"well-designed" is a very subjective term.
Craigslist is a website so elegantly designed that I know 80 year olds that can use it just fine.
Yeah I'd argue Netflix absolutely aren't designing for usability. The most usable UI they could offer starts with a big button saying "continue watching the last show you were watching" but that runs the risk of you stopping watching once you're done with that show. They want to push new stuff at you constantly.
> Nothing Microsoft has ever made has been usable
I'd argue Windows Phone 7 was one of the purest examples of usable UI I've ever interacted with. Then it all got destroyed. The sad reality is that good, usable design is never the top priority.
Very much agreed. WP7 was a nearly perfect platform for communication.
No.
What's worse is the vast majority of engineers somehow think they understand UX and design by mistakenly extrapolating their engineering expertise into domains which their engineering expertise does not apply. They end up in this hubris-fueled Dunning-Kruger feedback loop of creating software with a bad user experience.
If you're an engineer who does understand the user and what makes a good experience for them, you have a power few possess and you can make some seriously profitable and useful things.