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I think a lot of it is the other way around: graphics design driven by branding rather than UX.

I also think the death of native development has a lot to do with it. The web is now the UI layer of desktop, but that means there is no consistent design language across the system.

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From my perspective as a dev, this is what happened: UI designers who had been trained on usability, who had a good grip on what was/wasn’t feasible technically, and knew to take content variability into account were almost wholesale replaced with more generalist print/graphic designers who were great at pumping out pretty branded PSDs, but not so great at producing usable UIs.

My guess is that this happened because real UI designers are harder to come by and cost more, while generalists are more common and cost less. I’ve not hired for these positions though so I don’t know for sure.

It can also just be a result of oversupply of certain college degrees. Back in the late 90s to early 2000s there was a big trend of graphic design degrees at universities probably far in excess of available jobs for that specialty. I knew a bunch of these and many went into web design, and now I’m sure are doing UI design now that the web engine is the de facto standard UI engine everywhere but mobile. (Even on mobile it has an increasing presence.)

This is very similar to what Grudin suggests in his HCI history "From tool to partner": Apple used to be very usability and research focussed in the 80s and early 90s, but turned away from it with Jobs and went more look-driven — and had great success with it. Other companies followed. (Which does not mean that companies ignored graphic design before, but it was the more utilitarian parts of graphic design that were important focussing on distinct shapes, readability etc.)

True but I don’t think this gets it quite right.

The big problem with classic Mac was the cooperative multitasking weird OS and the unstylish and clunky hardware. The UI needed polish and modernization but was not fundamentally bad.

The complete loss of OS coherence has a lot more to do with the web than anything else.

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