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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

The fundamental challenge I have with UX and UX people is that there's clearly a lot of really important, useful stuff in the discipline, mixed with a lot of nonsense. And I've been burned a few times by those who tell a good story to susceptible executives and utterly waste time and resources to justify their own existence.

I wish there were better resources for non UX people like me to learn how to tell the difference.

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What you describe is true in any area, including software developers.

You could just start learning about UX. It’ll make you a better engineer!

I think you're partly right that it is true in any area. But I don't think it's equally true in every area, and I think that UX lends itself a bit more to subjective artsyness than software development.

But I generally agree with your sentiment; you can absolutely find "just trust me" in software development. You can also probably smell it out better by learning about it more.

If you do want to stay away from the “artsy” side, search for “usability engineering” and “interaction design”.

You’ll find a lot more about empirically driven methods to evaluate your UI, mostly from a productivity perspective. I personally find it fascinating!

> more to subjective artsyness than software development.

You would think so, but the amount of 'developer superstition' and and 'gut feeling' I've faced in development is quite high.

When UX veers away from research and data it gets nasty. I think the situation you're describing is something that happens when their isn't full buy in from the stake holders on the value of that research

I do, too. It’s a growing field, and it’s much more muddy than dev. Give us time.

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