UX clichés

Spotify and Google Play Music are a kind of worse version of UI of Foobar2000, with much limited features. There was a huge UX regression coming with the move to the cloud. I'm all for things evolving, but it's better if they don't devolve.

>> “If Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, they would have told him faster horses”

I don't buy that, many people probably would have said that they wanted a horse that doesn't poop

As a like-/counter-anecdote, I developed semiconductor CAD tools for 10 years, after spending 10 years using them. When they first started being developed with GUIs, GUI meant UI, and its oft-maligned sibling, UX, wasn't a term. In my learnings, Xt (XToolKit) started putting words and code behind the abstract patterns in the late 80's, but our tool usability suffered horribly as more and more (usually nonresizing) Athena widgets were crammed into every goddamn corner of the screen with microscopic b&w pixmaps. Because of the lack of distinction between UI & UX in the tool design process, tools were extremely challenging to navigate with each new feature-rich release.

One of my first tasks as a project manager in 2004 was to introduce the web concepts of UI/UX into what had become essentially commandlines converted to Tcl/Tk (after Xt we went to Tcl/Tk.. ugh).

First challenge was to convince the old timer CAD devs.

Once I was able to explain there the difference between UX and UI, it waslike a light went on over everyone's head: how you use it is different from what it looks like. I know, obvious now, but not 15 years ago. We spent 10 months really driving the new buzzword UX/UI in order to get buy-in for profiling how the top 3 existing CAD tools (formal verification, layout, and timing) were being used via instrumentation and interviews. We then proceeded to completely redesign the GUIs in Qt using a consistent set patterns, icons, and workflows.

Then we had to convince the old timer engineer users.

We put a lot of effort into classes to explain how to migrate, and holy shit did we get yelled at. So much "It worked fine before, why did you change it?!?!?!?" Uhh... because a feature you use 80% of the time required 5x more clicks to get to than a feature you used 20% of the time? FML. It got better, people liked it more on our follow ups months later. [The first product to use the new suite completed in 12 instead of 18 months and I personally believe it was due to the new tools being faster, but I'm biased, and it could have been a variety of factors.]

I agree with your point that it is frustrating as fuck when a UI/UX pattern changes, and it should not be done glibly. But I have also found myself getting angry at having to adapt to a new change that ultimately made me more productive, just because of my own inertia.

/shrugs/

PS. Ironically, as a sad end to this story: the GUI's my team made in the early/mid-2000's eventually bloated after 10 years in almost the same way the original AIX/Sparc GUI's I used in the early 90's did. New coders came on board, and new managers, and they just crammed new buttons into to the tools without thinking about the UX. That was ca 2010 when I left, so I don't know where they at today, but I did have a "the more the things change, the more they stay the same" moment!!

It's true. Asking users what they want is not that useful. Users don't know what they want and any suggestion they make probably won't scale to others.

On the other hand, understanding your users, how they work, what they hate, what their pain points are is incredibly useful.

While running a UX/UI design studio for B2B SaaS companies for 10+ years - I’ve seen the UX space evolve into a cult like crowd of designers with too many “gurus” and design research methodologies. Really, all you have to do is 2 things:

# talk to your users.

# look at your data/analytics

It’s really not rocket science. These two metrics will take you minutes to find UX problems and opportunities in your product. Then, try to solve them with the least amount of design possible.

Repeat.