Engineers Build Ugly Products

Reducing a task graph is exactly the role that I'd expect a UX Engineer to be perfect at, and yet the article is titled "Engineers Build Ugly Products" while going on to state exactly the expected benefit of having a UX Engineer deeply involved with the product team -- reduced tasks, focused functionality.

Where this kind of thinking blows back on real decisions is when someone says, "Look, I know how you engineers think..." suffixed by some opinion completely drawn from the realm of speculation. Subscribe to such thinking if you want to arbitrarily override the work of your best modelers.

The absolute worst kinds of push-back are fueled by identity politics statements like these bait into. You wake up in a conversation about prioritizing core value and someone pushes on wanting to change the color of the drapes and calls the entire engineering team anti-design like we don't get anything outside of text-highlighting in our code editors. It's infuriating.

Flat design, invisible scroll bars, the modern 'hamburger' menu, absence of menu bar, unnecessarily dynamic UI elements, hidden swipeable menus, etc all serve their role as annoyances that I have to explain to people who were already familiar with, and productive in the old UI paradigm.

Engineers from time to time build beautiful products by themeselves, but most people don't care to understand the beauty of an underlying complex system. The mathematics and design behind a bridge or traffic lights are immense, as is the number of different engineering disciplines involved.

The site that everytime you visit throws a javascript popup and make the experience on your mobile horrible? Yeah, it isn't built by an engineer and probably whοever build it didn't decide upon the popup himself. Techcrunch's site loads assets from 93 different domains. I don't know of a single engineer who would build something like that.

Engineers are every bit as capable – if not more capable – as learning design as any other person who wasn't "born with it" (which I haven't seen to be a requirement). But, since most of their energy is going towards one type of thinking, it diverts cognitive resources from doing another type of thinking.

Engineering requires logical thinking, whereas design requires that you be able to let your brain go quiet and let your unconscious take over for a little bit. From what I've seen, once engineers have seen a logical way of understanding what makes a good design, they have a framework on which to bind logical thinking to their experiences with design, and iteratively progress.

(P.S. I think this article could just as easily be called "designers make unusable products.")

I've seen plenty of management decisions where, instead of making a choice which will apply to all users, management decides to make it yet another check box buried in the preferences section of an application.

It takes a week or two before Mgt settles on whether it should be on or off. If 90% of users want off, then off it is.

Then two months down the road, the 10% that like it on now want to extend the feature a bit more. And with that, the process repeats, another check box is nested.

Before long, you're left with a management designed, byzantine architecture of wheels and knobs and checkboxes everywhere.

It's not just us engineers doing it :)

This seems like a grand overgeneralization from someone who hasn't done much engineering.

There are a lot of us who enjoy the challenge of working within the constraints of an existing codebase.

1) Lack of design abilities 2) Lack of understanding of how 'average' users use computers 3) Using the system model and architecture to drive the UI model. 4) Engineers have decades of experience debugging and learning all sorts of complicated software products and languages. They are experts in figuring out how complex systems with no documentation or learnability work. Average users just want to get work done and have no ability to diagnose and debug.

Stop blaming wrong people.

The more interesting twist of the story would be to turn it around - what does it turn out like when designers code?

All in all, I think we have to accept that people are different and we need both designers, programmers and ux-ppl to make a product that works, looks good and is useable.

The history of pretty products in consumer electronics isn't that good. Olivetti products from the 1960s and 1970s can be found in art museums, but were never in many offices. Bang and Olufsen consumer electronics are works of art, and designers admire their work, but the unreadable black on black buttons introduced made the devices almost unusable. Apollo Computer's workstations were much prettier than Sun's. NCR and Wang had nicer looking personal computers than IBM. Apple currently sells a desktop computer in a round can, just to be different, but it's overpriced for the performance.

Clean simplicity in design has its uses. There's a current tendency towards very spare products. This is recent. Now that we have more complexity than we know what to do with, the problem is hiding it. Compare, for example, an 80's boom box.[1] There, complexity was a status symbol. There's still some of that in automotive interiors. Read Lutz's "Car Guys vs. Bean Counters" book for a sense of how that industry thinks. What sells cars is quite different from what makes cars work well.

It's useful for engineers to have some sense of design. And vice versa. When you're in SF, go through SFMOMA[2] and look through the industrial design section. Their web site demonstrates a classic failure of design to consider functionality. The museum is closed for remodeling until May 2016, but their home page does not mention this.

[1] https://messageinabottleblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/boo... [2] https://www.sfmoma.org/

> The short answer: The most interesting part of an engineer‘s job is the obsession with the possibilities in the solution space (all the cool stuff you can make computers do); engineers don’t want to make choices that limit power and flexibly (a design); engineers value adding potential functionality higher than removing unneeded complexity; engineers want to engineer their way out of design problems.

"Oh you want to do this? FUCK YOU, I'm the designer and I've removed that option. There is now literally no way for you to do what you want unless you hex edit the binary."

I think that when it comes to usability (and maybe even empathy) that some engineers are more talented than others. And even then there are some engineers who may not have that talent, but have an understanding that user interface design is important part of a product design.

The same also applies to other team members involved in software (from beta testers to those who do marketing): Some understand engineering better than others.

“Star had many fewer commands than today's systems, and it didn't do it by having fewer functions; it just had fewer commands.” — Dave Smith, Xerox Star human factors designer, in the ‘Final Demo’ https://youtu.be/_OwG_rQ_Hqw

Product people driving design without input from engineers will get you a pretty site that will look and feel about the same as what is already out there.

Do they? I see he sites no examples or evidence. I presume some do and some don't.

He doesn't; likely because being a designer isn't highly appreciated (with the monies).