I'm not the parent poster but I see where they're coming from - form used to purely _follow_ function in computer UI/UX (as in most engineering fields) but now it's been delegated to "creatives" who, by virtue of their skill set, put form first.

Overall "betterness" is subjective, but speaking as someone who uses a computer as a tool I can honestly say I'd prefer it to function pragmatically than look pretty, if the prettiness requires sacrificing of pragmatism in some way.

I'm not sure I see any reason to expect or believe that engineers would make good ui/ux decisions. It's not clear to me that choices that are simple for engineering are necessarily even aligned with ultimately being functional.

A good ui/ux specialist will be interested in reducing error rates and improving ease of discovery and use through affordances and good organization of information and actions. Obviously other business interest may conflict with those goals but those same interests are capable of corrupting engineering as well.

And I don't think ui/ux work is as recent as this is all making it sound. Perhaps it is more common now even for orgs where their bread and butter isn't software but ultimately making tools useful and safe and accessible predates software entirely.

I think the shift in recent years has been from "UI designers" to "graphic designers". There is a massive difference between the two, but also a lot of conflation. Computer programmers may not be the best UI designers, but graphic designers are even less so, and the "but my art!" graphic designers are the absolute worst.

a main tenet of graphic design is sacrificing your art for functionality. i'm not sure what designers you've been speaking to, but i doubt they're professionals.

I think the difference is between "professionals" as in "gets paid doing this stuff", and as in "actually knows what they're doing".

As evidenced by the discussion here, there seems to be far more of the former than the latter.

That is still the wrong way to look at it. Functionality comes first, then you can make that look pretty. There should be no art in your UI.

I think they’re talking about a certain kind of “brutalist UI” that used to exist because it was the only possible UI for very simple systems (e.g. switches to bang bytes into registers to bootstrap a machine; character-oriented VRAM you wrote to directly; two-character Unix commands to save line-printer ink; etc.) and then was carried forward as a sort of tradition by people used to that restrictive minimalism (e.g. modern uses of Forth; C for application programming; shell commands that are non-interactive even when run directly from a PTY; essential config files in arcane formats that aren’t easily machine-generated, under the expectation that people are doing system bring-up by hand, Linux-From-Scratch style; etc.)

An example of good UI/UX specialists would be the people who designed IBM CUA. Where did they all go?

Given two functionally equivalent pieces of software, customers will choose the prettier of the two. That's all I want to contribute to the conversation.

Yes, same: If your solution users aren't satisfied, then your solution is naively unpragmatic.

That's a totally meaningless sentence.

It's really quite simple. I've been using PCs since Windows 3.1. With "good software", I intuitively know how to use it and how it will behave. Of course, new concepts arrive every now and then, like ribbons or the hamburger menu or whatever. However, what's behind them is in the end still the same.

When I am faced with the challenge of designing an interaction in software, I always try to make it fit established patterns.

Now I'm working with a UX expert. The interaction designs I receive are just not right. They are not intuitive. I am rather disappointed. My impression is that this expert is simply not an expert PC user. Of course, that's N=1 as far as my professional work is concerned.

Furthermore, in the last… 12-15 years, more and more software seems to change just for the sake of change. My personal opinion is that this is because of designers trying to justify their existence.

It comes down to a simple, enduring principle: people who don't use something shouldn't have sole authority over its design.

So many of the complaints about the dominance of seemingly-incompetent UX professionals really boil down to failure to consume one's own dog food. The UX pros are not incompetent at UX design, but they are unfamiliar with the tasks that the program will ultimately be used for, and that's even worse.

This phenomenon is more widespread than most people realize, even here. If you buy a new Porsche 911 today, you'll find that the garage-door opener button has been moved to a touchscreen menu. People who take a bus to work are now designing Porsches, in other words. It's only going to get worse from here.

Corollary is that many engineers are unfamiliar with the tasks that end users are actually going to use the software for. This phenomenon is definitely more widespread that people in this thread seem to realise, afaics because many are power users used to power interfaces. Power interfaces are generally not enormously useful for the majority of users (preemptive /s: yes, please tell me anecdotes about how pet power interface is superior).

Yes, there is flawed design: that covers most design, in the same way there is flawed programming, which covers most programming, and flawed approaches to business which covers most business, and so on.

[edit] the feeling I get from the threads here is that many commenters don't get that most design involves huge tradeoffs, same as programming. Design training is not "make a pretty thing" (which is what many commenters seem to be dismissively suggesting, which is actively offensive), Dribbble is really not reflective of actual design, and much of what you see is surface driven by designers having to find tradeoffs to deal with management edicts/commercial goals/technical limitations that may conflict with otherwise good design

My pet peeve is the new file handling

The programs used to ask for a file name before saving it somewhere. Programs with modern UI/UX just save the file to a random place and then you have to search it.

The browser saves it to Downloads, or to the Desktop, or perhaps to the home folder.

The GNOME screenshot tool saves it to the home folder

The GNOME audiorecorder saves it to somewhere else

iOS homescreen management is one example. Three confirmations to delete app. Can’t delete app from search. Editing stacks is miserable.

The the control center... changing audio source - fine motor skills required if you ever find how. Long pressing things means its faster to do things from settigns.

My pet peeve is macos Photos. Forget ever watching your videos for which storage you pay. It just won’t play until you click edit which is gonna just crash app about 10% of time. If it doesn’t it takes 5 minutes to download at like 10mbps.

> Three confirmations to delete app. Can’t delete app from search. Editing stacks is miserable.

I would even consider it by design - management doesn't want apps to be deleted so easily. It's a subtle nudge for a user to accumulate apps, which slowly increase and eat up disk space.

The justification is that if no one deletes apps often, the button to do so should be hidden away, so users don't "accidentally" delete an app. And the designers are just a cog in the wheel - they listen to the objective given to them by management and do exactly that.

This is why you see great designs from apps that are written/made by a single person, or from a small team that cares. One such example is IDEs like Intellij - the UI/UX design is very much geared towards developers (by developers).

This is it. I'm shocked by the amount of blame designers are getting here while they have a job that gets the most unskilled criticism and feedback (as displayed in many comments here).

Everyone has an opinion on design, including stakeholders and management who their jobs depend on. I think all the engineers here don't realise the privilege of having their own impenetrable domain.

Add or Remove Programs on Windows often requires more than 3 clicks to uninstall an application as well, so I'd argue that specific complaint isn't new.

On macOS you can usually just drag the .app file to the Trash.

Lots of people studying UX design but not actually using a lot of computer programs.