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Comment by vijucat | Hacker News Reader

I suspect a larger theme at play, whether it be the universally disliked flat UI design that permeates all platforms or how company logo fonts are all converging to a bland sans serif [1], is that UX designers are not only disconnected from the U in UX, the Users, but are encouraged to have a self-image as being superior in sensibilities and thus, free from having to deign to listen to the inferior User. How else can one explain how the Windows UX team supposedly uses Apple Macs, lol? I would fire that bunch and replace them with a more grounded set that actually uses the product they design ("eat your own dog food"). Stop the starving artist impersonation while sipping on $7 lattes and listen to the actual user, IMHO.

1. https://justcreative.com/why-do-everyones-logo-fonts-look-th...?

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This becomes an issue in any field where people are primarily working to impress their colleagues or others in their field, rather than the customer.

Just look at the divide in architecture between houses sold to people, that are actually made to look inviting and high-quality, vs those huge modern buildings in cities that are mostly designed for "prestige" and to show off.

This only happens in markets where there's no real choice. This would never happen for cars for example because people can choose which car they buy. But if a website has a give UI, you can't choose a different one.

This absolutely happens in cars. Modern cars are full of fancy looking controls that are actually far less usable than the controls we had 30 years ago.

A lot of that is cost reduction though because people want cheaper goods more than they want buttons.

> look at the divide in architecture between houses sold to people, that are actually made to look inviting and high-quality

While I agree with your conclusion, I think your example is incorrect. Most houses aren't custom builds, they're built on spec. Think McMansions.

These houses use 2x4 framing, guaranteeing that they can't be adequately insulated. They all use double hung windows instead of high performance options, like tilt turn. They have features that no one actually wants like erratic rooflines, great rooms and oddly places veneer bricks. In short: these are bad houses. They optimize for maximizing square footage, resale value in a Keynesian beauty contest, while throwing all liability concerns to the winds.

Contrast this with actual custom contemporary residential architecture. You get features like insulated wall assemblies, large eaves to reduce weathering and summertime thermal gains, roof lines that won't lead to maintenance nightmares and so on.

Outside residential, I think you're spot on. Look at Boston's city hall. No one with affection for humanity would've built such a thing.

> Look at Boston's city hall. No one with affection for humanity would've built such a thing.

Trypophobia, the Building

Out of curiosity - what kind of window performance are you talking about? What's the advantage of tilt turn over double hung?

Air tightness.

Tilt turns have a single seal that runs along the perimeter. When the window closes the gasket gets compressed all around. Double hung windows have more seams and slide.

> Boston's city hall

I had never seen it before and just looked it up, and I find it quite ironic that it could easily be mistaken for an eastern block administration building from the same era.

>But if a website has a give UI, you can't choose a different one.

Ah, how much I miss Proxomitron.

> This would never happen for cars for example because people can choose which car they buy.

People have also been complaining that cars are all starting to look the same. Car designs tend to use similar structures to meet safety regulations.

This is most noticeable when you look at the design of a concept car vs the actual production version. When an automaker has to bring a concept to market it has to add larger mirrors, larger lights, bigger bumpers to meet standards. The issue is exacerbated by the need to meet standards globally while minimizing production costs.

In this case the automakers don’t have any real choice because of the constraints they’re given. Much like how software trends to sameness once an optimal design has been discovered.

Note: if you want to revert you can use : https://f-droid.org/fr/packages/com.aurora.store/

Then you can select manual download with version 1067000303 (Not sure if this is the latest version before redesign).

Edit: you will need to remove previous version to downgrade and since you probably can´t uninstall go to apps disable it and then select remove updates.

This is the real problem. Certainly when I was at Facebook, basically zero employees used Android so the product was much worse there.

I suspect the same is true at Google which is both darkly hilarious and very sad.

one company i worked for mandated underpowered laptops for frontend engineers and split their wifi so that everyone in that group had poor internet when trying to see/test their own work (the rest of the internet was fast). everyone complained. except for the users. the website (a very complex web app full of graphs, images, videos etc) was super fast and tiny.

there are other ways of doing this, but i found this approach interesting.

Yep, same when handing out reference devices for developing. Don't give out the Samsung galaxy excalibur 10+ super pro, or the Apple iPhone Pro Master 10+ extreme.

Go to walmart and get the budget android on sale. Go get a used and beat up iPhone SE.

If you get your stuff to run on those, it'll run fantastically* on the big devices

* Barring device specific bugs.

For sure it will run but the issue is that nobody designs for small devices like SE. It has been this way for over 4 years I guess.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26522294

Related. If you want the people at your company to have good IT support, make sure that the execs and upper mgmt have a lower tier of support than everyone else. At most places, they get platinum support, and everyone else is bronze, so they never see what people who work for them have to deal with every day.

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