UI Degrades over Time | Hacker News Reader

UI Degrades over Time

grumpy.website

16 pointspetilon9 comments

It seems UI has stopped being a science and started being middle-management: Everybody must justify their position and promotion by completing some very visible change in the product, even when the only practical changes are bad ones.

Yeah, it’s a problem with the employment and organizational structure, in a way.

Software doesn’t need continual redesign and redevelopment at constant scale, nor is there unlimited need for new software tools in any one company’s wheelhouse, but the expectation is that software companies hire people and keep them onboard as long as they’re performing well, not that they’ll scale up for a periodic launch and then scale down again. And a company that did that — outside of the video game industry — would be shunned by developers (at least in a good labor market).

I don't think software companies ship UI churn because they're running out of things to do with their development resources. They're just bad at rewarding bug fixing and bad at saying no to user-visible changes that aren't meaningful improvements big enough to overcome the pain of making users re-learn a changed UI. Microsoft doesn't need to scale down their Windows development resources, they just need to make them do the less-fun parts of their jobs instead of shipping new intern project rewrites of Notepad.

nah, it's just people wanting to pad their resume. And your resume is usually first read by someone who's only impressed by stuff they can see

> I don't think software companies ship UI churn because they're running out of things to do with their development resources.

I think that's exactly why they do it: "Our division has 600 developers that we're paying large amounts of wages to, if we try and fix some bugs no-one notices but if we roll out the 357th UI refresh everyone notices. OK, UI refresh it is then".

You say "that's exactly why they do it" then go on to describe something entirely different: an organization with plenty of options to spend their development resources on, and they make their decision not out of a lack of options but due to misaligned incentives. Which is exactly the point I already made.

It was never science. But it was pretty obvious when there wasn't anything left to do. Then people kept changing stuff anyway. You'll never even see the trend go back to windows 95 era UI, because if the masses get that feeling back, they'll murder before they let another style enter their lives.

> It was never science.

There were credentialed academics running studies and contributing to the UI/UX design in KDE in the 2000s at least, though I guess your comment is true in the sense that (most) commercial software usually does design by middle management.

When you see it all lined up, it's pretty clear. It does make sense though. Computers were first viewed as utilities, but now they're more entertainment machines. Makes sense that the UI would degrade away from utility towards pure style.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com