I then heard more about the designers at Microsoft for Vista through Windows 11 which deeply confirmed most of my prior negative assumptions. It sometimes really is as simple as folks who think they know better than anyone who uses their product; people who refused to dogfood or even touch the thing they ostensibly work on, in any given day.
They were bad enough, but then Visual Studio 2013 HAD THEM TOO.
That was triply bad: ugly, took more screen width than Mixed Case, and perhaps worst of all, to a programmer they looked like errors.
Most of the languages we work with are case sensitive, so FILE and File look like two different things. It was a constant irritant.
The chief designer for VS2013 had a blog post about the new design, and naturally in the comments there were a lot of complaints about the uppercase menus.
The designer eventually replied: "Thanks for your feedback. We decided to keep the uppercase menus because we want more energy in this part of the interface."
More energy. I am not making this up.
They eventually came to their senses, and the next releases of Office and Visual Studio went back to conventional Mixed Case menus, just like every Windows app has used since the beginning.
(Note: my use of uppercase at the top of this message is not for emphasis or shouting, it's for illustrative purposes.)
It always seems to be new-age mumbo jumbo with these sort of design people. Design needs to be given back over to the engineers again. I know that suggesting is going to draw ridicule; it's easy and popular to point to the worst engineer-designed interfaces to ridicule the design abilities of all engineers. But form needs to be balanced with function and these artsy new-age designers who justify everything they do with faux-poetic metaphors have been a disaster. There needs to be balance.
Engineers can be taught the pragmatic virtue of interfaces designed for common people. Using standardized widgets and guidelines, engineers are perfectly capable of creating interfaces that are intuitive to users, even if they don't satisfy the dedicated designer's sense of aesthetics. Just look at the GUI libraries from the 90s and compare it with the dumpster fire of modern interfaces. In the 90s an engineer designing an interface would use a button widget and the button would look like a button. Today designers make everything look sleek and special to leave their artistic mark and I am left with no fucking clue what I can even click.
No, no, then you get the open source approach:
In case the desktop shortcut for your application is not available with the /usr/share/applications/ directory you have and option to create the Desktop launcher manually. In this example we will create and Desktop application shortcut for Skype application. Obtain the following information for any given application you wish to create shortcut for. Below you can find an example:
Path Application Icon: /snap/skype/101/meta/gui/skypeforlinux.png
Application name: Skype
Path to executable binary: /snap/bin/skype
$ which skype
/snap/bin/skype
The general dysfunction of open source design is much broader than UI design and has little to do with engineers in general being incapable of good UI design. You might as well linux bluetooth woes to claim that engineers shouldn't be allowed to write device drivers. Whether it's designing a GUI, an API, or any other system, there will be some engineers who are good at it an others who suck. To get good design of any sort out of engineers you need an organizational structure that promotes talent and weeds out the hacks. The open source scene broadly lacks such structure and struggles to do this.
What you're talking about is a deficiency with community driven model of development, not a general deficiency of all engineers. Put 20 random chefs into a kitchen with no organizational structure imposed on them and your restaurant will be a disaster. But using that to claim chefs can't run a restaurant is absurd.
In other words, we jumped off this bridge because all our friends did to. Consistency... with other Microsoft products. What a joke. What about consistency with virtually every other Windows application, both from 3rd parties and Microsoft's own history? Citing consistency to justify such a bizarre departure from the 20 year norm is truly insulting.
Translation: Here is vague explanation that distracts from the fact that I made this choice emotionally rather than rationally.
I see this time and time again. People are simply reacting emotionally. If they try to explain why they behaved a certain way, they offer an explanation with something that sounds rational but isn't actually the reason.
In this case, the designer probably was hurt that people didn't like their work and stubbornly resisted it.
The default white title bars that blend seamlessly into any white content behind them is a perfect example of this and so many people don't even realize they can change it.
Windows usability has declined since Windows 7 which had a lot of things that seemed like the designers were trying to improve their own lives while using the software. My favorite was the thick borders that were easy to grab for resizing, etc., even on high DPI displays. Compare it to Linux UIs where you often have to grab a single pixel border on a 4k monitor to resize a window.
Thankfully Win 10 still has large targets for grabbing window edges even though the border is only 1px.
On Linux you hold the super/windows key and click/drag anywhere on the window to move it, or right-click/drag anywhere on the window to resize it. It's much easier than using thick borders. Discoverability is admittedly not great, but this feature easily coexists with window borders. Microsoft could keep the thick borders by default and also implement this.
“Don’t do it the way everyone else does it or the way you’ve always done it; our designer decided to make that hard for <inscrutable reasons not related to delighting existing users> and instead we offer this hard-to-discover non-idiomatic workaround.
“You will grow to love the workaround because it doesn’t hurt nearly as much, kind of like stopping after you’ve been hitting yourself in the head with a hammer.”
To put things in perspective, this is how we get stuff like the Eiffel tower.
I'm not sure I got the point across. The whole point is that focusing on design is how we get outstanding, high-quality results. It makes the product more appealing and can even make it transcend it's status. High quality design creates value with negligible impact on cost.
The Eiffel Tower exemplifies that. It was designed as a temporary exhibition but it's impact transcends that of a mere temporary structure. It became the landmark of a European capital, and the symbol of one of the richest, most successful and culturally dominant nations on earth, and in the process generates fortunes in revenue due to tourism.
Another good example is the Sagrada Família cathedral in Barcelona, or pretty much each of Gaudi's work. Even the Gaudi's Park Guell, which failed as a real estate project, is a resounding landmark and tourist attraction.
I think most people disagree with me so I don't think it's going anywhere. But that's my view of it.
That was a popular opinion when it was built. Eventually it became iconic, but nevertheless I don't see many cities rushing to build their own.
Designers nowadays are in a fashion to get impressed by things that make the results of their work worse. That leads to completely different problems.
I've been a designer for about a long time. I've done many dumb things, but never that. I have definitely had the irrational thought that "users will think I'm a bad designer if we ship this product", but that's usually because it was a bad product that shouldn't have been shipped.
I've never gotten the sense that my peers do this either. I have definitely gotten the sense that some designers want their designs to impress Apple, and Steve Jobs specifically.
Everybody wants to impress their peers to some degree, but to be clear, that usually translates into just doing a really good job. I've never had another designer show me something and say "Nobody else will appreciate this, but I thought you'd like it".
It was applied to a lot more than that. Even the F11 6er still had it.
What is interesting, though, is how much flame surfacing started to flood car designs after Bangle's BMWs had been out for a few years. I'm not arguing that the E65 looked good, but he certainly made an impact on all of car design, seemingly overnight.
There's a difference between a customer who plans on selling a billion units, and some company like this game controller design team that clearly making some crappy kids toys. I think the OP twitter person just learned a valuable lesson.
Go on to learn what Bauhaus architecture looks like, how that led to modernism, Frank Lloyd Wright, then Mies Van Der Rohe, then brutalism, and finally Frank Gehry in ridiculous mode.[2] Understand why this didn't result in liveable cities.
Then you can talk to designers.
[1] kare.com
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ray_and_Maria_Stata_Cente...
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You always get some people who build asinine crap in order so show off their "mastery" of their craft. It's just that product design and web development have more money sloshing around to provide for that kind of indulgence than residential plumbing and semi trailer manufacturing do.
I increasingly subscribe to the thesis that many designers and design teams design primarily in an effort to impress other designers. They don't have to use the things. They often don't even really care if the things work at all. They care that other designers - their artistic peers - are impressed.
This does not generally result in what we the customers or users would regard as good design. The phenomenon reminds me of software engineers I've worked with who were more interested in building something with event sourcing and stream processing and functional languages rather than solving the problem more readily.