On a similar note, constantly redesigning UI just to redesign them encourages this too -- why develop expertise or skill when it will be undermined because some UX designer wants to make his mark?
I get the strong impression that UX has stopped being about the users and has become more about the designer's ego or his employer's interests. It's the best explanation I can think of for all the redesigns that no one wanted or asked for.
IMHO, the first questions any UX designer should ask themselves are:
1. Is the new design a useless side-grade from what we already have (i.e. just doing something differently to do it differently)?
2. Are the advantages over the existing design significant? Is it really worth invalidating existing user knowledge?
I've had a few run-ins with UI designers and architects (of the building kind) as an end user, and they've left a sour taste in my mouth. A lot of dismissing user feedback with pablum about "change being hard" or insistence that the changes are popular with some silent majority.
A small change in user engagement can mean millions in revenue. Or billions, in the largest cases.
Things are extensively a/b tested to validate that the change drives revenue. And most companies are fine with forcing the user to learn, as long at it increases profits.
Most everyone is looking at their paycheck and status, not the bottom line.
They mentioned something about a design philosophy in which there should never be more than one button, or if there were two then one should be the main button that people really should click on.
It seems there is an effort to raise a whole school of new designers on the idea that there isn't that much of a difference between software users and chicken in a farm.
Wikipedia is a clear example of not taking this into consideration. There's a hundred links mixed with the text, and buttons and doodads everywhere around it, which makes it very clear to actually think about what you want to do.
If you compare Encarta '96 with Wikipedia:
<https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/links/encarta.png>
<https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/links/wikipedia.png>
It's clearly very different. The Encarta design is a lot more quiet. If you're reading, then you are reading. There are sparse inline links, but nothing near the shotgun linkedness of Wikipedia.
I've experimented with stripping down Wikipedia, producing this:
<https://encyclopedia.marginalia.nu/wiki/Plato>
It's definitely several steps too far (but taking things too far is the best way to get the feel for an idea), but I find that much easier to read, because the choices are moved out of the text and into the bottom of the text. That is, you read first, and decide what to do next once you are finished reading.
The notion that the relation to other things is at least as important as the thing itself permeates Wikipedia. Many smaller articles, like e.g. Differentiable Programming [1] probably link to more topics than the article itself has words.
I think a "stripped down" Wikipedia is an experiment worth trying, but it would serve a subtly different purpose, with some use cases being left behind and some being better served.
I often wonder if it would be more beneficial for websites to transition to footnotes with all pertinent links at the bottom of the page.
I think perhaps having multiple views for different needs would be a way forward.
> I think perhaps having multiple views for different needs would be a way forward.
I think what this thread is missing is that Encarta and Wikipedia are vastly different products. If Wikipedia had multiple views for different needs it would literally die, because it's community edited. If its UI encouraged staying withing a narrow lane, then it would have even more problems with getting readers to cross over to being editors.
I'm not saying it's all bad, though - it's something that could be an option offered to the unfortunate people with attention deficit disorder.
The forced text width, however, is inexcusable.
Maybe multiple columns could be an option, I guess. Not sure how to do that well with varying paragraph sizes, though.
I also actually prefer wider lines, as I don't find following them difficult, and prefer wider lines and having to do less scrolling. It's also fun seeing how a lot of random blog articles which seem long in a narrow layout are in fact very short. :)
I sadly can't diagnose since my phone isn't powerful enough to run Firefox. Looks as intended on Firefox desktop with emulation mode, though.
Seeing the encarta/marginalia version vs the wikipedia one really drives home the point. It's interesting how the design had a strong impact on my experience, and yet I never really noticed it before.
I feel a bit like a fish suddenly aware of the water they're in.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato
It is still consumption-oriented and stripped down, but retains far more non-textual information than your experiment.
The truth is (IMO) that UX is more closely related to marketing than it is to technical design work. The entire point of having a UX designer is to get marketing speak and advertising techniques right into the heart of the engineering process.
If engineers just built tools in the way that was the most sensible to them, they would have too many options and give the user far too much control. Ostensibly the reason given why this is bad is that it is 'confusing' for the user, but the reality is that it allows the end user to use the product in ways that do not maximize the profit. Even worse, users might use the product in a way that does not reflect the spirit of The Brand. It is telling that UX revolves around creating user stories, because this is exactly how advertising is done; “Martha, a woman in her mid thirties, is trying to balance home life with her need to efficiently walk her dog…”
Using modern design philosophy you won't risk getting a really terrible UI but the trade off is you will not get something new and innovative.
I am sure there are all kinds of issues with the scale of complexity also. It would seem nearly impossible for a designer to come up with a good innovative UI if they are not an expert in using the system themselves so the chicken in a farm ends up being the least bad option.
... which you have to look at, because the position and function changes. There is no muscle memory with dynamic UI.
I recall a visually impaired woman who couldn't hail an Uber. I could tell she was very fast with the old UI. But, the button had shifted. She was going to call her Husband to drive over from Oakland to pick her up in San Francisco. Instead, I showed her where the button was.
I don't think there's something wrong with CTAs.
You can misuse/abuse this technology as you can with every, but providing a structured way to achieve a desired result is not bad per se.
It helps build muscle/"brain" memory and can help you perform your task better/quicker.
I myself always searched for customization, starting with toys I dissembled and put together in a way I liked. Whenever I went to the toy store I looked for screws and not glue. To my first computers, I loved DOS and when it went away for Windows GUI I took to the registry and then searched for something else and found Linux. Tinkering is my destination and I am never happy with what I have. This drive is the way I am built, I think, and no matter what anybody would want me to do I simply can not. I must have things my way.
There's the opposite kind of people, who just want something that works right out of the box and find any tweaking to be a distraction from getting shit done. They are the majority and products are geared towards them because the market for tinkerers is too small for the economies of scale. I used to blame companies but now I just think they make what they can sell. And they must sell to people who actually hate computers and technology, they just like the products of it.
For me, I am a power user of computers and technology, but I couldn't care less about my car and just want it to get me places.
Other people are the opposite, and love tinkering with their cars. Or maybe they are a power user of carpentry tools, while others (like me) just need a basic drill.
I think one thing that worries me is that there are markets that cater to power users in other areas (cars, tools) but the way software is going, almost all software is being stripped down and power being taken away from all users since the non-power-user base is so large. This is especially true with mobile technology, but it is creeping into desktops/laptops as well.
I interact with plenty of interfaces that are difficult to learn but rewarding. I'm happy to spend my time working on the interface between my trumpet and my lips, or my piano and my fingers. Or hell, I will happily futz around with various synthesizers for hours, customizing which knobs control which parts of the matrix of the sound-shaping going on in the device.
I don't like to spend time learning UI that are difficult to learn but not rewarding.
I am a-okay not having to think about what color I want for the buttons the AWS console. I'm a-okay with google autocorrecting my misspellings or sending me to a different keyword, as I've taken the time to learn just enough about their interface to know how to circumvent that when it doesn't work well.
It's much more rewarding to learn the interfaces that I do want to make deliberate choices about than it is to have to master interfaces for things that about whose choices I do not care about; I feel like that choice engenders empowerment rather than helplessness.
Having to make interface decisions for the myriad of things I interact with on a day-to-day basis would be exhausting.
This might make sense for b2c public services, or areas where a high cost of training on continually 'new' users hits the bottom line.
It makes far less sense for internal services/apps, and it's something I end up 'fighting' with with clients sometimes. They'll have 'design teams' who justify their "ux of the day" decisions with data from public services.
An internal reporting system with 10-12 dedicated users who will use it 3 hrs per day as their main operating function should have more levers/buttons/filters/etc than a marketing website aimed at getting people to buy a specific brand of dog food.
But that marketing site looks so 'good' and 'inviting' because... there's only 2 buttons, in particular shades, etc. The reporting interface should be warm and inviting right? With smooth transitions to bring a sense of calm to the users, rather than induce tension, right?
I agree there is a UX crisis happening now, but fixing these pathologies requires changing the incentive structures around commercial software. I think the best we can do realistically is get people into open source.
For ads maybe, but if anyone thinks this for retail it's either because they are relying on the invasive tracking for (mis)attribution, or because they broke the checkout flow by putting a non-optional call to an analytics function in the button handler without a try/catch.
Maybe it's from looking too much at the data? There seems to be this notion that if the users don't immediately understand the interface, then it's a bad interface. But that's ignoring that human beings learn by fumbling. That doesn't make the world bad or the thing poorly designed.
If you take away every opportunity to learn and figure things out, to make mistakes, then you haven't helped anyone, you've made them helpless.
We should be thinking a lot more about how we can enhance user agency, how we can allow them to make deliberate choices, rather than how we can take that ability away and how to corral them into some particular behavior of our own preference.