UX Is a Canary in a Coal Mine | Hacker News Reader

UX Is a Canary in a Coal Mine

blog.growth.supply

35 pointskathliu52 comments

I don't get it, design is important but not nearly as important as engineering to any organization. All of these hipsters today in our industry doing design seem to think they are the most important, but the truth is they aren't.

I got news for you, Google has one bar and one button and was built by engineers and is the most successful company in the world of software. Facebook had a shit design and UI and became the leading social network. Microsoft never gave a shit about design and did great.

In the end engineers build great high tech organizations and it's especially true and even more important than ever today.

Fuck design, its like icing on the cake. Without a good cake the icing won't make you eat shit. It's not that important what's important is to get a product out, you should learn code it up and see if it's any good worry about hiring the hipsters when you're rolling in the dough.

EDIT: In the end I'm saying I disagree that having designers is a sign of anything in a good software company as the article seems to stipulate.

I agree with you. "Photoshop-designers" can only export their PSDs and that's it.

I can actually build and design it. If the design isn't satisfactory, I can.... wait for it.. actually iterate on it.

In fact, if I had another engineer instead of a photoshop-monkey we could iterate twice as fast on either device or browser.

Absolutely.

My designers keep asking for "pair design" sessions with me, where I open chrome inspector and "tweak" things for them.

So goddamn irritating.

Just learn to fucking write some html, js, and css or go back to print design... if it still exists.

If they are your designers, it might be time to engineer a better hiring system.

They are not "my" designers.

The design department is managed separately from the Engineering department. I have no control over their tooling, hiring practices, or deliverables.

UX degee level graduate here, had too many interviews in which an interest and ability to write code was seen as a detriment to the design process because they thought it detracted from the ability to design as a 'dumb user'. And because the people interviewing had no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned anything 'engineering'. Some of these people had no idea how the Internet works or how to make a simple web page. And yes, I have do have chip on my shoulder about it, because many UX people are self-taught and have little idea about what UX is either, they just keep churning out "i think" "solutions" that never get tested.

I read excuses here.

Excuses how? Because I didn't get that particular job? I work, I do code and I do UX. There are a great many people in UX who are not trained in UX. Given what the article was about, would you trust an untrained person to make key decisions about your product, or would you rather have someone quallified as in the rest of the IT industry?

Not sure what you are replying to, you were too vague.

Same, did undergrad and masters in HCI at top 30 schools. Love design and love coding. The industry needs more people like us on design teams. Don't be jaded, the graphic designers who claim to be UX designers/researchers that don't understand statistics/how software products are built will not survive for long in the future as tech takes over the world

Would be happy to work with you sometime, people with an eye for design that can actually build their designs are worth their weight in gold.

I find that most UX people I work with rely way to heavily on A/B testing. A/B testing is a great tool to get to the perfect UI, but when you are A/B testing every feature because you have no idea what works and what doesn't it becomes a huge waste of my time.

Microsoft's lack of interest in UX is well on its way to killing Windows. In fact every previous version of Windows and Office from 3.1 onwards had a lot of UX/usability/design input.

Google care so little about design they've just spent the last few years trying to get everyone to use their Material guidelines, and Google's doodles are legendary.

Facebook is a lost cause, so I'll give you that.

UX isn't just user experience - it's customer experience. And if your customer experience is bad, you don't have customers for long.

You can deal with this with hyper-aggressive bully and thug marketing and legal lock-ins. And as a plan, that totally works - until it doesn't any more.

Good UX is cheaper and creates less friction for everyone.

Ultimately, it's just much easier to deal with customers who don't hate you or your products.'

I couldn't disagree more sir.

Microsoft just started giving a shit about design with all the flat stuff and clearly it's failing harder than ever. They should focus on engineering and solving hard engineering problems more than ever if they want to survive, not design.

Google does now seem to care about design but its core product still has one input box and button and that's still the main way they make all of their money, and engineers still run that organization. They hired the hipsters when they made their money.

In the end design is not indicative of shit in high tech companies, I think my opinion is valid.

I think your opinion is misguided and it comes across as immature. Design can be indicative of a variety of important things, like a company's commitment to its users/customers. Google's simple search experience was a conscious design decision that helped it stand out and build a following early on. Although Facebook has changed considerably, when it first launched, it was a design inspiration compared to MySpace. For all the dismissing you do of design, it's interesting that, at least with these two examples, you've picked companies that made very smart and very conscious design decisions early on, helping them rocket to the success stories they are today. For pioneering companies that are tackling hard engineering problems and bringing these breakthroughs to the public, I would agree that design might not be as important initially. This is one of the advantages of being first to market with something people want. You get to set the bar and you can get away with a lot of things (Although it's not an example of breakthrough tech and more an example of a first mover advantage, Snapchat's UX is horrible [it has improved!] but since they popularized disappearing content, users were willing to deal with a poor user experience.). As markets mature, as technology spreads, or as established players attempt to enter new markets (Google with Google+), it can be harder to stand out on engineering alone unless you continue to push boundaries and break new ground (Hangouts!), but even then, it might not be enough (Hangouts...). In other words, in scenarios where technology is getting commoditized, you could argue that design (how it looks and feels) can become even more important than engineering (how it's built). Is the iPhone's success due more to it's revolutionary engineering or it's thoughtful design? (Personally, I think it's both + brilliant marketing, but you get my point).

I'd disagree with both you, I use all 3 of the most publicized OSes on a daily basis and I don't see MS as laggig. My experience is this:

Linux is improving on a daily basis (but there are too many DEs/WMs which adds to barriers of entry for new users [1].

OS X has dropped the ball, I see too many services being pushed that I do not want and they are getting in the way of me using my Mac.

Windows are actually ahead of the times. The every device with one OS was such a good idea on paper, but they jumped the gun. It's the legacy windows support that hold them back. The lack of start menu in Win8 is a priime example, it wouldn't have mattered if everyone had gone over to touchscreens on Jan 1 2014, but they didn't.

[1] Recently the good people at Bodhi Linux forked E17 calling the fork Moksha, because they want stability over new features, I would have preferred Jeff and the team to contribute to Enlightenment, but that would mean the Enlightenment team would need ears and continued support of E17. Now I'm not sure I want to swap my DE to Moksha or just keep using E19, forking is the FOSS plague, and its saviour.

> Microsoft's lack of interest in UX is well on its way to killing Windows. In fact every previous version of Windows and Office from 3.1 onwards had a lot of UX/usability/design input.

Please don't state that Apple does a better job. Please don't be one of those UX guys.

Good UX comes from good performance. Everything else is subjective.

If it's sluggish, buggy and anything else that the Engineers usually deal with, it doesn't matter how Material their design is.

The design can be iterated on and experimented with as long as you can ship. A psd isn't shipping.

You can have the quickest, cleanest backend in the world, but if it's laid out badly at the frontend, it doesn't matter.

I remember having to use a SAP-like bit of software called MFG/Pro years ago. It was reasonably quick to perform any action, but the workflow was baroque. In order to consume a part from stores, no matter how trivial (a washer? a nylon screw?), in addition to actual data entry, I had to click 'next' 27 times and 'back' about 6 times, and at the right points in the workflow or it would have to start over. Literally 27 times, working through various inventory wizard screens. It was the poster child for bad UX.

The same company's paid support patch process went like this: we give you credentials to the FTP site, and it's up to you to check it for updates. No, we won't send you an email when this happens.

Similarly, good design can make up for mediocre engineering. It's really not as black-and-white as you're painting.

> The design can be iterated on and experimented with...

All you're arguing here is that engineers should do design. Do you think it's likely that an engineer (at an equivalent salary no less) would be better than a designer at design? Outside of small start-ups, your argument holds no water unless you want to say division of labor should be avoided.

> ...as long as you can ship.

You don't need a shippable product to learn and develop. Iteration and experimentation can be done more efficiently with design methods such as prototyping. Why should an engineer build something before gathering evidence that it will work?

Proper design is about melding form and function. You're just talking about 'form' designers, who would be better termed as artists.

You're also just grabbing Microsoft and Google as being designer-free in their successful years, which is patent nonsense.

> In the end engineers build great high tech organizations

Again, nonsense. Engineers alone did not make Apple the behemoth it is today. The designers made their unusual products desirable. And the Apple marketing cohort never get their props for the incredible job they did in making a computer company funky. Then there are props to the Apple staff who did magic with their supply chain. You think engineers are the most essential part of a great company? Try to run a company when your business folk can't close a deal to save themselves. History is littered with superior engineering designs that failed in the marketplace. Doesn't matter how good your engineers are if their stuff doesn't sell.

Frankly, fuck this "my job is more important than yours" dick-swinging competition. In today's economic-rationalising environment, few jobs aren't essential.

My point is today, more than ever, engineers are essential.

Design is not and the article misses that point and is using design as a gauge for a companies health. That's not accurate, anyway that's my opinion.

Also it's not just google and Microsoft. It's every other high tech company being Bourne today. Engineering lead organizations are much more likely to succeed.

Part of what you're missing is that designers are closer to the user than engineers usually are, and the article relies on that link. I did support for many years, and I am very aware of the disconnect between what non-customer-contact engineers think users want, and what users actually want. Your customer-contact staff are an excellent barometer to the mood of your users, because they're actually looking at what's going on. And in the case of support and sales staff, they're at the pointy end.

And of course engineers are essential to a high-tech company. It's like saying lawyers are essential to a legal firm. But in a lot of tech companies, the engineers are insulated from users, or are even dismissive or abusive of them.

Also, the biggest tech company in the world was led from near-bankruptcy to "more cash than the USA" by not an engineer, not a designer, but a business guy. To make a great company - google, microsoft, whatever, you need hardcore business folks that can play the game hard at the highest level. Having a clean engineering setup is nowhere near enough.

Oh you get get it. Closing that loop between what the customer thinks they want, what they actually need, what the engineers can provide and at what cost, so so so important. I'd agree with the article, having the UX guys (or any keep team) dispirited is a bad sign. For companies with some sort of monopoly this stuff can continue indefinitely. Companies that don't have some sort of market power usually are a few years or quarters from death when you see this stuff.

Wholeheartedly agree. I see some people here would benefit from reading, 'The Inmates Are Running the Asylum' by Alan Cooper.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/0672...

It's not "my job is more important than yours", but instead "I'm doing my job AND yours."

What a load of horse shit. No one said design is more important than engineering, rather that software without ux research and design will never be successful in the long run. Look around man, design is the key differentiator. Any engineer can spin up your software in the cloud as a startup and leverage intuitive design to undercut you. You are on hackernews, no one is arguing that engineers are less important than designers. Engineers don't do ethnographic field work to realize how users intuitively prefer to interact with a system in any given industry.

Graphic designers mocking up PSDs are useless. A UX team with designers and researchers are worth their weight in gold and bring immense value to the SDLC by helping the dev teams validate their designs against user mental models early on in the product development life cycle.

And if you think I'm talking out of my ass, here is a voice of authority: Alan Cooper, “Father of Visual Basic," with his book 'The Inmates Are Running the Asylum'

http://www.amazon.com/The-Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/0672...

"The Inmates are Running the Asylum argues that, despite appearances, business executives are simply not the ones in control of the high-tech industry. They have inadvertently put programmers and engineers in charge, leading to products and processes that waste huge amounts of money, squander customer loyalty, and erode competitive advantage. They have let the inmates run the asylum. Alan Cooper offers a provocative, insightful and entertaining explanation of how talented people continuously design bad software-based products. More importantly, he uses his own work with companies big and small to show how to harness those talents to create products that will both thrill their users and grow the bottom line."

I highly suggest you step off your pedestal and read this book. If not, enjoy creating your architecturally efficient, crappy software that is a pain for actual humans to use.

Visual Basic was awful to work with.

No, it was pretty much unique in 1991.

Visual Basic 1.0 was definitely a product that "thrilled users and grew the bottom line", as Alan Cooper puts it.

I was out of the mainstream by 1991, but I seem to remember a bunch of completely failed projects and companies as people tried to switch to windows development using C++. As in we put our best programmers on it, hired extra help, they failed and the company went down.

Projects using Visual Basic fared a lot better.

Listen man the best UI and UX comes from not having the stuff get in your way.

Once could argue that the best UI/UX is UI and UX that gets out of your way, that is UI that is none at all. If we could interface with our machines without UI/UX and through some other means like thoughts or electrical impulses that would be the best UI/UX there is.

And anyway, I'm not arguing against research or against UX, I am arguing against the fact that the article is alluding something not true, that design is the gauge of a high tech companies health. The idea that those researchers are finding out anything that a few engineers can't find and iterate over is nonsense.

I can't argue with your logic because I suspect that there is a fundamental lack of understanding of the field of Human Computer Interaction and User Centered Design.

Please read up on this for a more productive discussion as I'm genuinely not trying to argue with you: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_experience_design

> Listen man the best UI and UX comes from not having the stuff get in your way.

You should spend some time reading Emotional Design [1].

Only amateurs to design think it is all about usability and minimizing complexity.

The real ROI from a talented designer is a product that creates an emotional connection with the user. Just look at Apple products: people attach their identity to the products - that's how powerful the design of the product can be.

The design (which includes the technical capabilities) can extend beyond just a simple tool providing utility to something which is a memorable pleasant experience - which you want to keep using.

Companies you can achieve the above are the ones who are incredibly successful i n the tech industry. Design is not always obvious - so people easily miss the cause/effect. And achieving it is not all about a flashy gradient or trendy flat design. It's a complex extremely well thought-out user experience. Take a phone's UX for example, from opening the package, to how it's used daily, to the times you need to plug it in while half-asleep next to your bed.

None of that can be summarized as just "getting out of your way", it's about providing the best experience as a result of optimizing the hundreds of small interactions involved in using the product.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Design-Love-Everyday-Things/...

> Microsoft never gave a shit about design and did great.

How wrong you are! When did Windows make its big leap forward in usability and popularity? Windows 95. Why was it a big leap forward? Because Microsoft poured massive amounts of resources into studying user interaction and rethinking everything to improve the user experience, both for the novice and the pro.

I think you are confusing Graphic Design with UX -- Just using your first example, Google has an awesome UX. One field, one button, and everything is about the results. Its simplicity is its design. UX is not about how pretty a site is... it is about how smooth of an experience the end user receives.

UX is required for success. You can have the best engineering in the world, but if your customers don't understand your product, cannot work with it, or get frustrated by it, all that beautiful elegant code means nothing. Products need to solve a problem, not add new pain to existing problems.

That does not mean that engineering is less important. Trying to put one above the other is like answering whether the chicken or the egg came first. They are two components that complement each other.

Your first paragraph about Google having great UX, one button one form.

That was built by engineers not by designers or by UX guys who do "research".

So my argument stands.

The best UI/UX is the type that gets out of your way. That is If there was a way to do away with UI and Ux all together and simply control our machines with thoughts or electrical impulses that would be the best UI and UX there is. Engineers know this that all of that stuff just gets in your way, and if they don't know it they quickly learn it through seeing their users interact with their software.

We don't need a bunch of people standing around doing "research" telling us that.

I would argue that the UX was designed by engineers with a solid sense of what they wanted and what the customer would want. Whether Larry and Sergey were aware of it or not, they were acting as a designer. I've seen many engineers with exceedingly poor design sense.

For instance, a valid choice for Google would have been to clutter the landing page with advanced search options or ancillary material as so many of its contemporaries did. In this case, I would argue that the engineer was skilled at a small set of design tasks.

For what it's worth, I'm an engineer, but I'm close friends with designers.

Exactly. The uncluttered search experience was very much a user-centered design decision and it was indicative of the fact that Google valued my needs as a user.

You have a huge chip on your shoulder, geez. Your argument is missing some logic. The engineers at Google are building from UX design specs.

"if they don't know it they quickly learn it through seeing their users interact with their software."

Engineers don't do ethnographic research to avoid these problems in the first place. Why subject users to painful workflows when UX teams can solve these issues early on in the SDLC and save the dev teams from doing MORE work later on fixing these usability issues?

Google has been performing A/B testing on its design since 18 months after it launched. If you go look through archive.org, you'll see that the UX has been tweaked over the years, adding fields to the home page early on for language options, removing it later, tweaking how many links show on the front page, moving options around, etc.

If you think 15 years of UX tweaks, driven by A/B testing, is not research, then please clarify what kind of research you are arguing against?

"""We don't need a bunch of people standing around doing "research" telling us that.""" As an engineer I very much disagree with this sentiment. I usually prefer to base my decisions on quantitative methods. Sure you can say "it's obvious that design should get out of the way". Even if I agree with you I'd still prefer to run some tests using actual data instead of taking your word for it.

> That was built by engineers not by designers or by UX guys who do "research"

Except that what Google did was look at existing search engines and think 'how can we differentiate?' and the result was an (originally) ad-free, no links to other services site. They stripped all the bad design from thier industry competitors and left a service in which the new or naive user was in no doubt about what to do there. No distractions, no fiddling, no - anything except full focus on Google Search.

The search results are what you get after you use the search functionality, that those results were good could be argued as secondary to what got users to switch from Yahoo, Ask Geeves etc in the first place.

I started writing this before seeing other comments but I guess I'll finish it - Design is much more of a case-by-case issue than you seem to be making it, and in many cases it's definitely just as important as the engineering.

Going with your icing on the cake analogy, design isn't just the icing, but arguably the plate and utensil you're given to eat the cake. You could bake a top-notch cake, but if you're given a piece of paper and a hair curler as utensils, you'll have quite the shitter of a cake-eating experience.

What I mean/what I'm sure you've heard before/what design school students pay $160k in tuition to learn is that the purpose of design isn't its artistic aspects of making something pretty, it's meant more to facilitate the process of using a product.

And not to be an ass, but I'd say all three of your examples are shit, design was a huge driving factor in each of their success. Google's one bar/one button was a stark contrast to Yahoo trying to corral the entire internet onto their homepage. Facebook's design/UI might look shit in retrospect, but that uniform layout was definitely the primary reason for the mass migration from MySpace's load time hell of profiles littered with clipart and whiny post-punk/emo set to autoplay. Microsoft has made some of the ugliest shit known to mankind, but its core product is literally named after its design, giving users "Windows" so they can spend less time fucking everything up in DOS.

In regards to your edit, though, I definitely agree. So much of the design process can end up being determined at the engineer or executive level to the point where evaluating the design team to gauge a company's health is just identifying the turd polishers. And "design team morale" is such a god damn stupid and difficult thing to evaluate since it might be the result of any number of misleading or erroneous factors ranging from the soda machine running out of Pepsi to the team itself being a tight-knit group of lazy incompetents who interview well.

Your mental model of designers seems to be "people that make stuff pretty". In the field of software development that's typically not even the most important part of a designer's job. The post specifically mentions HCI. They typically help you A/B test you stuff and are very data oriented and use quantitative methods. The user centered design process (one example being ISO 9241-210) focuses on the user and users' needs. They typically can crank out prototypes (that you can interact with) at a great pace which helps a ton with testing all sorts of hypotheses about your product.

That seems really valuable. Especially since they usually can make stuff pretty as well ;)

Author is not talking about "design" - he is talking about "UX design". Totally different beast. Former is, well, design, while the latter is how user experiences your product or service.

As a UXer, here's my 2 cents:

"Design team morale is a leading indicator for a company’s design health. Are the designers in the company positive and happy, or do they complain about feeling disempowered or disenfranchised?"

It's a bad sign when ANY entire team in the organization has low morale and is feeling disenfranchised, whether they are the design team, engineering team, or business team.

"If designers are not happy, it likely reflects larger issues with the company that impact current and future products under development. Moreover, if designers are not happy, it’s really hard for them to create a joyful experience."

No so. Designers are never happy. We are always striving to do better and to improve the customer experience. The fact that the experience is not the best that it could be drives us to do more.

"It’s incumbent upon the design leader and CEO to rally the team to see the opportunity ahead and be excited about delivering it."

The leaders need to be respected by the team in order to have the ability to rally them. In my experience, it's best to have the respected leaders talk to their teams rather than having a lead designer try to motivate a team of engineers, for example.

Overall, I think this article is a lot of complaining about designers not having enough respect in a company. From my experience, if you want respect, you have to earn it by showing that you can deliver value, not by whining that the environment is not optimal. Good UX designers are able to see inefficiencies and design a better way, both for the customers and for their own work processes.

Its also the leading indicator of your companies financial heath. Typicaly "designers" get cut before engineers. IF they fire the designers and the UX people, odds are your next.

You look at the top classified ad site(craigslist), and it's pretty clear how important design really is.

One might argue that the look and feel of craigslist matches its use. It also had a great first-mover advantage and vacuumed up all the mindshare for classifieds very early on. It's hard to compete with that, even with a shiny well tested design.

A lot of the comments here are pointing out outliers that succeeded due to reasons such as first mover advantage combined with network effects. In more competitive spaces, design still matters.

"I do UX at startup.io"

translated

"I read design articles and tell developers what they already know."

Design team morale is a leading indicator for a company's design health.

Yes, and in fact the title contradicts the main thesis of the article -- UX is a "trailing indicator", UX Team morale is a leading indicator.

I'm curious to know how many people who've interviewed have received honest feedback about the current situation at the company.

Most people don't know how bad it is, until they're in the job, unless you know someone who works there outside the interview.

Morale can be a leading indicator but the honesty/transparency required to actually capture the indicator is somewhat difficult

Reply on news.ycombinator.com