Most software is not designed by intelligent and thoughtful people anymore. It is designed by hastily promoted middle manager PM/Product type people who, as has been mentioned elsewhere, simply were not around when thoughtful human interface design was borderline mandatory for efficiency’s sake.

There is incompetence and there is also malevolence in the encouragement of dark patterns by the revenue side of the business.

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bfbf 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It’s amazing how many blank stares I get when I, as mobile engineer, tell stakeholders that we shouldn’t just implement some random interface idea they thought up in the shower and we instead need design input!

“But why can’t you just do it?” Because I recognise the importance of consistent UX and an IA that can actually be followed.

Just like developers, (proper) designers solve problems, an we need to stop asking them for faster bikes.

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zahlman 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> “But why can’t you just do it?”

The answer should be "because users will hate it and use a competing product that's better designed".

A shame that it isn't actually true any more.

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jstanley 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There's a time and a place for it. If you already know exactly what the program needs to do, then sure, design a user interface. If you are still exploring the design space then it's better to try things out as quickly as possible even if the ui is rough.

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Enginerrrd 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The latter is an interesting mindset to advocate for. In almost every other engineering discipline, this would be frowned upon. I suspect wisdom could be gained by not discounting better forethought to be honest.

However, I really wonder how formula 1 teams manage their engineering concepts and driver UI/UX. They do some crazy experimental things, and they have high budgets, but they're often pulling off high-risk ideas on the very edge of feasibility. Every subtle iteration requires driver testing and feedback. I really wonder what processes they use to tie it all together. I suspect that they think about this quite diligently and dare I say even somewhat rigidly. I think it quite likely that the culture that led to the intense and detailed way they look at process for pit-stops and stuff carries over to the rest of their design processes, versioning, and iteration/testing.

	▲	gmueckl 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Racing like in Formula 1 is extremely different from normal product design: each Formula 1 car has a user base of exactly 1: the driver that is going to use it. Not even the cars from the same team are identical for that reason. The driver can basically dictate the UX design because there is never any friction with other users. Also, turnaround times from idea to final product can be insane at that level. These teams often have to accomplish in days what normally takes months. But they can pull it off by having every step of the design and manufacturing process in house.

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ivan_gammel 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There exist other ways to do the research. „Try things out“ is often not just a signal of „we don‘t know what to do“, but also a signal of „we have no idea how to properly measure the outcomes of things we try“.

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bfbf 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But that’s the point, no? Prototyping is useful but beyond a proof of concept, you still need a suitable user interface. I have no problems if there’s a rationale behind UI changes, but often we have stakeholders telling us to do something inconsistent just so their pet project can be presented to the user. That’s not design.

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ErigmolCt 35 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yep, there's some bad incentives and some rushed work, but calling it mostly incompetence or malice kind of ignores how much the underlying system has changed

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mbesto 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is reductionist and myopic. I've personally been through building forms online and it's hell to try to find consensus on perhaps the most common forms used online.

Let's take a credit card form:

- Do I let the user copy and paste values in?

- Do I let them use IE6?

- Do I need to test for the user using an esotoric browser (Brave) with an esoteric password manager (KeePassXC)?

- Do I make it accessible for someone's OpenClaw bot to use it?

- Do I make it inaccessible to a nefarious actor who uses OpenClaw to use it?

I could go on...

Balancing accessibility and usability is hard.[0]

[0] Steve Yegge's platform rant - https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

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mohamedkoubaa 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Cybernetic natural selection should take care of this over time, but the rate of random mutations in software systems is much higher than in biological systems. Would be interested in modeling the equilibrium dynamics of this

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api 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Software is now media, not tooling. Media tends to come with a lot of baked in perverse incentives.

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polkapie 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

	▲	exe34 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Would it be better to bring this up in the retro? We're getting sidetracked here. We could set up a meeting with the stakeholders.