This adds cost and worsens UX. It has less to do with making the app look attractive from the user’s perspective than with designer ego and satisfying the brand-over-all-other-concerns product owner types. Usually there’s little discussion of features that will be missed so the widgets can work worse, but design flair should, properly, be part of the discussion of what your velocity may look like.
[edit] I suspect some of the motivation for designers here is a combo of selling designs to clients or product owners, who are easily flattered that they need this kind of thing, and their version of résumé-driven-development—that is, highly-custom trendy screenshots probably “pop” a lot better in a portfolio than a better-functioning app that looks more ordinary.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. The designers that have worked on my site seem to be focused on screens that they can add to their Dribble portfolio rather than getting the job done in an efficient way for my users.
Meanwhile lots of successful sites don’t follow design trends the way every designer and startup seem to want to, and others do spend a lot of money fucking up their UI but not in a trendy or attractive way, particularly, and are successful nonetheless.
I suspect “minimum viable design” is much cheaper and more straightforward than a lot of what’s being treated as necessary to attract users, and has less to do with following trends or cute animations or whatever than simply appearing to have been updated some time later than 2005.
As a UX designer, that pains me. The only "unnecessary cruft" I've ever removed was stuff the CEO asked for but tested abysmally with users. We launched it, then quietly removed it a month or two later after they were able to show it off to whomever they were trying to impress.
I tend to always put a description in small print under a button or option (or use a hover tooltip) to explain what a certain button will do when clicked (e.g. a button labelled "Assign Checklist", then underneath "Clicking this will assign a brand new checklist to the employee(s) you nominate". Or perhaps under an entry field for a mobile phone number, I specify in small print that the number should include the international dialling code etc.).
These are examples of things that two different designers said to remove completely so the interface could be 'cool and clean' with minimal distractions. We did see an uptick in support queries about a few things after users inadvertently selected something at the wrong time or entered things incorrectly and wondered why they couldn't send text messages etc.
On the flipside, there were a few screens with 4 or 5 lines of explanatory lines at the top or bottom that we removed and had nearly nil impact, or that users preferred. So I can see the necessity of lessening the things that users will read, but sometimes, I wish designers would go a little deeper and see when something that doesn't look as 'pretty' is still useful to keep.
Won't happen until/unless dedicated design folks have to provide support for their creations. I don't particularly care what looks cool/clean/etc - after having done this for > 20 years, and constantly having to be the one who ends up fielding support issues - either directly from users, or via intermediate help desks - I generally have a pretty good idea of what will confuse or help many types of audiences. That's based on thousands of hours of dealing with common questions, weird hardware setups, language barriers, display issues, network speeds, etc.
The design team doesn't play a role in supporting the product/service/users, but somehow manages to get ultimate authority on how everything should look. hrm....
Frankly, I agree with you. The designers should have a stake in it. At the last place I worked, all designers received a daily report of costumer feedback gathered through the site. We attended monthly reviews of feedback and CSAT and summaries of customer care cases from the month, highlighting top trends and issues that the support staff were handling. We even had representatives from the support team attend our daily standups to raise issues and report back on our progress handling previous issues to the support team so they could be informed when customers asked about things. We even had goals around CSAT that impacted our bonuses. I used to read every single comment we received and even took the time to test and narrow down issues before working with a dev to find the root cause. We fixed some very nasty, but unusual bugs that way.
It comes down to the org: how mature is it with regards to CX and is everyone willing to make the effort to make it a priority?
That really takes a dedication and long-term view that doesn't seem present with most orgs. A non-long-term view also impacts a lot of the actual software too - I'm working with a large enterprise company right now that has rather immense challenges - UX is so low down on the list right now. And yet... they keep getting new customers, and, from what I've seen, it's because their UX is still better than that of their competition, which is truly ... shocking.
But maybe it was a bit of a bubble in a sense. Neither I nor the other designers I knew would take a job at a place that didn't understand an appreciate the value of UX (unless that job was specifically to help change that), so that might be it. We didn't just want to be a mockup monkey spitting out pretty designs.
For a designer, this is really painful to read. But I do agree to some extent. Though it is a little bit more complicated than how you put it.
> Won't happen until/unless dedicated design folks have to provide support for their creations.
This is partially true. The way I work is that I always provide "the best" solution I can think of. I always explain the reasoning behind it. But then it all comes down to the client.
You either have a solution that covers all edge cases, is extendable and works for the use case but usually isn't very cool. But the client "knows" that design sells. So they want something that "pops" and can serve as marketing material on its own. And at that moment it is about the pricing. If you charge hourly, you can iterate however long you want, you can have calls where you argue about usability and long term sustainability of your designs. But if you charge per project, at one point you will decide that you've done enough because it is no longer very cost-effective to continue like that. And you deliver what the client wants and what makes them happy.
And this is where the whole conversation turns almost philosophical. Should you deliver something that is good for the product, but the client is not satisfied (and probably won't recommend you in the future)? Or do you make your client happy, but deliver a sub-par experience? (This happens less and less as I progress and charge more for my work, but still happens from time to time).
You can argue that prioritizing product should deliver better long term results. But there are too many variables. There will be changes in the product that will make your solutions obsolete, or the implementation is not right and the promised result won't be delivered. Or the functionality of your designs change drastically, but the solution stays the same. So statistically, betting on a satisfied client is working better than on good product experience.
You can argue about usability all you want, or you can be part of a longer term process of measuring actual usage and make adjustments after actual users are using it. Between heat maps, click tracking, watching engagement numbers, A/B testing, etc, you can determine if goals are being hit. Are users falling away? Test out alternative UX, see what helps, commit to that. Lose the designer "this is what works best" attitude (not saying you have this, but enough I've worked with do). Help your client help their clients/users.
It's not how most design is thought of - at least in web projects. It's "design" up front - hey, we're using figma - look how awesome all this is! - we can 'design' for tablets and mobile and desktop!. But all the questions about "what happens here" and "how do I deal with a text label that was designed for 20 characters when most of the text data is 30+ characters?" - these get ignored after a client "signs off" on design, and making things "just work like what was approved already!" becomes an ongoing nightmare.
"Look - we did all this hard work of deciding how this should work - you need to just make it work now!" - I've been on the receiving end of these a few times. It's not really all that 'hard' to make decisions when you don't have to implement them. 1-2 years in to my software career, I thought this was a problem with me - I wasn't quite good enough with a piece of software to know how to implement XYZ, etc. This goes back to early VB days, and has compounded with web stuff - someone draws a static 2d picture, and this is supposed to somehow be a gold-standard for how every live interaction should 'feel'. After a couple years of this, I realized it's far less me (although a bit - I'm not perfect), but mostly the process itself, but it's what everyone still does.
If you want 'design' to serve the product/service, it needs to be an ongoing part of the process and budget, and take in to account everything that's learned when users actually use it. If devs need to react to changing use cases, the actual UI and UX may need to be adapted as new information is measured and learned.
I have to agree with you on the examples you gave, those sound like things that were useful to users. It would have been nice if the designer, in wanting to make something "cool and clean", found a way to make those elements belong to the overall design aesthetic, instead of simply removing them. That's the lazy way. The hard things that requires real talent is making utility elements feel sexy.
In the latter case, the product is aligned with the need to sell the system, since the person who pays doesn’t use it.
If so, I recommend a consumer-facing job the next time you chsnge.
I'm afraid there never was any golden age in software.
> The pressure in the past from co-founders or stakeholders to 'get things out the door quickly' and to get a quick and dirty MVP out there.
That's been true since Day 1 of software development. Certainly in all of my career.
The reason? The pressure in the past from co-founders or stakeholders to 'get things out the door quickly' and to get a quick and dirty MVP out there. This often meant lack of time to consider these small details (or even to backload them into the system later for v1.0).
Also ironically, we've had professional UX and CX designers work on my software creations who have cut a lot of these things off the interface and functionality as 'unnecessary cruft'.
I would also add to the list under Colours/Formatting, that a lot of 'dark mode' designs out there that are considered fashionable just have too low a colour contrast or too small a font to make it readable my someone like me with degrading eyesight.