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I got in an argument with an accessibility engineer about this recently... The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability.

pwg 1y ago
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-get-a-man-to-understand-something https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge...
hyperbrainer 1y ago
It's interesting especially because it seems like companies today pour tens of millions into "accessibility", but I never see a thing's usability in terms of simple and easy-to-do-what-I-want UX fall in to the same category.
- rafram 1y ago
  One is required by law and/or contract terms, the other is just nice to have.
  - layer8 1y ago
    And that is why we can’t have nice things, apparently.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- cenamus 1y ago
  Even just simple UX testing with people that have never seen or used your software seems to be a lost art.
  - hnthrowaway0315 1y ago
    Companies are outsourcing testing. I'm not surprised that they get rid of UI testing. Back in the day companies used to invite people to sit down and use their software. Nowadays they just push out whatever they have and then start collecting bug tickets. Then they let the community to vote on the tickets. It's basically a huge "pay for being a beta tester" scheme.
    - ivan_gammel 1y ago
      UX testing is not UI testing and it is not QA.
      - hnthrowaway0315 1y ago
        You are probably right, just saying in general...
      - girvo 1y ago
        Quite, but lots of companies jam them all together these days.
cosmic_cheese 1y ago
It’s a completely predictable result if you think about it. Old style UI was developed with the findings of countless man-hours of UX research performed by field experts, while branded UI is typically whipped together purely based on trends and vibes in an evening by a visual designer who’s probably never performed an ounce of serious research or user trials. It’s natural that the latter is only going to be good at the most superficial of purposes. UI as branding is the McMansion of UX.
- bri3d 1y ago
  I think it’s worse from a time wasting standpoint, really - a lot of modern UX does have thousands of hours of UX research dumped into it, but with faulty metrics driven goal seeking and internal politics bolted on. I agree that Vibe Branding killed UX in the way you describe in the 2000s (remember when every company had some abominable Flash site?!), but now, we’ve come full circle: from the ashes we’ve allowed warring factions of UX researchers to return to create hundreds of carefully constructed disparate systems with no consistency.
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    I don’t think we’re quite back to where we were, because branded UI widgets are almost always devoid of functionality compared to their traditional UI toolkit counterparts. If a feature is even slightly “power user”, branded UI widgets probably don’t implement it, even in tools made for technical users. One of my favorite examples is tree-style lists (“outline views” in AppKit nomenclature). On macOS these have a very convenient functionality where holding down option while expanding/collapsing a section performs that action on all children as well, and it’s practically never implemented in custom-built tree widgets even in cases where the primary audience skews Mac-heavy.
burnte 1y ago
> The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability. This is caused by a change in who is hired as UI/UX developers. In days past it was HCI experts and engineers, now it's graphic designers. "Pretty" is the order of the day, not "useful". "There are too many menu items" is now answered with "So let's hide them" when it used to be "How can we organize them in the UI us a simple, discoverable manner?" But then that "overflow" menu (really? Needed menu commands are now OVERFLOW?) gets crowded so they start just removing features so the UI is nice.
- ivan_gammel 1y ago
  >This is caused by a change in who is hired as UI/UX developers. „UX/UI developers“ is a strange name for it. In 2000s the web enabled more sophisticated presentation designs and there was a push from client-server to web-based applications using incredibly strange technologies for building UIs — HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which gave the rise to UX design as a interdisciplinary job (HCI+digital graphics design). By 2010 the internet of applications kicked off and in mid-2010s moved to mobile, dramatically increasing the demand for UX designers. By then it actually mattered more who is hiring designers, not who is hired. Since only relatively small fraction of hiring managers does understand the scope of this job even now, they even started calling it „UX/UI designers“ or „Product designers“ as if that name change could help, still judging design work by often-fake screenshots on Behance rather than by case studies in the portfolio. Even HCI professionals are often reduced to mere graphic designers by those managers who skip research and apply „taste“ to a science-based discipline. At the same time, since UX design is one of the most well-paid and less stressful creative jobs, a lot of people switched to it without proper education or experience, having no idea what is statistical significance or how to design a survey. And voila, we are here.
  - burnte 1y ago
    > „UX/UI developers“ is a strange name for it. I agree. It's a UI Engineer. User Experience is just the fluffification of the title to something that sounds expansive and nebulous when it's actually pretty focused and critical.
Lorkki 1y ago
It's also repeating what the hellscape of inconsistent skinned UIs did in the late 90s and early 2000s. People are looking back at those times with a rather selective memory.
- xandrius 1y ago
  People forget having to use IE with 12 toolbars when going over at some friend's house.
- Gormo 1y ago
  The themed UIs of that era were very superficial -- if they applied to serious software at all, they were just a cosmetic layer on top of an otherwise well-engineered interface, and could be easily disabled. Most people I knew, for example, disabled the theming engine that shipped with Windows XP. Most applications that supported UI skinning still had a default or fallback UI that adhered well enough to modern conventions. Not so much anymore. The abandonment of any coherent organizing principle to UI layout in favor of pure aesthetics has been a massive regression. Reasonably complex software often doesn't even include menu bars anymore, for example.
WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
> The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability. Imagine if Active Desktop had taken over. I eventually came up with a not-awful use for AD but that was a few years after it went away.
- anthk 1y ago
  It did under several ways since w98SE and Explorer with IE merged on.

pwg 1y ago

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-get-a-man-to-understand-something https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge...

hyperbrainer 1y ago

It's interesting especially because it seems like companies today pour tens of millions into "accessibility", but I never see a thing's usability in terms of simple and easy-to-do-what-I-want UX fall in to the same category.

rafram 1y ago
One is required by law and/or contract terms, the other is just nice to have.
- layer8 1y ago
  And that is why we can’t have nice things, apparently.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
cenamus 1y ago
Even just simple UX testing with people that have never seen or used your software seems to be a lost art.
- hnthrowaway0315 1y ago
  Companies are outsourcing testing. I'm not surprised that they get rid of UI testing. Back in the day companies used to invite people to sit down and use their software. Nowadays they just push out whatever they have and then start collecting bug tickets. Then they let the community to vote on the tickets. It's basically a huge "pay for being a beta tester" scheme.
  - ivan_gammel 1y ago
    UX testing is not UI testing and it is not QA.
    - hnthrowaway0315 1y ago
      You are probably right, just saying in general...
    - girvo 1y ago
      Quite, but lots of companies jam them all together these days.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago

It’s a completely predictable result if you think about it. Old style UI was developed with the findings of countless man-hours of UX research performed by field experts, while branded UI is typically whipped together purely based on trends and vibes in an evening by a visual designer who’s probably never performed an ounce of serious research or user trials. It’s natural that the latter is only going to be good at the most superficial of purposes. UI as branding is the McMansion of UX.

bri3d 1y ago
I think it’s worse from a time wasting standpoint, really - a lot of modern UX does have thousands of hours of UX research dumped into it, but with faulty metrics driven goal seeking and internal politics bolted on. I agree that Vibe Branding killed UX in the way you describe in the 2000s (remember when every company had some abominable Flash site?!), but now, we’ve come full circle: from the ashes we’ve allowed warring factions of UX researchers to return to create hundreds of carefully constructed disparate systems with no consistency.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  I don’t think we’re quite back to where we were, because branded UI widgets are almost always devoid of functionality compared to their traditional UI toolkit counterparts. If a feature is even slightly “power user”, branded UI widgets probably don’t implement it, even in tools made for technical users. One of my favorite examples is tree-style lists (“outline views” in AppKit nomenclature). On macOS these have a very convenient functionality where holding down option while expanding/collapsing a section performs that action on all children as well, and it’s practically never implemented in custom-built tree widgets even in cases where the primary audience skews Mac-heavy.

burnte 1y ago

> The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability. This is caused by a change in who is hired as UI/UX developers. In days past it was HCI experts and engineers, now it's graphic designers. "Pretty" is the order of the day, not "useful". "There are too many menu items" is now answered with "So let's hide them" when it used to be "How can we organize them in the UI us a simple, discoverable manner?" But then that "overflow" menu (really? Needed menu commands are now OVERFLOW?) gets crowded so they start just removing features so the UI is nice.

ivan_gammel 1y ago
>This is caused by a change in who is hired as UI/UX developers. „UX/UI developers“ is a strange name for it. In 2000s the web enabled more sophisticated presentation designs and there was a push from client-server to web-based applications using incredibly strange technologies for building UIs — HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which gave the rise to UX design as a interdisciplinary job (HCI+digital graphics design). By 2010 the internet of applications kicked off and in mid-2010s moved to mobile, dramatically increasing the demand for UX designers. By then it actually mattered more who is hiring designers, not who is hired. Since only relatively small fraction of hiring managers does understand the scope of this job even now, they even started calling it „UX/UI designers“ or „Product designers“ as if that name change could help, still judging design work by often-fake screenshots on Behance rather than by case studies in the portfolio. Even HCI professionals are often reduced to mere graphic designers by those managers who skip research and apply „taste“ to a science-based discipline. At the same time, since UX design is one of the most well-paid and less stressful creative jobs, a lot of people switched to it without proper education or experience, having no idea what is statistical significance or how to design a survey. And voila, we are here.
- burnte 1y ago
  > „UX/UI developers“ is a strange name for it. I agree. It's a UI Engineer. User Experience is just the fluffification of the title to something that sounds expansive and nebulous when it's actually pretty focused and critical.

Lorkki 1y ago

It's also repeating what the hellscape of inconsistent skinned UIs did in the late 90s and early 2000s. People are looking back at those times with a rather selective memory.

xandrius 1y ago
People forget having to use IE with 12 toolbars when going over at some friend's house.
Gormo 1y ago
The themed UIs of that era were very superficial -- if they applied to serious software at all, they were just a cosmetic layer on top of an otherwise well-engineered interface, and could be easily disabled. Most people I knew, for example, disabled the theming engine that shipped with Windows XP. Most applications that supported UI skinning still had a default or fallback UI that adhered well enough to modern conventions. Not so much anymore. The abandonment of any coherent organizing principle to UI layout in favor of pure aesthetics has been a massive regression. Reasonably complex software often doesn't even include menu bars anymore, for example.

WarOnPrivacy 1y ago

> The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability. Imagine if Active Desktop had taken over. I eventually came up with a not-awful use for AD but that was a few years after it went away.

anthk 1y ago
It did under several ways since w98SE and Explorer with IE merged on.