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Comment by oxff | Hacker News Reader

I think UX designers have already caused enough havoc, we don't need more of them

Design is a side-effect of making choices. The idea is that you get someone to do it who has experience and is thinking very hard about it, and testing their assumptions. But the alternative is not to have no designer; that is impossible. The alternative is just that someone else does the design, usually someone who doesn't even know that is what they're doing, let alone care.

What a bad statement without any proof. For sure, I suppose Apple isn’t making money out of its designs, by side helping normal persons to deal with heavily complex computers. And Google, Microsoft etc hiring tons of designers to keep up with it.

Of course, the more you scale design, the harder true talents are to find. That doesn’t mean the profession is useless. Also, developers caused a lot of havoc as well. Nothing that goes wrong today has been put on the market without developers. That doesn’t make them useless either though.

How do you reconcile this with a lot of software having horrible UX? It has real consequences

Here’s my take: in many projects there are design and engineering tradeoffs that put the user’s needs and interests against the company’s interests. A simple example would be ads. Many websites and software tools rely on ads for funding. There are many ways to serve ads with varying impacts on the user experience. The challenge is serving the ads in a way that brings in acceptable amounts of revenue while not alienating users with annoying, intrusive ads that drive users to their competitors.

Of course, there are many situations where users can’t use competing software, or where there is no competitor. This leads to resentment, and I believe some of the negative sentiment against some UI/UX designers comes from people being burned by bad experiences caused by UI/UX being optimized for the interests of the company instead of the user.

What do you mean? Are telling us that a lot of people in the UI/UX industry don’t have talent? Are you telling us that the UI/UX industry is bad? Can you clarify, otherwise a lot of people here—that are members of that industry—are gonna assume you mean they aren’t good at their jobs, and will take offense.

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