There's no shame in being homogenous and obvious, though.

If I'm building out an internal tool for, say, a hospital lawyer to search through malpractice lawsuits, I want my tool to be the most familiar, obvious, least-surprising UI/UX possible. Just stay out of the way and do what it's supposed to do.

The trick is, of course, that the human is still responsible for knowing when homogenous is fine, or when there's real value in the presentation. If you're making a website for, say, a VST plugin for musicians, your site may need to have a little more "pizzazz" to make your product more attractive to the target audience.

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).

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.