The reason I put air quotes around "designer" was to convey the fact that I believe _good_ designers would base their decisions on logic discovered via some form of the scientific method. Studying what makes user interfaces understandable, and why.

Data doesn't need to be "track everything the user does and do A/B testing", it can come from many sources: user behavior studies done in the past, cognitive psychology, experience gained from mentors, etc.

Would you make the same "they do it every day so they must be right" argument for engineers? Product managers? Stock brokers before data-driven trading? Doctors before the rise of modern medicine?

"Who could be right, the multiple designers who do this every day..."

Those designer might actually be very good one's but they might have different goals. Their design might be all about eye pleasing hoping that mos potential customers will glance at it, like it and buy it. Ergonomics might not be their concern at all.

There are other UX designers though, making GUI for pilots, nuclear station operators etc. etc. They have somewhat different goals. I feel that my brain digests what they do way better then the stuff coming from a first group

I come from a different background where I learned to value reaching the goal in most clear and shortest way

If you read The Design of Everyday Things, you'd gladly remember that to each user-unfriendly design, the author sarcastically added "but it won a lot of design awards". Which implied that the givers of those awards had one-track mind. And since the book's author co-wrote the article that we discuss, aesthetics at the cost of usability is a major sin for him.

On the other hand, since (insert obligatory joke about $1000 monitor stands), losing customers is no longer their worry.

> If Steve Jobs had followed user preference he'd have made a faster flip phone.

Actually, would this be so bad?

This is a take that I had never considered. Given our apocalyptic predicament, perhaps faster horses would have been the better choice... What a twist.

Also... are self-driving cars smarter than horses yet? I've wondered if it would be easier to train a dog to drive a car than a computer. Working dogs are just so crazy smart.

According to the old Tom T. Hall song, the secret to life is "faster horses, younger women, older whiskey," and "more money." Food for thought.

Being stuck in a city traffic then answer might be:

Faster horses? YESSSSS !!! ;)