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

Agreed. I only make internal tools where I work, and homogeneity is great here. These apps should be the most boring apps, yet clear, easy to use, and importantly, consistent across the company.

Bootstrap was great for this. You got a clean web interface that was simple, yet didn't have to be completely ugly. Basic and functional. A form to submit POs doesn't have to stand out, be glassy, or have animations. It needs to be easy to parse and stay out of the way.

Of course, there is indeed no shame. There is also no pride.

Standardized interfaces are as exciting as kettle thermal switches or physical knobs in cars. Useful, probably optimal and will be around for decades to come. Also nobody talks about it, treats it with interest, or pays above market rate to work on it.

The value becomes the architecture of the value of the tool, not the interface. There is still value being generated, but the need for a highly paid UX designer evaporates, and is ultimately replaced by the above.

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

There is more to design then just buttons and colour... Like menus, options, how, where, when etc.

But I reckon, nobody cares. Just let Claude decide and go with it... Sad state for UX designers / researchers.

"attractive things work better"

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

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

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

This is reducing the role of Design as some lego-blocks assembling process. And higher quality being seen as adding ‘pizzazz’.

You are right, though. Many products don’t need more than that. But I fear that this will greatly impact design innovation and progress. We might get stuck in the current UI paradigm for a long time.

I agree, only the very best designs (and their designers) can nicely mix utility and beauty (or the wow factor, it’s hard to define).

And people sometimes overestimate their designs because beauty is subjective, and because all children are beautiful in the eyes of their parent.

Also, there’s a reason why the mass adopted plastic, monobloc, stackable chair design is worldwide common and is studied as a cornerstone of design.

The remaining issue is that even an AI-generated UI needs considerable UX input in order to work well, especially when you have to fit it around domain specific knowledge, use-cases, and prior art. Is it for power users or not? All that.

At risk of shifting the goalposts on what I originally said, unique here isn't meant to mean quirky or weird but, simply, something that hasn't been done before, or hasn't been done as effectively.

This is the challenge for B2B startups that are switching to LLM-based development and are trying to offer more than the reselling of cloud compute at a markup with specialised functionality, because AI turns SaaS into a sexy version of MS Access.

Exactly. If I am making a tool, I want the users mental energy to be spent on their domain, not bespoke weirdness of my ui choices.

> It's that the people making enterprise software have terrible taste and can't even see (I am convinced) that the thing they built is ugly and hard-to-use.

Generally the issue with enterprise is that its designed to appeal to the stakeholders who will make the purchasing decision, not the person who is actually going to use it. The people making it may have great taste and know damn well what they could do to make it more usable, but if a clean and easy tool doesn't match someone's preconceived notion of what the purchaser thinks the tool ought to look like then it's not going to fly.

Sort of. At the moment there is a fad of websites that mess with your scrolling and have very low content density. They are all trying to imitate Apple's marketing pages. Most startup websites do this. It's not at all good design, it's user-hostile, but it's trendy and popular right now.

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> if this was a real problem large companies faced it would have been solved in software already.

Good for everybody who isn't a large company then?

AI can already generate music and it stands out a mile both in terms of the lyrical content and how middle of the road it all is. People will create some slop on Suno and lip-sync to it on TikTok because they absolutely don't sound like a thousand country singers blended into one.

So it's competent, for sure, but that is damning it with faint praise.

It's a legitimate boon for throwing together little internal apps, mind.

I can slap something together with Claude over a few evenings to fill a gap on tooling, or I can wrestle with Jira and CI and all that to tie things together with their own integrations.

No thanks, I'll just take the API keys and build on top, to my exact specifications, and the interface will be passable even if it needs a lot of polish. Tailwind has worked wonders for that.

UI Design is an art. Like any other art, it's bound to have constant currents and counter currents. More than the designer's whims, it's the population's need for novelty, generational differences, and the desire of companies to stand out what is driving the wheel.

The early web was filled with wacky and unique websites and it's a ubiquitously loved period of the internet.

What's great is I can take what you just said now and use it as context when generating my new DESIGN.md system and making sure it doesn't look like any of the other stuff. Thank you! Superpowers will show me all the options in their built-in visual companion when brainstorming. :)

This aestethic is useful though for SaaS apps and the like that know themselves to be generic.

Most companies I’ve worked at still use bootstrap or something that looks very much like it for most internal web tools

By the nature of LLMs, there's no reason to think it would.