Research by and on whom?

I don't doubt in the slightest that fancy mobile-y design styles look nice and are often intuitive at T=0, but we've lost a lot of throughput and information density by going for them as an industry.

It's the same as trying to write code on a phone, but backwards

All too often being 'mobile first' means being desktop last. It feels like a betrayal when UX becomes a zero sum tradeoff between new users and the enthusiast users who built the platform and community to be what it is. User research metrics will favor the new users every time because inexperienced users tend to be the majority. Eventually, the enthusiast users leave, causing many to wonder why the original culture and appeal of a website disappeared.

But none of that matters, the conversion rate went up 5% so the product manager still gets promoted :)

Microsoft went with whatever Windows 8 was based on user research too. Just because someone did a few interviews it doesn't make it good. :)

In this case I have to agree though. Linking to LinkedIn is simply ridiculous. What's next, linking to a high school yearbook?

All terrible UIs are said to be based on some amount of "user research" and are usually called "pleasant and intuitive" only by people promoting them.

Can you name a single failed interface that wasn't?