When I hear the other point that users dont care about UX what that boils down for me is they don't see all the little things that we see. They still expect a consistent user interface but seeing a menu not render exactly where it should, an animation that stutters for one frame or other small things. These are all things that we as developers scrutinize but the user doesn't notice all that often.
Now we should still scrutinize those little things. I feel like the thing that makes some apps feel more "magical" than others is how polished those little details are.
I find it's the other way around. Quite often it's the developers who don't care if a menu is out of place or if an animation stutters.
The users, however, do see these things. They might not be able to articulate it, but they will see it. And call your app slow (animation stutters), unpolished (menu not rendered where it should) etc.
That's why, for example, MacOS has been getting so much flak these past years: they've stopped sweating the little details, and people noticed.
My sor of laypersons intuition about UX has been that it's just about reducing cognitive effort for new adopters. For things that don't really matter to functionality, make it consistent with what they'd expect given their context so they don't have to think about it. Hamburger menus aren't "intuitive," give them to a tech naive person and they'll be confused, but they sure feel that way today because of how everyone has been thoroughly trained in how to use them to navigate them, so why not take advantage of that social training to lower the adoption activation energy? I would think that I would rather people spend effort figuring out the parts that have to be different for the new functionality. I'm curious to hear from someone with actual design training if that's a reasonable approach, or if there might actually be some reason that the opposite is actually empirically true (like a unique UX makes people feel like power users and locks then into the platform or something?)
The most important thing for a user is how pleasing it looks, not even how easy it is to use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetic%E2%80%93usability_ef...
The reason that icon sets are similar is probably because they are quite ingrained into our memory. The save icon, although younger people have no idea what it's supposed to represent, is evident to them to be the save function. And since icons are generally meant to guide the user, then you opt to use something they already know. After all they do not have much agency compared to the main content of an app or site.
Probably because you only visit mainstream sites, use mainstream software or you just don't look hard enough. That said I tend to agree that there's lots of similarity.
Visit a few sites listed here:
I also find lots of odd little programs in the music production category that are very individualistic in appearance.
1. Consistency is extremely important for UX and one of the cornerstones of user-friendliness
2. Users who aren't developers probably don't care too much about "native look and fell".
If users, indeed, don't care if some applications don't look and can't be handled like other applications, maybe it's time we judged designs more in terms of innovation and usability, and less in terms of compliance. I haven't seen a new icon set, application theme or website that didn't look like any other icon set, application theme or website in years.
If they do actually care, then maybe let's admit that. I'm not advocating for burning all JavaScript to the ground, but it would certainly help if we'd treat inconsistencies as bugs, so that we could use frameworks like Electron to write better (i.e. more consistent) applications, rather than hand-waving them as unimportant, except in topics about UX rather than Electron, in which case they're totally important.