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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

> Designers fundamentally do not understand that software is a tool that people use to get things done.

I find this point of view - that designers are inferior to developers - to be incredibly condescending and yet very typical of HN. I'm a developer, and I would hate to work with you or someone who holds this view point. You seem like poison in a development team.

Regardless of whether you meant or not, that's what I see here. A bunch of developers telling designers that their bad at their job, that the devs know better than them, and devs know how to tell designers to do their jobs.

> I am sick to death of learning this iteration of a file manager or settings menu, dock, or toolbar.

You're literally just making stuff up. Apple, probably the most infamous capricious design company, hasn't changed their File manager, settings menu, dock, or toolbar in 19 years.

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Full stack dev : he didn't say they are inferior but that in his point of views most designers don't understand their design should conceived as a tool. Now that's discussable as it changes from project to project. A promotional website shouldn't be forcefully seen as a tool but cool be seen as a augmented poster. Now I understand his point of view when he says that designer use too much icons language, without any text Intel on it. I'd add to it that web.dev asks to use and display label on every input. Even tough they might have placeholders.

And no HN people are nice, it's just a matter of understanding the subtilities we might all disagree on.

Ps : a bas php.

No, lets be clear here. OP said that Designers fundamentally do not understand their job, how OP "hates UIs and [..] UI designers" and how much they know better.

What OP is talking about is how sometimes there is bad design, in exactly the same way there is bad code, and using that to extrapolate out to an entire discipline. Imagine seeing someone's shitty very first Visual Basic project and just declaring that all developers fundamentally don't understand their jobs.

Sorry but being clear here only provides an answer to who might be right to an internet argument. Nobody is really right, I understood what he meant and I might not agree with all of it but still take valueable feedback. You could do as well by avoiding the troll discussion. It's not because someone is literally crying in pain because of his team's cursy bad work that you got to end his opinion on the least interesting part.. It's only an opinion.

> I find this point of view - that designers are inferior to developers - to be incredibly condescending and yet very typical of HN. I'm a developer, and I would hate to work with you or someone who holds this view point. You seem like poison in a development team.

It's not about skills, it's about goals.

There are roughly two main conflicting goals when building a product. One, make a product that delivers value to users. Two, make money off that product. In a perfect world, these two would be maximized simultaneously - leading to fair exchange of value between the customer and the provider. In the real world, people sacrifice the first in order to get more of the second.

UI/UX design as it is today is almost entirely about sacrificing utility to boost sales. All the trends parent commenters are complaining about exist to convince users to spend money by means other than delivering a useful product to them - be it by differentiation from others, by looking like popular players, by reducing functionality to make it look simpler when purchasing decision is made. Addiction-inducing design trends like timelines and notifications and loot boxes are a part of this too.

This is not failure of intelligence of individuals, this is a moral failure of the industry. And being on receiving end, as a software user, it's fucking annoying. So is being upstream from it, as a software developer doing their best to deliver value to user, only to see it shat upon because the organization adopts user-hostile design trends.

> UI/UX design as it is today is almost entirely about sacrificing utility to boost sales.

I think this statement is just about as true for design as it is for development.

It isn't, because development is upstream from UI/UX design. You can have a software product delivering value to end-user without UI design. Might not be pretty, but it'll do the job. Whereas you can't have a software product delivering value to users without development work. Moreover, it's the UI that's the direct point of contact with the user and the driver of sales, so the pressure to screw users over is higher there.

That's not to say developers don't make choices sacrificing utility for sales - they do, and I bitch about this here plenty (for instance: bloat, invasive telemetry, privacy-hostile solutions, addiction-generating mechanics). But it doesn't look like a trend that's essentially consumed the discipline.

> UI/UX design as it is today is almost entirely about sacrificing utility to boost sales.

I don't think this is true. Many undesirable qualities in modern design are due to a cult like belief in them by designers rather than just listening to users. Excessive use of white space in virtually all design being the most obvious one.

That's not generally because it boosts sales. It's because they've really drunk the kool aid that it's better.

> Many undesirable qualities in modern design are due to a cult like belief in them by designers rather than just listening to users. Excessive use of white space in virtually all design being the most obvious one.

IIRC, negative space is one of those things that lay users tend to think is unimportant or even undesirable as a design element, but every empirical study of usability/reasability shows that it is important, and that lacking it produces negative reaction to the end product even if users don't attribute the reaction to the missing negative space, and that this result has held up with online design but was well-known even in older studies of print design.

That's still just "looks prettier". Yes, there is a degree at which the design is so ugly it interferes with its intended function, but we've taken the opposite up to 11. Negative space in modern design constantly interferes with intended function. Take a listing on an on-line store. A design making copious use of negative space may look stunningly beautiful, but a design that just follows the Gestalt principles but otherwise crams in 5x the number of items on a screen will make it easier for the user to choose the right item to buy, and will consume less of their time.

(This is not an invented example; when I was building a PC recently, I wrote userstyles to remove most of the negative space in UI of a shop I was buying parts from, just to not be driven to madness when trying to compare prices and features among available components.)

> A bunch of developers telling designers that their bad at their job, that the devs know better than them

Another view on this is that a new set of designers suddenly deciding that the old set of designers were bad at their job and just doing it over can end up pretty terrible for users. Some stuff doesn't need to be disrupted, dammit!

> that designers are inferior to developers

My comment was ranty, but I did not say that.

But fundamentally, it is not about who is inferior. It's about who's subjecting whom to constant change, and who is not listening to whom.

The problem is that it isn't "the designers" versus the developers anyway. We're all a little of both. The problem is that the sum total of all the little changes, both cosmetic and fundamental causes a drift over time. You don't see it until the timescale is long enough. Eventually you drift so far that nothing is familiar. (case in point: last time I used Windows was Win2k. Windows 10 is nothing like it. I have no clue how to do anything, and it is hard as fuck to learn, because there isn't much in the way of all that ugly "text" to help me out. There's no manual, no printed documentation. You gotta google everything, or use the built in searches. )

I find all this really frustrating. I'm worse than a novice. I used to be good at this. Now I'm a dinosaur. I literally cannot use the tools that I was good at 10-20 years ago. While change is constant in modern life, software, and particularly The Web, have accelerated change to a point where we are, as I say in my OP, robbing ourselves of skillsets when using software as a tool.

I mean, talk to someone who used Excel for 15 years, like friends of mine in marketing positions. Every revision. Changes. New functionality, but scrambling the old. And then one day their corporate overloads mandate a switch to Google docs, which not only has way less functionality, but is also all different. It's constantly changing too. The damn thing scrambles itself every 6 months. Eventually, the unconscious brain unlearns what it knew. And, worse it learns that how it is now is not how it will be. The brain won't bother learning anymore. So we stop actually becoming experts. Because what's the point if it's gonna get scrambled in < 2 years anyway?

> You're literally just making stuff up. Apple, probably the most infamous capricious design company, hasn't changed their File manager, settings menu, dock, or toolbar in 19 years.

Mac is relatively stable in the core things (thank god for that!) but Windows definitely not, Linux definitely not, and the web is a total other animal. Mac also drifts a lot. Look at iTunes. But the one MacOS example in a sea of drifting, changing, usually breaking and getting worse, crapass apps isn't really worth much.

I'm going to play a bit of devil's advocate here.

When a developer adds a feature to an application, he/she generally reaches for the boring stock widgets in the UI library. It's a full time job just wiring together these components! You end up with an app that looks more or less like every other app. Good for usability, maybe bad for aesthetics.

When a designer adds a feature to an application, their mind is freed from the constraints of the toolbox. Their job is to imagine a better way! Their only constraint is Photoshop. You get... new ideas.

This is of course a cartoonish illustration of these roles, which overlap considerably. But I think there's a kernel of truth to it.

I see where you are coming from, but to play Devil's advocate: My understanding of Design Thinking is that the entire idea is that the people using a tool know better than the designers. Designers are supposed to interview them and develop a product that better meets their needs. Instead it seems like many designers make something that they think looks cool (e.g. the touch bar and ultra-thinness on Apple laptops) and expect the tool to adapt around it. It seems like in many cases (thin Mac-books, infinite scroll, UI animations) this actually makes the tool less well suited for the person using it.

You can test this directly by asking what piece of user feedback prompted small visual features of the design. If half or more of the design decisions have some kind of backing in experimental data (including interview/qualitative data, that counts too!) you're good. If almost nothing about the design can be directly tied back to experimental data, the designer has gone wrong.

I've worked at several places where the designers made a big show of interviewing/looking at data, but then could not incorporate any aspect of it into their designs. Unsurprisingly, their tools weren't used or appreciated.

"I find this point of view - that designers are inferior to developers"

The parent didn't make that point.

> Regardless of whether you meant or not, that's what I see here

> Regardless of whether you meant or not, that's what I see here. A bunch of developers telling designers that their bad at their job, that the devs know better than them, and devs know how to tell designers to do their jobs.

It's exactly the same with marketers. Or managers. Or anyone who isn't a developer for that matter.

A sentiment that I have seen quite often, and seen work out in practice, is that you can take a developer, and make them into a designer or a marketer or a manager. The reverse process goes much less well.

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