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Re:How the Web Became Unreadable by js8 on Wednesday October 19, 2016 @01:42PM (#12745906)
I wouldn't judge designers this way. I think they are users too, but they have a certain aesthetics, that can be even more subjective than, say, software architecture. And in OSS you cannot really do usability studies, it's expensive (although commercial companies don't do them much today either, I think).

I think the problem really is lack of humility of some designers, which was trend-set by Steve Jobs. SJ didn't do what users wanted, he had a very strong sense of his own aesthetics (lack of buttons, for instance). This IMHO works if you can create fashion trend around it, but otherwise, it leaves a lot of people (maybe even majority) in the cold.

Re:How the Web Became Unreadable by ozgung on Thursday October 20, 2016 @03:43AM (#12750388)
No, this is the most common misconception about Steve Jobs. It's like another cancer affecting the young entrepreneurs and designers.

He didn't have strong opinions on many things, he had a very compotent team and he continually pushed his teams to their limits.

iPhone was the result of a long and iterative design process involving many smart people.

Here is the ancestor of the iPhone from 1983: http://gizmodo.com/279688/apples-original-iphone-1983

Apple was working on the tablet project (iPad) long before they were working on the phone project. First iPhone designs indeed had physical buttons like iPods of the time. Then they decided to marry the phone project and the tablet project. Hence a phone with a multi-touch screen.

Of course all of these are marketed as if Steve Jobs was a genius and everything was so obvious to him from the beginning. That's just not true.