The computing world was at peace until then, we had UI designers and engineers who through much research and trial-and-error produced very nice UIs for us to use. The UX industry came in and destroyed all that for shits and profits; literal decades of experience and precedence thrown out the window in the name of the latest fashion trend.
Really? They just came from a war elsewhere. Standing up from XML trenches and walking joyfully into green JSON fields. JSON to hydrate UI's.
I don't remember that era of great UI. Sites were still inaccessible except no one cared, multitude of dark patterns still exists, confusing design language, no information organization at all.
The "trial-and-error" approach was much more "error-and-error" based entirely on guesses by the designer or engineer. I'm an engineer and remember, working through that time period, the horrible sites we created. I had a part in implementing them.
Not to mention the idea of "Web Application" was still very much incipiente in the mid-to-late 2000s. Who had great design for that? Go back and look at Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace back then, hardly a great example to be had, regardless of how bad we might think it is today.
If you're in the camp who treats UX as a professional title/career, then in principle it has very little to do with UI, and being labelled "UX/UI" is often an "insult" to UX professionals along the same lines as "Computer Scientist / IT support", or "Electrical Engineer/Electrician", "Civil Engineer/Sanitation Engineer", "Pharmacist/Teller at Boots", "Doctor/Medical receptionist". (not to imply that the latter professions are 'lesser', but rather to point out that the former professions in the pairs are typically deemed to require a higher standard of skills/training rather than simply vocational/apprentice-based training).
At the same time, I'm not naive to not understand the fact that, if a large number of people start referring to X as Y, then after a while, insisting that X isn't Y is a lost cause, and you might as well start calling it Z instead.
But, e.g. my wife was a senior UX professional who is now doing her PhD in Experimental Psychology; the original motivation was that this would make her a better UX researcher when conducting controlled experimental studies on behalf of her employer. She specialises in voice assistive tech, and her topic relates to isolating auditory markers of voice trustworthiness. I can tell you if she applied for a UX job and the interviewers started asking her what css colours she prefers on buttons, she'd be pretty pissed.
With that understanding, it seems to me that many, if not most, of the criticisms being levelled here do, in fact, apply to the field of UX research.
But certainly not all of them.
This is often a motte and bailey distinction though, where the "UX" person's background is UI, and they think only about UI. But they can charge more because theoretically UX is everything.
I don't think this is an individual's issue, as if everyone hires UX instead of UI then what do you do? It's a UX consultancy issue.
The poor usability of modern interfaces certainly doesn't come from people who care about what it's like to use it in practice. It comes from people whose main skill lies within the field of aesthetics.
What should you call yourself if you're actually interested in working with usability, and happy to leave the visual design to others?
UX.
Most serious people in UX who see job postings mentioning "UX/UI" avoid those jobs in the same manner that a C++ coder would avoid "C/C++".
But I agree that doesn't do much to dissuade people who don't quite know the difference (or what it is that they actually need or want) from advertising "UX/UI" or "C/C++" and then people applying to these jobs.
There being "impostors" in the field who bluff their way through, while regrettable, does not imply that the whole industry is made up, any more than the existence of people applying to data science jobs with nothing but excel skills says nothing about data science.
And some companies really, really need UX people on board.
Now, I'm someone who insists on having a UX/UI person in the team when I'm making an app, as I want it all to go well, and I don't mind spending a chunk to get it, but the number of people I've found who can actually do that is vanishingly small compared to the number of people who are billed out as expensive UX consultants.
* Octocat is the mascot of Github, while Clippit was not only not the mascot of MS Office, it wasn't even the only option of assistant, just the default one.
* Octocat is not a functional part of the UI. That is to say, you don't interact with it to do anything. It's just part of the Github logo and it shows up on certain screens, notably the 404 one. Clippit could be used as an additional interface for the application to accomplish tasks.
* Octocat isn't animated, Clippit was.
It seems to me that the only thing they have in common is that they're cartoon characters that appear somewhere on the interface of software products. You can complain about it on aesthetic grounds, but certainly not on UX grounds. It doesn't make Github any easier or harder to use.
Neither did Clipit -- every function it offered was also accessible through the UI. It was a completely optional element that degraded the user experience exactly the same way Octocat does: you got to look at a goofy, childish character whether you wanted to write a cute check from the tooth fairy for your niee, a report on inappropriate use of company resources, or a death notice for your late father's friends.
You could at least turn it off, whereas Octocat is in the top-left corner of literally every Github page, and prominently featured wearing an astronaut's costume (!?) on the homepage.
>you got to look at a goofy, childish character
Like I said, aesthetic grounds.
>whether you wanted to write a cute check from the tooth fairy for your niee, a report on inappropriate use of company resources, or a death notice for your late father's friends.
>You could at least turn it off, whereas Octocat is in the top-left corner of literally every Github page, and prominently featured wearing an astronaut's costume (!?) on the homepage.
This is quite an inane complaint. Plenty of serious products and companies have cartoon characters as mascots or logos. LLVM has a dragon in the logo; the Go language has a gopher; the Rust language has a crab; the FreeBSD and OpenBSD OSs have a devil and a blowfish respectively. All of these have varying levels of visibility when you visit their web sites.
> cartoon figures in professional applications (please explain to me how Octocat is different from Clippit)
Is Octocat not a cartoon figure? Is Github not a professional application?
I'm not aware of any authoritative definition of user experience that excludes "aesthetic grounds" from the field of UX. How an interface looks and the feeling it conveys is a part of the user experience. The UX industry doesn't operate with this distinction -- see e.g. NN Group's oft-quoted definition (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/definition-user-experience/), which considers aesthetics, and UI design in general a component of UX, or the ISO 9241 definition.
A tongue-in-cheek logo is one thing, but a goofy interface, from the ever-present logo to the overall widget design, is way out there in kindergarten land. The comparison between Octocat's use and, say, that of the Rust crab, is itself unwarranted: you can (in fact, I do) write Rust all the time and not see the crab for weeks, whereas that goofy cat critter is literally on every Github page.
As for Clippit specifically, while its graphical design was obviously not the primary reason why it was hated, it was definitely one component of it -- in fact, it's one of the reasons why it was specifically considered distracting. Contemporary studies, like Swartz's notorious dissertation about why everyone hated Clippit, obviously focused on the functional aspect, but it's telling that the quantitative framework in use at the time put "fun" and "useful" in separate categories.
The sad truth is that UIs have gotten gradually prettier but less usable since their peak in the mid to late 1990s. I honestly don't know how an entire UXR department can be justified if they just keep making things worse. Frankly I am sick of the utter wasteland that touchscreens have created, the giant crater they blasted in people's imaginations. And I'm sick of this endless cycle of redesign.
I do not give two shits about drop shadows or rounded corners or animations. I want to use the frickin software tool to do frickin work. I am not looking to play tiddly winks with an animated brochure.
Bring back the damn drop down menus written in my native language with keyboard shortcuts that are right there in the damn menu. I'm sick to death of iconese. I don't speak it. It's not a language, it's alien hieroglyphics. And stop telling me it's for my own good. It's for their good, so the crap fits and they don't have to go to a translation team. Nothing could be lazier or more hostile to users.
Which brings me to the final sin: if you are a UXR and you are not polling actual users, talking to actual people, sitting down and actually watching them use the thing, listening to actual words coming out of their mouths when they do so, which include an *&#$ of profanity, and you are instead relying on indirect means, then congrats, you are a trying to scale a process that doesn't. fricking. scale.
> The sad truth is that UIs have gotten gradually prettier
I don't think they've become prettier at all. What they've become is bland and uniform. All basically the same look, apparently trying to be inoffensive rather than beautiful.
If "predictability" is a key principle of good User Experience™, then UI uniformity is the best way to achieve it. Consistent interface patterns translate across applications and make software easier to use, on the whole. Users learn the pattern once and can use it everywhere with lower mental overhead.
I would take a bland-but-consistent UI across all software over beautiful-but-unique. Modern UI design has taken this stance too for good reason.
Also worth pointing out that a "bland" UI of today (let's say macOS or iOS since they are so pervasive) would be stunningly, mind-blowingly beautiful to a user 30 years ago. It's all relative, we've just gotten spoiled by beautiful UIs to the point they are considered bland now.
> Sure, it can be fun at first, but learning a million unique UIs that all look and behave differently is exhausting as a user.
Absolutely. I wasn't calling for anything like that.
Uniformity in behavior is highly desirable. Uniformity in the general location of controls and general workflow is also highly desirable. Also highly desirable (but not in fashion anymore, so isn't really done) is the ability to easily tell how to accomplish things.
But you can have that without being visually bland and without looking essentially indistinguishable from everything else.
> Also worth pointing out that a "bland" UI of today (let's say macOS or iOS since they are so pervasive) would be stunningly, mind-blowingly beautiful to a user 30 years ago.
I'm old enough to remember being a user 30 years ago, and you do have a point. But the most beautiful painting in the world looks a lot less beautiful when every other painting looks just like it.
Also, I would argue that the "beautiful" days of UI design are over. What is in fashion now wouldn't really have been considered mind-blowingly beautiful 30 years ago. Technically impressive, sure, but aesthetically neutral at best.
> we've just gotten spoiled by beautiful UIs
Not spoiled. Habituated. It's the way people are. If you eat nothing but your favorite food every day, you will eventually reach a point where you dislike it.
Variety is an important design goal, too. You can have variety without sacrificing beauty or consistency. You jsut have to break out of using UI frameworks or slavishly following guidelines like "Material Design", or whatever the flavor of the day is.
Regardless, I'll take the UIs of 30 years ago over those of today even though they were uglier. They were also more powerful and generally easier to use.