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Comment by gyomu | Hacker News Reader

We lost the plot when interface design became UI/UX (and all the associated modern variants on this terminology).

The goal of an interface is clear: it is how a human interacts with a machine. Buttons, dials, latches, sliders - those are interfaces. We can reason about them, make taxonomies, determine what operations they are appropriate for (or not), and so on.

“User experience” tries to capture everything into a nebulous haze that exists not to serve a human with a task to accomplish that a tool will assist with - but a business and how it will capture “users” and guide them on the “journey” it deems most appropriate to reach its sales goals.

Design students won’t be able to formulate a cogent thought on what the properties of appropriate interface feedback are, but they’ll be great at cranking out “personas” and sleek landing pages that enumerate marketing points. Something’s rotten.

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We lost the plot when the MBA ass clowns took over and started adding "engagement" and other features that only serve the interest of the developer not the user.

The typical corporate software is now primarily serving the needs of the developer and the user is secondary. In many cases the user has no way but to succumb (due to lack of competition or enterprise/workplace policies etc) and eat their frustration because there's no alternative, or they're not allowed to use the alternative or the alternative is equally trash.

I disagree that UI/UX as interface design is where we lost the plot. After all UI mostly refers to the looks and UX to the interaction, both have always existed and on their own are certainly not bad.

For me one of the biggest issue is that neither the developer, nor the UI/UX designer are actual users of the software they write. If you don't actually understand how users end up using the software, best even skip the interviews with users, you'll never be able to write software that truly serves the users.

Additionally, you have the separation between developers and UI/UX which leads to another area where trade-off needs to be made to accommodate (new) requirements. In that sense you might be right, that when the developers created everything, they were able to shape something way more efficient and concise, but often also at the cost of looks and potential accessibility.

A second issue I see is, that software these days is always developed for the average user, where as in the past software was developed for experts. As such the look becomes "simplified" and the UX dictates a layout that is cumbersome to use for experts and power users.

I feel compelled to say that this is the most concise and accurate summary of the whole mess I've yet seen.

When you take something straightforward which is grounded in hard logic and measurable outcomes, and try to combine it with abstract concepts about feelings and organizational goals that overlap with multiple philosophies, a massive amount of space for endless argument over details is created.

I found an archive of Apple's Human Interface Guidelines.

Here's 1985:

https://archive.org/details/apple-hig/1985_Apple_II_Human_In...

Here's 2013:

https://archive.org/details/apple-hig/MacOSX_HIG_2013_10_22/...

(More in sidebar)

Do they still have these? Anyway I present it as a curiosity. Maybe they're heroes for sticking relatively closely to objective considerations like how a slider should behave and when to go fullscreen, or maybe it's all their fault for being pretentious and tastefully elegant and dumbing things down with a 1-button mouse in the first place. Maybe it shows a smooth evolution from good intentions, and successful corralling of terrible erratic interface choices (from the dawn of time, i.e. the 80s and 90s) into something logical and standard, through into an inevitable rise of nebulous "user experience" over function. Or maybe it was all nebulous and abstract from the start, and the high point was in the middle, somewhere around 2000, where it went through a phase of nitty-gritty good sense which faded away again, I don't know.

https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... are the newest ones.

It all kinda changed when interfaces had to be big enough to differentiate between buttons with your finger instead of a mouse.

> Something's rotten

It's called late capitalism. We cannot structure a society around not only profit, but infinite growth, and expect that not to give us any problems. It does.

You cannot just sell as many copies of Photoshop as last year: you must sell more, each quarter, and more expensive. You cannot sell as many phones as last year: you must make batteries non-removable so phones break quicker, you must spend 3x your R&D budget on ads to manipulate people on buying an identical phone to last year. Etc etc

I think the big red flag with UI/UX was that it was a new term invented for a concept we already had: HCI. Human-Computer Interaction is what it was called when companies like Apple and Microsoft were releasing style guides for application developers to adhere to, to ensure their applications remained consistent with every other application on the system.

By inventing a new term, that generation of designers signature that they were ignorant of that past work. And the specific choice of terminology further signalled the shift in values for the designer. It was no longer about creating optimal interface points between the human and the computer, it was about creating "an experience".

It centered creating a distinct brand identity for the application through the design, a goal that is anathema to the goals of HCI. Because of this, it was not enough to use the native UI toolkit of the system, which had been carefully designed around consistent experience. It became necessary to reinvent UI tooling from scratch, with the primitive elements available in the browser engine being readily available for doing such. The cross-platform nature of the browser also presented an opportunity for the MBA- and SV-driven focus on monopoly to pursue total market dominance, rather than just creating one good app for the users you have on the one system.

> It centered creating a distinct brand identity for the application through the design, a goal that is anathema to the goals of HCI

Not really, as the constraints of HCI are relatively loose. The fact is that current UX designers don’t read the litterature and don’t take usability in account. Instead, UI design is just aesthetic and UX is ruled by sales.

A platform should be consistent, but you can add your variation as long as it’s usable. Which most UI toolkits allows.

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