creation work in large organizations.
I disagree with the "dumbing down" idea: "old UX" (90s, early 2000s) focussed a lot on beginner-friendlieness and at this time a lot of people might have seen this sofware as being "dumbed down" from its predecessors. Menus e.g. are a staple of making GUIs more discoverable than command line interfaces, and at that time there were already criticism that urged for building more efficient text based interfaces (See "canon cat" and the "anti mac interface")
maybe because the userbase grew over tenfold in that timeframe (most of which are not vim users ;)
A possible example of this is C. E. Steuart Dewar's DateBk for Palm, a Personal Information Manager (PIM) software title he published through his company Pimlico Software [1].
The sheer density of the UX/UI (he packed an enormous amount of visual indicators and manipulables into very few pixels, and the pinpoint precision of the stylus helped here) is anathema to current Web and smartphone sensibilities, but it was the closest I have felt to the intertwingle-ness [2] of the Emacs Org mode experience on a smartphone. If you had a "power user" mindset, then the software was productivity hacking catnip.
Still looking for the data storage layout of the Apple Newton, the densely-packed yet layered feature set (progressive disclosure UX) of Pimlico DateBk3, hackability of GNU Emacs Org mode, and an LLM-powered index to organize my personal information in an open, introspectable, future-proofed format.
[1] http://www.pimlicosoftware.com/datebk6.htm
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertwingularity
First of all, I don't fully recognize TFA's description of what a UX researcher primarily does. It almost sounds like user testing, which shouldn't require a different hat. That's just something you do to evaluate the product. Designers and developers do that anyway (hopefully).
What I did when I put on the "researcher" hat was (I guess, after reading this article) more akin to market research, but within the existing market.
For example, while working with a big holiday/vacation company (operating flights + resorts), we uncovered that a significant portion of the customers staying at their "family friendly" resorts didn't want to be there. They were typically couples who had done fairly adventurous trips when younger, then they'd married, and had kids. They hated the enclosed, catered, walled feeling of these resorts, but thought it'd be the best they could do with a newborn on their hands.
Awareness of this group of people might feel obvious today, but at the time it was a genuine discovery that lead to development of both services and marketing. While you might argue that the company gets their custom anyway, so what does it matter, the fact was that these people left the resort with low ratings, and a low opinion of the company, which they would announce to their peers in $important-demographic on social media and verbally. I.e., long-term damage to brand and customer retention. They freely chose to stay at the resort, and then felt resentment towards the company for it not being a mountain climbing holiday or whatever. It's illogical, but that's what they did.
Secondly, these types of discoveries can't be produced predictably. Either there is something you don't know about your customers or competitors, or there isn't. Initial efforts might yield a lot, but perhaps there is a saturation point along the way, where more research of the same nature at that particular point in time will yield diminishing results? Well, that doesn't matter, because these people have been hired to do research, so they will keep doing it, whether it's useful or not.
I don't understand the separation of design and research into different roles. To me, a designer should be able to go off and do research if it's warranted. Maybe I'm old school, but separating it feels like separating a developer into two people: one whose only job is to find new libraries and read documentation, and one whose only job it is to type into an editor.
Thirdly, to those griping about "UX ruined UI": it did not. UX is what got it to the point you're imagining as "good old days". What damages UX in the long run is shifting incentives (resulting in dark patterns) and a variation of the above, but on the design side: you needed a UX team of a certain size to get to the design you have, but you don't need an engine of that size to maintain it. If your UX department is oversized, I suspect that they will start inventing tasks for themselves and do things that aren't strictly benificial.
This goes for all roles, arguably. More people doesn't equal more productivity, and at some ratio of number of people vs. real problems for them to tackle, the productivity becomes negative.
Also, a UX department as some kind of "other entity" is not a good setup either, in my opinion. In my experience, UX has worked best when it's a cross-disciplinary focus rather than an isolated group of individuals imposing their will and "owning" the UI.
As a UX designer, your most important job is to get people who don't regularly talk to each other into the same room. You don't have to be the cleverest person in the room wrt UI, but you do have to be the person who can bring the user's point of view into a room where other, equally important points of view, are represented. UX can't be effectively do...
But there isn't, and hasn't been historically, based on my experience. OP is spot on.
The field of UX is very, very guilty of this as well. Some people seem to think that just because it's qualitative research, you can feel free to go with your gut, or rely on unsubstantiated data. The same methodology that would get you thrown out of a university can thrive in some organizations.
If the users don't equal the customer then UI/UX doesn't matter at all so long as customers keep buying it. In this scenario, firing UI/UX makes the most sense, because it doesn't matter.
If the user IS the customer, then it might matter. But this would be easier handled by product - they would understand their customer's and market's needs. The majority of web/adtech use cases do not need this level of research, hence why they're all getting fired. They aren't doing important work like designing a cockpit. They're just making some changes every few years that frustrate people for a week and then gets redone in another few years.
Academically, 98% of UX people don't have the requisite background to be doing what they are doing.
I just couldn’t get over how full of shit the UX industry seemed to be. It seemed in thrall to itself, and vastly over-rating its own depth and complexity. Sorry for the negativity. I have huge undying respect for dedicated HCI research experts and massive admiration for talented visual designers. I just couldnt shake the impression that a lot of UX had become a blag, a methodology to sell to business like agile etc, and wasn’t on solid ground.
I’m not saying there’s any real insight in that but it was the opinion I formed and this article seems to give some degree of validation to it.
The idea of HCI research and usable product design still strike me as noble & important fields of endeavour. I’d hope if you’re a sceptical UX researcher then we’d be in some kind of understanding & agreement. I admire what it can be.
makes me chuckle while using a standard, two-button mouse to double click on windows desktop icons.
The problem is the rise of Career Designers™ as opposed student of the arts. The current pipeline is dominated by candidates who realize there are few careers for liberal arts students paying six-figures and also self-aware enough to know they don't enjoy math/programming/excel (although many cashcow masters provide OPT when they don't even any math or even the rigor of a respectable MBA). Google has a propensity to hire people who hold master degrees specifically in UI/UX, but I've found only a small fraction (maybe 1/10, and definitely much lower than 25%) who has any aesthetic intuition. I've seen their non-portfolio work, such as their photography and clothing choices. The average teenager on social media probably have more artistic sensibilities than people who are supposed to be the top-tier designers. Obviously this is subjective and also a proxy metric, but I'd like to believe the ability to compose whether it's photos, interior design, or clothing is strongly correlated to the ability to design a website. Or even just having an appreciation of cinema that isn't Marvel. We end up with people who follow systematic procedure taught in a masters in UI/UX that leads to lots of and lots of overly complicated design patterns that make sense intellectually and in isolation, but will never arrive at something that is hollistically cohesively and usable like Craigslists.
Google has grown into a corporation and select for career oriented students who are studious high achievers who focuses on practical matters rather than frivolous things. Maybe that algorithm works well for programmers, where in math/programmer there is a yes/no, but even then school can't indicate who has good intuition about design. I mean the author of Vue is a design major, not computer science.
The people who live and breath art aren't being hired by tech companies to be designers, especially the large ones. They don't fit the corporate status quo, but then again they tend to be independently wealthy and never had to treat academia as a means of procuring a job anyways. At least for hackers / cybersecurity / introverted programmers types, tech companies have done a good job at assimilating people were in social outcasts in early decades. The design orgs feels much more political and feels like a grown-up version of a high school popularity contest. Google's recruitment process of emphasizing academic prestige (school, grades, advanced degrees) may work well for other areas, but it's filtering out the best candidates, and selecting for people who are frankly mediocre.
In the early days of Google, when Google was a pioneer in design, design was lead by Marissa Meyer, an engineer who had a knack for design. It she an artist? Maybe not, but Google was a pioneer in website design and it's at least in part attributable to her. Engineers who have design sensibilities are probably better for designing websites / apps than career-designers.
So that's UI designers. UX Researchers are supposed to be scientific and minor statisticians. They're supposed to glean test hypothesis and make unbiased judgements from a representative sample of the population. The UX Researchers I've worked with were some of the most unscientific and non-quantitative people I've worked in my 10+ professional years. The math stops at basic percentages. I observed some of these surveys and user studies where they prime candidates and ask leading questions towards answers they've pre-assumed, rather than actually listening to the user. That's why there is such a huge and growing disconnect between Google products' usability and the user. Most of the people who advance in this org are...
Startups, especially the ones that have well designed products since that shows the founding team understands. I remember the early days of Yelp having all these "delightful" experiences such as showing a rocket when you scrolled the page. Corporations like Google are too risk averse and Easter Eggs like that have a lot of red-tape.
Also, this pullback in the labor market is probably a good thing for people who are passionate, as it will hopefully prune alot of the competition who have stellar resumes, but only on paper, that was just there for money.
Apple is great. Heck, even Microsoft. There is this defunct blog about industrial design called Minimally Minimal and the person who wrote that got hired to design the Xbox One. That reflects that Microsoft's talent acquisition team has some sense. Meanwhile, Google gets all philosophical and grandiose about the Material "design system". At the end of the day, it doesn't look good and boring. Netflix was good in the beginning, but I also observed they started hiring those Career Designers and it's been mediocre since. Google's Hardware design was pretty original before, but that was only because those people came from HTC. The new Google hardware is the equivalent of Material. Nowadays, the flat and minimalist design isn't an enlightment but just lazy and unimaginative.