Another post in two weeks that reminds me of that S.Jobs quote I lean on a lot: “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”
Nobody seems to care about the aesthetic or quality anymore. Software development has become a beige, boring assembly line where brains go in as input and "Metrics Go Up" comes out the other end of the factory.
You sound depressed. Maybe try find a smaller shop where you have more influence?
Indeed. This is why we should abandon the "modern" software development process. Bureaucracy & consulting appears to be producing shit software. By whatever means necessary, the developer needs to be made to care more about the quality of the final product.
Making "UI/UX" a label, project category or other management abstraction is a gigantic red flag to me. This tells me it is everyone's job, therefore it is effectively no one's job. Someone needs to take deep ownership in things that end in "experience" or it won't work.
You'd be amazed at what others around you will start stepping up to if you set even the tiniest example. Certainly, there are those who will do bad work on purpose, but you won't change those. All you can do is your best and let HR take care of the rest.
At the end of last year the menu was redesigned, and the links which were a tags were replaced with some other element. So now you can't ctrl click to open pages in new tabs, which was a big part of my workflow.
Oh and the labels on the design of the new menu were removed, but of course there is no title tag to explain what the items are.
I filed a bug report shortly after it was released, and it is - and probably for the rest of eternity will be - in the backlog.
I came across the exact opposite recently. With Ghostery enabled, one of the company owned websites won’t work with regular clicks. The only way to go to the link is to open in a new tab/window. Infuriating.