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Comment by emidoots | Hacker News Reader

I have had conversations with several "designers", some from FAANG, and all have held the general belief that having strong authority over how the UI looks and getting eye-candy at the cost of usability and ergonomics was 'without doubt the right choice'.

In my frank opinion, many designers hold a position of subjective judgement and thrive on the power that comes with that. This is like a developer making arbitrary decisions about a product because they like the technical implementation better.

Data, and actual user preference, should always be the key decider. Not some arbitrary rule-decider.

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Be careful with data-driven design, you can easily end up fooling yourself into seeing evidence in the metrics for whatever you want to be true, I've seen it happen plenty. Accidental p-hacking by well meaning but misguided "data driven" programmers is not at all uncommon.

Furthermore, in my experience the data doesn't necessarily mean what it's believed to mean, with the favored explanation for the data being assumed to be the correct explanation. (e.g. "We want more engagement. This data shows users are staying on this page longer, that's a measure of engagement." It may instead be a measure of your users getting confused, lost, etc.) My point here is that an earnest attempt to be data driven doesn't eliminate the matter of bias. Being cognizant of possible bias when evaluating the data is important, otherwise you'll have a false sense of confidence.

The danger with data is it can keep you trapped in a local maxima. Also there's the whole thing with a lot of users seeming to be more and more annoyed with telemetry.

THIS. So many people don't realize that true innovation cannot come from existing data.

Maybe, instead of either just declaring what is the "right" way or observing users like some kind of behavioural scientist, we could just go back to, I don't know, asking them.

Innovation comes from experimentation. It's useful to have hypotheses and quantitative/qualitative data to back the assumptions up or disprove them.

This is a subtle problem of incentives and information. The designer has the problem that the product will ship with only one of the possible designs. And the feedback process is patchy at best. There's no way to get a good overview of a bunch of forums where some people love it, but others hate this or that function.

What you can get feedback for is how eye popping or outrageous (no F keys!) your suggestions are. People in the office will react, and they are the ones who will decide what actually gets shipped.

Who could be right, the multiple designers who do this every day, or my opinion about data (which I don't see backed up by any data)? If Steve Jobs had followed user preference he'd have made a faster flip phone.

On another topic, putting someone's job into quotes just isn't a good look for any argument. If you have to straw man to get your point across, it might not be that great.

The reason I put air quotes around "designer" was to convey the fact that I believe _good_ designers would base their decisions on logic discovered via some form of the scientific method. Studying what makes user interfaces understandable, and why.

Data doesn't need to be "track everything the user does and do A/B testing", it can come from many sources: user behavior studies done in the past, cognitive psychology, experience gained from mentors, etc.

Would you make the same "they do it every day so they must be right" argument for engineers? Product managers? Stock brokers before data-driven trading? Doctors before the rise of modern medicine?

"Who could be right, the multiple designers who do this every day..."

Those designer might actually be very good one's but they might have different goals. Their design might be all about eye pleasing hoping that mos potential customers will glance at it, like it and buy it. Ergonomics might not be their concern at all.

There are other UX designers though, making GUI for pilots, nuclear station operators etc. etc. They have somewhat different goals. I feel that my brain digests what they do way better then the stuff coming from a first group

I come from a different background where I learned to value reaching the goal in most clear and shortest way

If you read The Design of Everyday Things, you'd gladly remember that to each user-unfriendly design, the author sarcastically added "but it won a lot of design awards". Which implied that the givers of those awards had one-track mind. And since the book's author co-wrote the article that we discuss, aesthetics at the cost of usability is a major sin for him.

On the other hand, since (insert obligatory joke about $1000 monitor stands), losing customers is no longer their worry.

> If Steve Jobs had followed user preference he'd have made a faster flip phone.

Actually, would this be so bad?

This is a take that I had never considered. Given our apocalyptic predicament, perhaps faster horses would have been the better choice... What a twist.

Also... are self-driving cars smarter than horses yet? I've wondered if it would be easier to train a dog to drive a car than a computer. Working dogs are just so crazy smart.

According to the old Tom T. Hall song, the secret to life is "faster horses, younger women, older whiskey," and "more money." Food for thought.

Being stuck in a city traffic then answer might be:

Faster horses? YESSSSS !!! ;)

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