The UI/UX department of the future will have only two employees, a hipster and a dog. The hipster will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to bite the hipster if they change the UI/UX.
(Bite me.)
I also read 10 years ago that Amazon hired a big name to take over design for the shopping portal and Bezos wouldn't let this person do much of anything.
They survived several rounds of cost-cutting at a large company by constantly convincing management to let them rewrite their mobile app in some new framework because of X.
Start out with the native implementations, then they did Xamarin, tried PhoneGap, went back to native, then to React Native, and now on to Flutter. The pair of them keep their jobs constantly rewriting an app.
And if the UI/UX does not significantly change every 6 months, your users will give you one star reviews and "Old looking and ugly" comments. I don't envy app developers.
That's a very dangerous career path though. If that legacy system gets replaced you are usually out of a job and job search is hard with outdated skills.
Also, problem solving and creative thinking are never outdated skills. ;-)
It will have to pop and rebalance itself because it leads to fatigue and false sense of progress.
> It will have to pop and rebalance itself because it leads to fatigue and false sense of progress.
Totally agree, it's ended up turning into a stream of pointless side-grades and regressions, forever.
Progress come from thoughtfulness, vision, and luck. You can't replace any of that with A-B testing and little experiments.
I think we just blew some social limit. People prefer stability, stability allows for more complex but riskier constructions, society enjoys the working ones even better. I like the notion of seasonality these days.
A late response, but a response none the less.
Faster response time and changes can result in global improvements, but they don't ensure it unless they consider global implications. See also: normalization of deviance [0]. It's very easy to make small changes based only on local considerations. These can, individually or in aggregate, produce a globally worse system.
A non-programming example, but I think illustrative:
A friend works in aircraft maintenance as an engineer. They use an adhesive to apply patches to aircraft versus bolts and other joining mechanisms (it's less harmful, longterm, to the airframe and less disruptive to the operation of the aircraft being lightweight and not intruding into the airflow). When the aircraft come in for maintenance the worker is supposed to use a disposable plastic tool and some chemicals to remove the adhesive, it is a slow tedious process. So, naturally, the worker makes a local change to improve their flow: a metal tool that quickly scrapes off the old adhesive. Job done, they move on.
The decision was made only with local consideration, but the consequence was an extra 2-4 weeks of maintenance on every aircraft this happened to. Why? The metal-on-metal scraping resulted in damage to the aircraft that required repair.
Unless you're making changes with the whole system in mind, the consequences can go either way with regard to the global optimum, while moving towards a local optimum.
They need to account for how that changes behavior.
It is like Agile development. Sure, adaptability is good. But it has led non-technicals to treat change as free so they now feel ok writing specs on the fly in meetings, creating half baked tickets, or changing a button's color every 5 minutes. By making change seemingly cheap, demand for it soared.
Smaller changes at a faster pace mean that no thought is being put into them and they are probably being viewed by fewer people before being deployed. In large companies that have a lot of people, that can easily mean that one developer has no idea what others are doing.
It also requires that meaningful feedback be received about them. A friend of mine has a startup and they are endlessly making small tweaks to where things are located. They aren't checking in any meaningful way how that is changing things but rather just guessing based on weekly user numbers.
If you’re deploying continuously to a QA server, there is be no way halfass features get out in prod.
Also, no developer needs to know what everyone is doing, and is impossible to ask for it, since people need space in their head for real life problems and responsabilities, not keep track of the minutia of their peers day to day
These two types of products need completely different approaches to product development. But also, don't teach your grandma Notion - Word's a much sensible option for her.
This is one reason I use Xfce. My brother once told me that my computer has looked basically the same since I used Gnome 2, and he's right.
I'm not entirely immune. After switching fully to GTK 3 it took me a while to find a decent style that had scroll bars or not terrible scrollbars. The one I'm using right now (ClassicLooks) has a few issues (e.g., I can't tab through GUIs because it won't highlight the active option), but overall is acceptable. I'll fix the highlighting issue eventually...
Other differences I could see from the screenshots: the comboboxes have the dropdown arrow next to instead of inside the edit control, the table headers should have a thick left and top border too, the up/down control's buttons should also have a 3D border, the scrollbar buttons shouldn't become disabled even at the end of travel, and non-top-mounted tabs have their shadow in the wrong direction and side tabs should have text rotated accordingly. I've used this UI for over two decades so it's pretty easy to see when something doesn't look quite right.
Vector fonts are made of lines that can sometimes be smaller than a pixel wide. Font engines solves this in different ways. It both depend on the quality of the font and the settings of the engine. (I'm no font expert though so names might be off. But I have been playing on and off with pixel fonts and vector graphics since 30 years)
I agree it's normal and expected that people get used to buttons being in certain places, and moving them around too often is bad usability.
That said, the fact some of my elderly relatives use and understand technology this way, by memorizing how many centimeters from the edge of the screen they should look for a button, makes life needlessly tough for them.
They'd be better off understanding what a button is conceptually, what forms it comes in (e.g. standard button vs. underlined link with no outline, etc), and how buttons might be grouped.
I know it's a lot to ask of elderly users, but it pays dividends.
After many years of Q&A with me, my mom understands her iPad conceptually and as a result gets much more from it than my aunt does, who only understands procedurally that if she presses her finger on 'the button in the corner' then 'x' should happen.
If there is no button in the corner, my aunt is lost.
Then I got her an iPad - the very first one, back when they were released. She absolutely loves the form factor, but hates the UI, and finds it inconsistent, having to learn every app on its own. You could say that this is partly because of having to re-learn - except that it's been several years of nearly exclusively using iPad and iPhone for all her needs, and she still finds it terribly inconsistent.
A lot of capable people are mathphobic, and it's strange to watch (as someone who took naturally to math). The expressions on the page (or the attempt to produce those expressions from a model in their mind) causes them to seize up. It's like watching an anxiety attack happen. Something about math (the subject, their experience when taking the courses, whatever) has left them with a severe discomfort or level of fear when dealing with it.
Computers illicit the same response from many people, regardless of background, education, level of experience with computers. They develop an understanding by rote, or with a rudimentary (but likely totally wrong) mental model. As soon as something is slightly different, the fear or discomfort rises and their mind blanks. They cannot figure out the next step. At an extreme, a color changes and they think it must mean something, but really it's just that that control is now "transparent" (pulling in the background color but blurred) and they happen to have a bright red object behind it, when normally it's a more neutral gray or blue. For some it's that things are no longer in the right place or that display differently (think of the changes in the Windows start menu over the decades). They'll have different thresholds, but once they hit theirs they cannot proceed without great difficulty.
Of course, any attempt to improve math education gets screamed at ("New Math! Common Core! Blah!") and the whole thing just becomes political.
Another problem is that the discovery learning approach can lead to some horrible failure modes for math. I've seen cases where an hour of proper instruction can go further than a whole term of trying to see if they can find it out for themselves. Case in point: the rule of three. If 10 apples cost $20, then 5 apples cost ___? You can spend ages thinking about what it "means", or you can learn that you write down a 2x2 table, multiply across the diagonal and divide by the number in the corner.
given enough time to read and debug, I suspect I could eventually figure out how any piece of code worked. but if you give me a book and ask me to pick a good topic for an essay, I might not finish before the end of time.
Exactly. That’s how I work in applications I use a lot. I don’t look much at the symbol and certainly not at the text. Same for buttons. It’s highly confusing when they shift icons around. Office 365 has become pretty bad that way. Every two months something gets shifted around. No new functionality. Just change for change’s sake.
It's not just a usability nightmare, it's an accessibility one too (although the two go hand in hand most of the time). Imagine teaching some elderly neighbour how to write a word document, and after weeks of practice they get it into their muscle memory that the thing they want a lot is the 5th button from the left ... then microsoft adds another one in the next update so it's now the 6th.
This would be one place where free software could really shine - you could convert a lot of people with "every application works the same, and we promise we won't change the UI more than once every two years unless we really have to.