As a designer, I'm ashamed of reading this. This is the opposite of what designers are supposed to do. UI is not art, you can't just do whatever you want. You need to abide by user patterns and conventions, because our job is to get people from A to B in the most efficient way possible. Period. Your designer is just bad.

But "designers" are surely understood to be engineers. This problem exists because the company creates positions for designers. If positions were created for usability engineers, we'd get a completely different outcome. (I wish repeating this over and over on social media would cause it to happen.)

Designers != Artists Designers are supposed to create things that humans can relate to and use, the end-user should always be in mind. They do not just churn out art for its own sake and damn the beholder. So I don’t see the distinction here.

> They do not just churn out art for its own sake and damn the beholder.

But that's the point of this article. As a matter of empirical fact, they do. Visual appearance/attractiveness has dominated over usability since smart phones became our ordinary means of interaction.

(NB. artists never "churn out art for its own sake". They usually want to do something with that art. But to the extent that we allow usability to compete with visual appearance, it can be called "churning out art for its own sake".)

Unfortunately, our UX engineers are on the front-end team. And anyone working with React is just a code monkey, so if they suggest anything related to their area of expertise they cannot possibly be right.

Requiring users to learn the idiomatic way your software behaves in order to be productive may be warranted if your functionality is complex, heavily used and more or less unlike any existing software.

Or, your software is niche and its alternatives have such terrible UI that trying to do what the user expects is adding 3x clicks and actively hurting their productivity.

There can be legitimate cases for learning curve, especially if unlearning is involved. If so, the fact that your designer wants the user to learn is a very welcome position. If they make learning effortless and intuitive, you may end up with a solid piece of software.

I worked as a developer for a design agency in the year 2000. This was a frustratingly common perspective from the designers.

Maybe for lock-in!