This. I almost see an anti-correlation, where the worst UX sites spend the most on UX designers -- I find FB and Quora a pain to use, while the easiest sites are the hacked-together bootstrap ones or the ones that never left the 90s.

Brief examples: Quora on mobile has the user-hostile floating headers and if I switch to desktop the text is impossibly small. FB takes a long time to load on comments I click from my notifications, and recently forced the switchover to the ugly redesign.

I've seen someone put it that way, and I agree: developers are often to blame for mediocre UX, and designers for downright terrible UX.

> - bringing in a giant JS framework to make sure a single type of input field works the same for a single buggy browser + OS + device combination (Firefox on Android on Samsung S-something) as for the others is bad UX, and

This is a business solution, not a UX problem. You've got a billion users. 0.01% use the buggy browser with the bad input field. You're losing $X per hour. The input pays for itself.

Your argument assumes that bringing in a giant JS framework has zero negative effects, but this should never be taken for granted:

- The framework may well be buggy for a small percentage of users who happen to this time not include someone vocal. Result: you've lost users and you won't know it.

- The framework might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in terms of load times or cost. For some reason it seems to be rare to test for slow devices on slow, unreliable, metered connections, even though it's pretty much a given that the UX designers' devices and connections will be in the top 1% in all of these. Result: you've lost users and you won't know it.

Isn't the motivation for arbitrarily unique design to stand out? To look like you aren't just another commodity web site and product?

Standing out visually is helpful for branding, but the unique designs that succeed usually occur when presenting the relevant data in a useful way. So understanding helpful mappings is key.

For example, I switched to iTunes when it was first released on Windows mainly because of the “artist | album | song” as a row of lists interface. It wasn’t a new interface: Smalltalk used something like it for code, and OSX had it as a display option for file browsing before then too I think. But it was such a big improvement over Winamp for quickly finding the album or song I wanted to hear. IIRC Winamp at the time was a direct map over folders, and they were just vertical trees. When I switched, I had to do a bunch of tagging, but it was still worth it. If iTunes had used a gmail-like “tag and search” interface, I don’t think it would have been as compelling. I’m still waiting for something like it in Windows Explorer.

i believe that inteface is called 'miller columns.' didn't realize what i was missing til i used the OSX Finder.