If UX designers made a gas pump, it would be a featureless white pillar with a single button and a hose and it wouldn't work.
So many big firms hire mediocre "designers" out of college and they wireframe whatever the project managers tell them to and they do what they are told.
I better term is just "product designer" but I like UX designer as the name encompasses it perfectly... your job is to know and understand the users experience inside and out, and make it as ideal as possible.
When done right, just like programmers who push back on stupid features because they often have a better grasp of what "good software" compared to the average "business person". Another bad group is the non-startup people who come from older, bigger IT megacorps and run product development, which is a disaster waiting to happen but I've heard of many examples of this.
I should also note I'm only talking from my experience working with startups and SMBs. I personally don't know much about operating design within a giant company.
Those crappy UIs were the result of PHBs sabotaging the work.
I stopped doing UI. It was pointless. We'd mock things up. Validate with usability testing. Rinse, lather, repeat. Until it was spotless.
And then it'd all get trashed by someone(s) with a corner office.
Everytime a car drives up, use a camera to determine their license plate number. If they are a new customer, ask them if they want to save their payment information and fuel grade preferences. If so, everytime they come back, the pump can display "Welcome back John Doe, you can begin pumping".
Ultimately, we make things that serve other people. All of us need to pay attention to how our work impacts the users we serve. Experts can help with that, but the Lone Design Ranger isn't nearly as powerful as a cross-functional, user-focused team.
I would also suggest that at least in tech, smaller firms aren't the problem here. As you say yourself, the small, neighborhood grocery store can get this stuff right just by paying attention. I think the big problems come at scale, where managerialism and over-focused metrics can easily disempower people and get them focused on the wrong thing.
In the company I work for, we call it "customer experience." We have an entire team of people who work face-to-face with actual customers, observing how they interact with our products and services to improve things.
It's why we have a 96% satisfaction rating in an industry where 40% is considered off the charts good.
But this will never fly in the tech sphere because it requires actual feet on the ground and talking to wetware. Some middle manager along the way would say, "it doesn't scale" and the project would get shelved.
However, you're right that it's too rare. The number one problem I've seen is that executives are convinced that they already know what users need. And when they get real data disproving their hunches, they really don't like it.
Remember when Google was still small and functional enough to produce excellent software with a good focus on design consistently? I do and I miss them. But all good things fade over time.
Clearly Google haven't architected a system that can put (or attract) the right talent in control of the right places. Small fast growing firms naturally attract talent and "game recognizes game" usually so it was easier for them back in the day.
It's just interesting to think of all the firms with a legitimate pool of great talent simply not executing properly (Magic Leap is the perfect example of this). It's a sad waste of resources which is heavily responsible for the people running things (IMO).
Additionally - it also shows how there are things that you never expect that have a positive impact. Suggests to me that there are so many factors that affect people's product choices, and that many of the factors that drive a certain choice are not fully understood by either the buyer or the seller.
Doing to the right optimizations at the right scale is a difficult balance. A lot of startups are investing thousands (or more important critical hours of runway time) in making super pretty websites and mobile apps when a simple non-JS HTML page where they figure out who their customer is or what product they really should be selling.
But then there are products where the mobile/web app's UX is the product because the industry is old/stagnant and haven't figured out tech. For example there are quite a few startups whose sole purpose is making buying insurance on your phone easy from a UX standpoint. Taxi companies could have made cellphone GPS/app driven services long before Uber but didn't, etc.
To be clear, I am not saying that UX as whole is not needed, but I do not need someone who has made a career of it to elucidate me on the finer points of emotionally connecting with a user via tooltips and the like.
UX as a field goes well beyond pretty UIs.
UX designer could drive your example because they looked at the users of the product and realized that like you, they care about a very responsive system.
Detecting that someone finds the product too slow could eventually materialize a backlog item to make page load times twice as fast etc.
For example:
Two competing microservices? One has a spin up time of 0.3 secs, the other 1 sec. The first is two times the price. It is the job of the UX designer to understand the impact of the longer spin up time to understand if it would impact the user experience.
The UX designer then works with the Product Manager to build a business case for the correct service and thus you've made a decision that impacts the UX but is not a UI or interaction based conversation.
Usability and interaction design is most certainly part of UX. However, the skills needed to be a competent visual designer match (in terms of difficulty, time to execute, etc) that of being a UX designer. Simply put, in order to go deep enough on either craft, you need to dedicate to one side or another.
There are many dual 'UX/UI' roles out there, but they tend to be weighted toward the UI side, maybe with some user testing tacked on the end or some journey work.
Sole UX roles are much deeper in their reach within an organisation and consist of much, much more than just wireframing and making visual deliverables.
They certainly go hand in hand but IMHO good UX is much more important than the way the UI is displayed, which I think can honesty be more influenced by aesthetic and personal preference.
More likely than not, you're just not aware of it, which is normal.
FYI the emotional connection is not just made 'via tooltips', it's usually a package affair.
The article is a good example: the product (gas) and price didn't change, one could argue cleanliness was changed but that's a little doubtful unless the old station was disgusting. What changed was probably brand, colours, lighting, atmosphere, modern appearance - all pretty superficial stuff that has nothing to do with the actual product - gasoline. And yet it makes a big difference to most people, probably including you and I. We probably don't notice we were more likely to pull into the big, lit, white, modern looking gas station with the brand we recognised - over the off-brand gas next door, which is identical.
That is exactly why brands use bright colours. It appeals to the part of the brain that evolved to recognize ripe fruit, for example.
As uncomfortable as it is to admit that these things may influence our behaviour, it is the reality. No person is completely immune.
Free will is largely an illusion. We act on impulses, then the conscious mind comes up with a plausible explanation for that action.
The gas station is actually evidence of this: literally the utility of the product does not change, but more revenue ...
I think maybe it's an offence to Engineers to posit that they are not 'in control'. It takes some right-brain thinking to get this it's all a little counterintuitive.
But it's definitely reality. For the quickest possible introduction to really odd marketing concepts that are true, I'd recommend the '22 Immutable Laws of Marketing'. For an Engineer, it's like getting hit in the head with a frisbee.
I pretty much always choose to stop at a QT if I can just because of all the little things you mentioned that they do better than every other gas station.
They place counters on _both_ sides of each checkout (and there's 3). They'll check a person out on the left of the register, then while that person is gathering their stuff up off the counter, they start checking the person out on the right. Almost like a zipper merge.
and it's very very effective.
When I was in college, there was a small restaurant nearby, Burger Continental. The owner knew us students, and when ordering he'd always upgrade our orders for free, usually with a big flourish. We knew why he was doing it, but we still enjoyed him doing it and patronized his establishment a lot.
It depends if your customer has money to spare and/or if they value the improvements. Walmart succeeded precisely because people don't care about anything other than price for commodities.
It's not obvious that these measures would boost the price. An owner might accept lower margins for scale. Or they may cut costs that don't matter, but which everyone dogmatically incurs, to incur the ones that do.
An in any case, segmentation is a thing. Targeting premium customers is a profitable strategy. It's also a virtuous cycle, since each premium customer gives you resources to expand your lead while depriving your competitors of their business (e.g. for upsold services).
Which is apparently why the engineer owns both discount (Arco) and premium (Shell) stations.
Clearly untrue, at least where I live.
There are two thriving chains of gas stations that do well because they offer superior customer experience. There are often lines inside and outside.
Then there are half a dozen other chains that are bare-bones and sell the gas for up to 30¢ a gallon cheaper. They don't have nearly the traffic as the nice chains.
Walmart of today still competes on more than Price, but it is Convenience + Price. For me this is the ability to get my Oil Change Supplies, my Furnace Filters, a new pair of shoes, a belt and my Groceries all in 1 store, with 1 checkout, and I can get into that store and out of it getting everything I need for 1-2 weeks in under 30-45mins
Often times if I price shopped for every item there are places that are lower in price than Walmart, and some that are higher, but on the whole those minor fluctuations are not worth going to 5 different stores to get the "lowest price"
Assuming it's not product or price, it's interesting to note how a professional appearance makes the difference.
In the early days, Ray Kroc focused on McDonald's always having spotless bathrooms. Moms knew this and would stop at McD's on road trips because the bathrooms were reliably clean. Nobody else was doing that at the time.
This is what most UX designers do for a living. They think about the small details which get overlooked while everyone is in a rush to build out x feature/functionality.
It's what creates emotional connections to products and services which builds strong customer loyalty and helps word of mouth.
Just like how they used to know your name at your local small grocery store, those intimate details go a long way. And in commoditized situations people are willing to spend more time/money or go out of their way to use your product.
Dan Norman talks a lot about this in his "Emotional Design" book. It's the design stuff that goes beyond merely functionality and most efficient problem solving (ie, obsessing about fewest clicks to do x, instead of the wider experience where adding a communication step might improve the emotional experience).
But often it is a luxury for many smaller firms struggling to just get the functionality part right, which is why this person buying up gas stations, providing time and capital, and giving them the attention they needed is working so well.