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Comment by Kalium | Hacker News Reader

> Oh, great, this debate again! I shall use this post as ammunition next time I am arguing with our stupid design team about why we need an off switch on the stupid product we are designing, because it is a giant pain to live with devices you cannot turn off.

I increasingly subscribe to the thesis that many designers and design teams design primarily in an effort to impress other designers. They don't have to use the things. They often don't even really care if the things work at all. They care that other designers - their artistic peers - are impressed.

This does not generally result in what we the customers or users would regard as good design. The phenomenon reminds me of software engineers I've worked with who were more interested in building something with event sourcing and stream processing and functional languages rather than solving the problem more readily.

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This used to be how I assumed that awful UX keeps coming about, repeating the same mistakes and then making new ones by removing existing conveniences for no clear reason. But surely, I thought, I must be assuming the worst of an assuredly more rational situation.

I then heard more about the designers at Microsoft for Vista through Windows 11 which deeply confirmed most of my prior negative assumptions. It sometimes really is as simple as folks who think they know better than anyone who uses their product; people who refused to dogfood or even touch the thing they ostensibly work on, in any given day.

Does anyone remember Office 2013 with the UPPER CASE MENUS?

They were bad enough, but then Visual Studio 2013 HAD THEM TOO.

That was triply bad: ugly, took more screen width than Mixed Case, and perhaps worst of all, to a programmer they looked like errors.

Most of the languages we work with are case sensitive, so FILE and File look like two different things. It was a constant irritant.

The chief designer for VS2013 had a blog post about the new design, and naturally in the comments there were a lot of complaints about the uppercase menus.

The designer eventually replied: "Thanks for your feedback. We decided to keep the uppercase menus because we want more energy in this part of the interface."

More energy. I am not making this up.

They eventually came to their senses, and the next releases of Office and Visual Studio went back to conventional Mixed Case menus, just like every Windows app has used since the beginning.

(Note: my use of uppercase at the top of this message is not for emphasis or shouting, it's for illustrative purposes.)

A DESIGN WITH ALL-CAPS: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/a-design-with-al...

> 1) to keep Visual Studio consistent with the direction of other Microsoft user experiences

In other words, we jumped off this bridge because all our friends did to. Consistency... with other Microsoft products. What a joke. What about consistency with virtually every other Windows application, both from 3rd parties and Microsoft's own history? Citing consistency to justify such a bizarre departure from the 20 year norm is truly insulting.

> "We decided to keep the uppercase menus because we want more energy in this part of the interface."

It always seems to be new-age mumbo jumbo with these sort of design people. Design needs to be given back over to the engineers again. I know that suggesting is going to draw ridicule; it's easy and popular to point to the worst engineer-designed interfaces to ridicule the design abilities of all engineers. But form needs to be balanced with function and these artsy new-age designers who justify everything they do with faux-poetic metaphors have been a disaster. There needs to be balance.

Engineers can be taught the pragmatic virtue of interfaces designed for common people. Using standardized widgets and guidelines, engineers are perfectly capable of creating interfaces that are intuitive to users, even if they don't satisfy the dedicated designer's sense of aesthetics. Just look at the GUI libraries from the 90s and compare it with the dumpster fire of modern interfaces. In the 90s an engineer designing an interface would use a button widget and the button would look like a button. Today designers make everything look sleek and special to leave their artistic mark and I am left with no fucking clue what I can even click.

Design needs to be given back over to the engineers again.

No, no, then you get the open source approach:

In case the desktop shortcut for your application is not available with the /usr/share/applications/ directory you have and option to create the Desktop launcher manually. In this example we will create and Desktop application shortcut for Skype application. Obtain the following information for any given application you wish to create shortcut for. Below you can find an example:

    Path Application Icon: /snap/skype/101/meta/gui/skypeforlinux.png
    Application name: Skype
    Path to executable binary: /snap/bin/skype

To obtain a full path to executable binary of any program use the which command eg.:

    $ which skype
    /snap/bin/skype

In regards to the application icon, the choice is yours. You can either head over to /usr/share/icons/hicolor/ directory and search for any relevant icon to use, or simply download new icon from the web. Now that we have all the necessary information, create a new file Skype.desktop within ~/Desktop directory using your favourite text editor and paste the following lines as part of the file’s content. Change the code where necessary to fit your application specific details.

Yeah yeah, typical. "it's easy and popular to point to the worst engineer-designed interfaces to ridicule the design abilities of all engineers."

The general dysfunction of open source design is much broader than UI design and has little to do with engineers in general being incapable of good UI design. You might as well linux bluetooth woes to claim that engineers shouldn't be allowed to write device drivers. Whether it's designing a GUI, an API, or any other system, there will be some engineers who are good at it an others who suck. To get good design of any sort out of engineers you need an organizational structure that promotes talent and weeds out the hacks. The open source scene broadly lacks such structure and struggles to do this.

What you're talking about is a deficiency with community driven model of development, not a general deficiency of all engineers. Put 20 random chefs into a kitchen with no organizational structure imposed on them and your restaurant will be a disaster. But using that to claim chefs can't run a restaurant is absurd.

> We decided to keep the uppercase menus because we want more energy in this part of the interface.

Translation: Here is vague explanation that distracts from the fact that I made this choice emotionally rather than rationally.

I see this time and time again. People are simply reacting emotionally. If they try to explain why they behaved a certain way, they offer an explanation with something that sounds rational but isn't actually the reason.

In this case, the designer probably was hurt that people didn't like their work and stubbornly resisted it.

It sometimes really is as simple as folks who think they know better than anyone who uses their product; people who refused to dogfood or even touch the thing they ostensibly work on, in any given day.

The default white title bars that blend seamlessly into any white content behind them is a perfect example of this and so many people don't even realize they can change it.

Windows usability has declined since Windows 7 which had a lot of things that seemed like the designers were trying to improve their own lives while using the software. My favorite was the thick borders that were easy to grab for resizing, etc., even on high DPI displays. Compare it to Linux UIs where you often have to grab a single pixel border on a 4k monitor to resize a window.

Thankfully Win 10 still has large targets for grabbing window edges even though the border is only 1px.

> Compare it to Linux UIs where you often have to grab a single pixel border on a 4k monitor to resize a window.

On Linux you hold the super/windows key and click/drag anywhere on the window to move it, or right-click/drag anywhere on the window to resize it. It's much easier than using thick borders. Discoverability is admittedly not great, but this feature easily coexists with window borders. Microsoft could keep the thick borders by default and also implement this.

Translation:

“Don’t do it the way everyone else does it or the way you’ve always done it; our designer decided to make that hard for <inscrutable reasons not related to delighting existing users> and instead we offer this hard-to-discover non-idiomatic workaround.

“You will grow to love the workaround because it doesn’t hurt nearly as much, kind of like stopping after you’ve been hitting yourself in the head with a hammer.”

I guess you (deliberately) missed the part where the two features coexist perfectly fine. There is no "“Don’t do it the way everyone else does it", you pulled that out of your ass. All the Linux DEs worth mentioning have draggable window borders that are familiar to any Windows or MacOS user. The default width of those borders varies, but thick borders by default are common.

I think you've just described the "design" philosophy of GNOME.

> I increasingly subscribe to the thesis that many designers and design teams design primarily in an effort to impress other designers. They don't have to use the things. They often don't even really care if the things work at all. They care that other designers - their artistic peers - are impressed.

To put things in perspective, this is how we get stuff like the Eiffel tower.

Sacré bleu!

Which I never saw the point of, even (especially?) during my periods of living in Paris.

Turned out to be useful in WWI

Do you also not see the point of art?

Not at all. And I understand the now obsolete technical show-off value of the tower at its time. But now I think it's just a humdrum industrial eyesore.

I think most people disagree with me so I don't think it's going anywhere. But that's my view of it.

> But now I think it's just a humdrum industrial eyesore.

That was a popular opinion when it was built. Eventually it became iconic, but nevertheless I don't see many cities rushing to build their own.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower_replicas_and_de...

I know, I've seen a few of those. Most of them are tiny replicas built ironically for the novelty factor. Besides the ones built for tourist traps, most are justified as radio towers. But as radio towers the design is laughably obsolete. Compare with guyed masts, which virtually every developed town and city around the world has numerous examples of.

It is probably among top 5 most recognizable buildings in the world. I see a point in that.

The Eiffel Tower was built as a temporary display for the World's Fair. It was very much intentionally designed to impress other designers; that was kind of the point

> The Eiffel Tower was built as a temporary display for the World's Fair. It was very much intentionally designed to impress other designers; that was kind of the point

I'm not sure I got the point across. The whole point is that focusing on design is how we get outstanding, high-quality results. It makes the product more appealing and can even make it transcend it's status. High quality design creates value with negligible impact on cost.

The Eiffel Tower exemplifies that. It was designed as a temporary exhibition but it's impact transcends that of a mere temporary structure. It became the landmark of a European capital, and the symbol of one of the richest, most successful and culturally dominant nations on earth, and in the process generates fortunes in revenue due to tourism.

Another good example is the Sagrada Família cathedral in Barcelona, or pretty much each of Gaudi's work. Even the Gaudi's Park Guell, which failed as a real estate project, is a resounding landmark and tourist attraction.

Which is beautiful, but is absolutely not something I would ever choose to pay for.

Oh man, do I believe this. I think every profession does this, tbh, I saw a lot of developers try to do stuff just to impress the rest of the team, but designers are one of the most impactful because they don't do stuff that is _so obvious_ like this one

I experienced this in programming when I got into Scala 13-14 years ago. For an outsider, it looked like the community was more interested in impressing each other than solving real problems.

I have to say that scala was the most fun in programming I’ve had. You can make beautifully elegant code, that is oh so clever. It is easy to get seduced into thinking about elegant code instead of good solutions.

Yes, every profession does that to some degree. But most professionals are impressed by things that make the results of their work better, even if at completely unreasonable costs.

Designers nowadays are in a fashion to get impressed by things that make the results of their work worse. That leads to completely different problems.

I've been a designer for about a long time. I've done many dumb things, but never that. I have definitely had the irrational thought that "users will think I'm a bad designer if we ship this product", but that's usually because it was a bad product that shouldn't have been shipped.

I've never gotten the sense that my peers do this either. I have definitely gotten the sense that some designers want their designs to impress Apple, and Steve Jobs specifically.

Everybody wants to impress their peers to some degree, but to be clear, that usually translates into just doing a really good job. I've never had another designer show me something and say "Nobody else will appreciate this, but I thought you'd like it".

Agreed. I find dumb design usually comes from two pools: inexperienced designers and cost cutting measures. What's a switch to a company but another point of failure that they can't as readily blame the user on?

Chris Bangle, who was the chief designer at BMW for the E65 generation of 7 series and E46 generation of 3 series, said that he was designing to the other designers. Which is why he ignored the feedback that the E65 was ugly. The term "Bangle Butt" was applied to the E65. His successor took the radical position that this thing called "beauty" was important. I don't have sources at hand but it was discussed in print and web publications of the consumer side of the auto industry.

>The term "Bangle Butt" was applied to the E65

It was applied to a lot more than that. Even the F11 6er still had it.

What is interesting, though, is how much flame surfacing started to flood car designs after Bangle's BMWs had been out for a few years. I'm not arguing that the E65 looked good, but he certainly made an impact on all of car design, seemingly overnight.

Sometimes they're not entirely wrong though. The E46 design is now decently well-regarded by many car enthusiasts. Granted, I'm probably not the best person to ask about BMW aesthetics since I think the best looking one they've made is the clownshoe and thought the hood bulge was exceptionally lazy.

It depends, I worked briefly for Flex(tronics), and my projects were entirely focused on battery life and size (or at least, the client design requirements were).

There's a difference between a customer who plans on selling a billion units, and some company like this game controller design team that clearly making some crappy kids toys. I think the OP twitter person just learned a valuable lesson.

Learn to talk to designers. Have a copy of Tog on Interface around. Know about Fitts' Law. Know who Susan Kare is.[1] Know what Bang and Olufsen audio gear looks like. (They took the black-on-black look to the extreme. Designers really like that look. You can't find the controls.)

Go on to learn what Bauhaus architecture looks like, how that led to modernism, Frank Lloyd Wright, then Mies Van Der Rohe, then brutalism, and finally Frank Gehry in ridiculous mode.[2] Understand why this didn't result in liveable cities.

Then you can talk to designers.

[1] kare.com

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ray_and_Maria_Stata_Cente...

Literally every industry has industry circle jerks like that.

You always get some people who build asinine crap in order so show off their "mastery" of their craft. It's just that product design and web development have more money sloshing around to provide for that kind of indulgence than residential plumbing and semi trailer manufacturing do.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31311625.

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