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Comment by usaphp | Hacker News Reader

> "Designers are ruining software in general. iTunes, the iOS music app, and Google Maps are just a few pieces of software that started out relatively usable"

Did it ever occurs to you that they had far less functionality when these examples were created? Backend programmers kept piling functionality into these apps and at some point no matter how good a designer is it just gets overwhelmed.

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> Backend programmers kept piling functionality into these apps and at some point no matter how good a designer is it just gets overwhelmed.

Wow that's the first time I have heard the problem phrased this way. Usually it's the other way around -- the designers and product leads want to pile on so many features and the backend devs can't keep up, so the codebase turns into a rotten pile of shit.

I don't think thats actually true. Designers are mostly very good at not adding too much because it goes against their aesthetic mission.

What you are talking about is product people or product owners not designers.

Do you think it's the product people asking for grey fonts on a light grey background? (What the article is saying).

> Designers are mostly very good at not adding too much because it goes against their aesthetic mission.

That's what's fashionable today (or yesterday? I can't keep up), but it hasn't always been the case.

Can you elaborate? When wasn't it been the case?

For the last 20 years I have been doing this it was the case. Before that too.

So not sure what you are referring to.

~10 years ago UX was all about adding animations, glow effects and colors as hints to the user. Colors are still used (but much more sparingly) and animations and glow effect have fallen out of fashion.

Not sure what you are talking about.

You sure you are not confusing campaign sites with actual digital tools and resources? It's never been a trend by designers to want to overcomplicate the design. The strive for whitespace runs so deep in most designers that you simple don't get the used car salesman mentality where every little pixel left untouched is one to much.

Not confusing it with campaign sites, I'm talking business/productivity apps.

It's entirely possible my experience was atypical, the I did a lot of reading about UX at the time and this seems to be what the "best practice" was at the time.

So if a dialog was shown the best way to do it was to have the dialog expand from the clicked element for instance. Now dialog's are frowned upon.

How that story goes seem to be a cultural thing depending on the org culture. I've seen places where the loop goes:

1. BizDev and/or Sales identify a feature set that would enable a deal or broaden the market suitability.

2. Dev team tasked with adding feature XYZ.

3. Designer brought in to figure out how to add the feature to the UI with minimal effort.

4. Repeat.

I think this version is much more common in enterprise software and less so in mass consumer stuff. As we all know, enterprise software is unsexy and not worthy of YC/Startup culture. High touch sales also favors fewer deals with more customer leverage and really fat commissions for sales people.

Yup. I don't know how many times we've shoe-horned in a feature because it is a "must-have" for some prospective customer, and they either don't end up purchasing, or they purchase, but the must-have feature never gets used. It lingers on, forever, in ratty old functions and crufted-up database tables, and cognitive load.

I've been at a few companies that have failed because they were letting customers design their product. As in sales reps would meet with customers who would buy the product if we added x, y and z which they found absolutely critical.

Customers don't have to consider things like applicability to other customers, stability, performance or maintenance.

I've been involved in a handful of projects that fell into a situation were UI development was much slower than backend development.

Specifically, one was primarily a visualization tool. It was trivial to add various data transformations. However, the UI to render and interact with any one of those transformations would take substantially longer.

There was a lot of functionality added so to address this, they reduced the contrast of all the fonts? Nope. A more likely story is, as they added more functionality they delegated what could have done by people with less skills than a programmer because there are not enough of them. The end result is the people who care about well something works are just working on the program. The rest of the hangers on are trying to make their mark by using uber cool typography. I'll be the first to admit the lighter fonts look cool but they don't help you with your real job.

I haven't seen any new functionality in iTunes or Google Maps in years. I'm sure there are new features, but the basics have been the same for going on a decade now. Seems like they are just redesigning the UI to piss people off, just like every other clueless company out there. If you can't figure out how to make a clean map or music player interface, you're not a designer.

This. It's just UI churn, and it's miserable. My wife /hates/ it when I do an OS update, because she has to re-learn how to do the same stuff.

I doubt that was the case. I'm not familiar with those specific cases, but typically in my experience when the padding increases, the usability and feature count drop exponentially.

iTunes 12.0 was the worst update to the iTunes UI ever, and its only new feature was support for Family Sharing, which is mostly a backend/store feature. It was 100% a pointless UI overhaul.

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