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Comment by anon373839 | Hacker News Reader

For a few years in the last decade, it seemed that UX design was getting recognized as a serious discipline rooted in user research. Then, somehow, it devolved into fashion. When/why did that happen?

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I'm sure there are many exceptions but a decent amount I've seen is portfolio-driven design, where the goal is more to have something eye-catching, unique and interesting that will look good in a portfolio and to show other designers, more than building something well considered and reliable/predictable. There can be a sense, especially amongst more junior designers, that the job of design is to add some style, and that design should be fun and much more like creating abstract art than making sure door handles are in a reasonable place and turn in the expected direction. The end result is, as you say, more fashion than function.

Does anyone have a design inspiration site that isn't this useless portfolio garbage?

It's incredibly annoying, and i say that with a an interest art, the abstract, cool concepts etc. but i want to see sites and interfaces with "actual messy real life content" not just one big image or whatever idiotic whitespace hell everyone's doing with way too much scrolling on Awwwards, Behance, Httpster, Gsap etc.

It's relatively easy to make a big font, a big picture and a 3d effect look cool, much harder to present 15+ items on one page and create a cool visual narrative around it that both grabs attention and lets the user go solo if he wants to without scrolling two miles.

I feel like a few newspapers were okay examples of this 5-10 years ago, but now they've also gone whitespace crazy.

We need a site like "Real life UX" or "Actual usable design" inspiration.

Not that I’m aware of but that would be really cool. Case studies, with visual components, of how complex, real-world design problems were solved.

If you find out the answer, I've also been looking for that everywhere to no avail. Sometimes I go to websites like https://dribbble.com/ and search "Rich UI" but results are really hit or miss (mostly miss)

Honestly? Install classic software and use it! I needed exactly those sort of references to design a project and knowing I wouldn’t find them on the web, I booted a win95 vm and studied it. My designs improved dramatically.

This is an interesting approach. I remember classic osx was also pretty good at dense content.

> When/why did that happen?

There's no money in making a thing that works well, only in making things that look good. Effectively 100% of people who are using software are using it for things that fundamentally don't matter, so why should they care if the functionality is shit? Personal computers and phones are fashion statements, not useful devices. Business computers and phones exist to facilitate the bullshit jobs that employ the majority of the white-collar population. Follow the money; nobody with money cares.

Maybe a bit cynical and hyperbolic, but the point is good.

I'd boil it down further and say it's a focus on short term gains over long term gains. If the pan flashes, that's a win, full stop. When the pan stops flashing and people don't want to use your software because it's confusing, that doesn't matter because they can just flash another pan.

> There's no money in making a thing that works well, only in making things that look good.

I work in a company building vending machines and such and it's the other way around here. Most products are shipped with a pretty mediocre UI because it just isn't valued. The software has to run the machine, vend products to people and don't eat their money.

> There's no money in making a thing that works well, only in making things that look good

Amazon, AWS, Salesforce and anything Oracle entered the chat.

More seriously, I think it really depends. People will use and pay large amounts of cash for stuff that solves there problem and does not have a fancy looking UI.

In other words: Make something people want. Ignore what people need.

1. 99.99999% of management have zero understanding of UX. So their view of UX is basically some designer making it "pretty".

2. Most UX design aren't probably taught. Especially Software User Interface.

3. A lot of Design in that era came from Web. And if we read this article we already know or could guess what web design were like.

4. It is my observation that Tech, or Silicon Valley historically speaking learns very little about history of their industry. Unlike many other discipline, things comes and goes like fashion industry. Combine with Hype machine and VC money. Apart from Politics or Finance there is no other industry that contains as much noise as Tech.

5. Conservatism ( Not politics ) is generally not well accepted. Finished Software is not appreciated. And if you cant improve, or remake something, there is no way you can move up the ladder. The fundamental of not doing anything hype or large changes is against Resume Driven Development model.

Electron-based applications seem like a hugo factor. When native applications were abandoned in favor of Electron, designers stopped trying to match their designs to established operating system standards and began designing from scratch, with much poorer results, because they didn't have the resources and experience of teams that had worked on major OSes.

Prior to that, deviations from established standards (layouts, colors, logic) were seen as unprofessional and tasteless. Things like buttons with unusual colors made software look like a shareware hobby project downloaded from Tucows, and nobody wanted their product to trigger these associations. Premium software made for Windows wanted to have the look and feel of Word and Excel.

It started as user-centric research and when the user became the product the intent of this research shifted.

Doing research on the user, instead of for the user.

I’ll give my perspective as a designer turned developer. People have always conflated design with “desenho” (drawing). But design is supposed to be more about information architecture. It just so happens that what’s usually trusted to be architected by designers is materialized graphically. But when the whole ecosystem of training and employment robs designers of their impact by not integrating them in both higher and lower level industrial processes, they’re hopelessly left at their corner, with a lot of energy to spend on what they actually have a stake on: visuals.

Designers still want to work, so they change stuff randomly and sell it as "modern".

> Then, somehow, it devolved into fashion. When/why did that happen?

I'll tell you what happened.

Apple.

I've been saying for years now that Apple is not a tech company, they're a fashion company. Alternatively, they make tech fashionable, which means abandoning function in favor of form.

Actual UX is unimportant. It just has to look nice.

What infuriates me is when other companies then start to copy them. I'm looking at you, Microsoft. With Windows 11, it seems you have forgotten that many of your users stick with you because you're not MacOS. So why would you want to start imitating MacOS?

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