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Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

UI changes are only good if they improve usability. By far most UI changes these days are only done for the sake of looking different and "fresh", UI design has become purely fashion driven. Where's the scientific research and white papers going along with the Safari UI changes which clearly justify point by point why every single change makes sense, all backed by user studies? All I usually see is "emotional bullshit", not rational facts when UI designers talk about their work.

This used to be different during the 80's and 90's and I'm convinced that this change (turning UI design from science/engineering into fashion) is why we are deep in a UX crisis.

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> Where's the scientific research and white papers going along with the Safari UI changes which clearly justify point by point why every single change makes sense, all backed by user studies?

Are you being hyperbolic, or is this your actual position? That’s a ridiculously high bar that most organizations could not muster (and there’s no way Apple would release that stuff publicly anyway).

“Emotional bullshit” is so needlessly negative. We’re not machines — we have emotions! If a UI designer can change an interface to please me a little more, that’s a good thing.

I'm dead serious. Almost every piece of software (and hardware) in a computer is driven by incremental improvements backed by research. Operating system kernels, file systems, databases, 3D-APIs, etc... there are tons of publications, white papers, discussions, all happening in public how those components are improved over the decades. There are dead ends from time to time, but those fail, and those failures are also discussed, analyzed and eventually replaced with better solutions.

Why are user interfaces special in this regard? Where's the research, where are the white papers which clearly demonstrate what the advantages and disadvantages of specific user interface philosophies are?

> Almost every piece of software (and hardware) in a computer is driven by incremental improvements backed by research

Could you please point to the research in support of this statement? Specifically, the "almost every" part?

> Where's the research

Do a web search for "human-computer interaction research."

As a UX designer & executive for 30 years, I’ll respond.

I agree that UX/UI is sometimes swayed more by fashion than empirical goals in service of the user. E.g., Jony Ive’s sad obsession with flat (featureless) design in iOS 7 is something we are still paying a price for.

However, the majority of UX research these days goes into things that are explicitly not in service of the user. Facebook doesn’t want you to be happy, they want you to keep using their product. Pay-to-play games don’t want you to have a good life, they want to squeeze micro-transactions from you at every opportunity.

Creating and propagating these manipulative dark patterns is a huge amount of leading-edge UX these days. It works. We know how to manipulate people towards goals that are antithetical to their well-being. The tech industry as a whole makes billions of dollars a day doing exactly this thing.

So yes, the research exists. UX continues to get much better. Just not in service of goals that you (or I, frankly) embrace.

This isn’t the fault of UX as a discipline or UX designers generally. Just like a coder intentionally optimizing a ratio of negative to positive stories to keep you fearful and scrolling, UX designers are driven by the same constraints — the product direction of their parent organizations.

Should UX designers individually, or as a discipline, rise up in revolt? Exactly as much, or as little, as programmers should. We’re all in the same boat. We can choose to serve the manipulators or not. Trouble is, there’s a fuckton of money in this manipulation, and you don’t have to spend much time here on HN to see how motivating that is, and the extent to which individuals will hold their noses and do what they’re told, as long as they’re motivated richly enough.

Ah shit is Ive really to blame for iOS 7? The OS and increasingly MacOS feels so dreary, lacking contrast, etc ever since. Animations also never recovered imo

Yeah, it’s true:

https://www.dezeen.com/2013/06/10/new-apple-ios-software-fla...

It’s an awful shame, really. The man’s very talented, but he needed an editor. For years Steve Jobs was that editor, and he was brilliant at it. It was the two of them together that made Apple’s industrial design so damn good.

I agree about animations. I remember reading (probably here :D) a story from an Apple mobile engineer. He was on an elevator and Steve Jobs got in afterwards, and asked his notorious, “What are you working on?” The engineer opened the app on his phone to show Steve, who looked at it for one floor. He said, “Not enough texture,” and handed it back.

That, specifically, is the voice that Ive needed to do truly great work.

As others point out, the discipline is called Human-Computer Interaction and has a rich history. The best example in the field might be work on Fitts’ Law, such as https://www.yorku.ca/mack/hhci2018.html

For more practical examples of how websites can be redesigned through science, though, see https://www.nngroup.com/ and other resources online regarding scientific study of UI, user experience (UX), etc.

UX used to be driven by researchers like Bruce Tognazzini and Jakob Nielsen, who absolutely did studies with actual users to drive their designs.

> If a UI designer can change an interface to please me a little more, that’s a good thing.

Without observing actual users, how do you know if you are pleasing them, or just pleasing yourself?

As parent is an actual user, I guess they'll be able to tell if the UI pleases them.

Edit:

> UX used to be driven by researchers like Bruce Tognazzini and Jakob Nielsen, who absolutely did studies with actual users to drive their designs.

Large [UI driven] companies still do this or hire agencies to do so (of which there are far more nowadays given the field is more mature). The fact that UX researchers haven't much visibility outside of UX -- Nielsen started blogging relentlessly at a point in time where there wasn't really anyone else doing that, and it was hoovered up by a wider audience that needed that knowledge. That doesn't mean in any way that he's unique, or that companies who can afford UX teams don't do this. Nielsen and Tognazzini -- they were popularisers, good at producing easily digestible writing for a general audience

Mozilla was doing exactly this with their Firefox redesign and everyone on HN hated it because stuff was different.

I think the problem is everyone on here hates it when stuff they use changes and that’s all.

I think very generally speaking, you have a point. But there are genuinely changes which make things worse.

For example, in Firefox 89 the contrast between the active tab and the inactive tab is so low that they are not distinguishable when the viewing angle to the screen or the lighting isn't perfect - looks fancy, but is not even acceptable by their accessibility standards. On top of that they removed the blue bar that - as a crutch - indicated the active tab ?

I don't understand being this invested in such an obiously bad design decision - contrast is just neccessary.

All that being said, I found a bug report from 19 years ago, when Firefox was still called Phoenix, that complained about almost the exact same issue (sans the blue bar), and it got fixed.

I don't think "UX crisis" is neccessarily too strong a word.

S/UI/clothing; your argument suggests the move to add color to fabric doesn’t make sense because it is simply fashion and has aught to do with the interface presented by a shirt. I think the parent comment nails it on subjectivity; the form of a thing is as much a part as its function. The luxury goods industry attests as much.

A functional tool can still look nice, but the function is still more important than the looks, otherwise it's just useless bling (the fashion industry is the perfect example though, they need to sell new stuff each year without actually changing anything important, all they can really do is change pointless details).

A functional tool can look nice, but a tool designed with a “function only” mentality is very unlikely to look nice.

Good design is a balance of many factors.

Poor analogy. A better one for clothing would be to remove the button and zipper from pants for a cleaner look.

So modern UI design is spandex?

It's removing all buttoned and zippered pants from your store one year and replacing them with spandex one year, then coming back in 5 years and removing all spandex in favor of buttons and zippers.

Elastic does work much better, also suspenders are 10x better than belts

i generally decide my own clothing. and... if I choose UI X... I would like to keep using it. At some point, I have to adopt someone else's ideas of 'good UI' in order to keep using a computer for 'every day' stuff. At some point, my online banking forces an upgrade, and that means 'new UI', whether I like it or not. I can keep wearing 70s flares and still go in and use a local bank if I chose to.

> UI changes are only good if they improve usability.

This is true only if usability is all you care about.

In the real world people like things with good aesthetics, and like beautiful things, and it’s important for Apple to make things that users like.

If looks didn’t matter every user interface and website would be plain and high-contrast.

A "plain and high-contrast" UI sounds like a good thing TBH.

Well you can go use Windows on the high-contrast setting then.

A setting that most electron and web apps will completely ignore.

exactly. just fucking flipping the "contrast, on" switch buried in accessibility is not a panacea, and it is no substitute for a regular high-contrast UI on beeauty grounds alone! God forbid third-party apps even utilizing a native API for it.

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