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41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

uxtigers.com

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Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#21

Post by BlueTemplar »

hdaz0017 wrote: post #10

Congratulations Jakob on your Liberation Day :) Are you saying the UI is your fault ;-) Serious question though: how come over the last 15 to 20 years UI's have got considerably worse?

IMHO a lot of this comes from :

1.) The move to the Web, where the browser's interface gets in the way once you start doing something more fancy than just viewing basic HTML documents.

2.) Trying to make a program work well both on a small touchscreen and on a large screen + mouse + keyboard : this is literally impossible without the result being a worse experience for both.

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#22

Post by karaterobot »

wharvle wrote: post #11
zer00eyz wrote: post #9

20 ish years ago I ended up with a UX gig. Best experience of my work history. Detouring into site structure, information design, and doing actual USABILITY (behind a 2 way mirror watching real people use your app) was amazing. Jacob Nielson was blowhard even then. His "all links must be blue and underlined" mantra was tired even then. It takes a lot for me to say this, but his pedantry at the time puts peak Richard…

> Now older and wiser, candidly a lot of folks would be well served by default blue links, og html submit buttons and tables for layouts. A fair bit of modern UI is complete trash: it's the product of a designer and a product person putting the next bullet point on their resume. If I were emperor of the world I’d make every consumer program pass a battery of tests that included demonstrating sufficient usability for…

If you aren't making a consumer product for nursing home patients with sub-90 IQs, then you'd be wasting your time, and the feedback you got from the exercise wouldn't be useful. In fact, any decisions you made based on it could be wrong. The point isn't to design for the lowest common denominator, but for the users you will actually have, and usability test participants should be recruited with that in mind.

There is some merit to what I assume is your underlying argument, but the way you phrase it isn't helpful.

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#23

Post by wegfawefgawefg »

wharvle wrote: post #11
zer00eyz wrote: post #9

20 ish years ago I ended up with a UX gig. Best experience of my work history. Detouring into site structure, information design, and doing actual USABILITY (behind a 2 way mirror watching real people use your app) was amazing. Jacob Nielson was blowhard even then. His "all links must be blue and underlined" mantra was tired even then. It takes a lot for me to say this, but his pedantry at the time puts peak Richard…

> Now older and wiser, candidly a lot of folks would be well served by default blue links, og html submit buttons and tables for layouts. A fair bit of modern UI is complete trash: it's the product of a designer and a product person putting the next bullet point on their resume. If I were emperor of the world I’d make every consumer program pass a battery of tests that included demonstrating sufficient usability for…

Too strict. I implore you to reconsider.

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#24

Post by karaterobot »

hdaz0017 wrote: post #10

Congratulations Jakob on your Liberation Day :) Are you saying the UI is your fault ;-) Serious question though: how come over the last 15 to 20 years UI's have got considerably worse?

They haven't, the median application or website is significantly better today than it was 20 years ago. Without any additional information, my guess is that you're thinking of some specific examples of good apps from 20 years ago, and bad apps from today, and incorrectly generalizing from a selection bias.

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#25

Post by wharvle »

tbitrust wrote: post #18
wharvle wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now older and wiser, candidly a lot of folks would be well served by default blue links, og html submit buttons and tables for layouts. A fair bit of modern UI is complete trash: it's the product of a designer and a product person putting the next bullet point on their resume. If I were emperor of the world I’d make every consumer program pass a battery of tests that included demonstrating sufficient usability for…

> a panel of users with sub-90 IQ who were in a stressful environment and trying to complete other tasks at the same time, blind users, deaf users, et c. For me, the first task would be to make absolutely sure that I block any apps designed by you. Such lack of empathy in your wording proves that you cannot possibly be a decent, half-decent, or even mediocre UI designer.

… lack of empathy? Where?

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#26

Post by wharvle »

karaterobot wrote: post #22
wharvle wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now older and wiser, candidly a lot of folks would be well served by default blue links, og html submit buttons and tables for layouts. A fair bit of modern UI is complete trash: it's the product of a designer and a product person putting the next bullet point on their resume. If I were emperor of the world I’d make every consumer program pass a battery of tests that included demonstrating sufficient usability for…

If you aren't making a consumer product for nursing home patients with sub-90 IQs, then you'd be wasting your time, and the feedback you got from the exercise wouldn't be useful. In fact, any decisions you made based on it could be wrong. The point isn't to design for the lowest common denominator, but for the users you will actually have, and usability test participants should be recruited with that in mind. There i…

A whole lot of us will be mentally impaired sooner or later.

Our experience with software when that happens is sad for everyone but bad UI designers. For them, it’s justice.

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#27

Post by zubairq »

wharvle wrote: post #11
zer00eyz wrote: post #9

20 ish years ago I ended up with a UX gig. Best experience of my work history. Detouring into site structure, information design, and doing actual USABILITY (behind a 2 way mirror watching real people use your app) was amazing. Jacob Nielson was blowhard even then. His "all links must be blue and underlined" mantra was tired even then. It takes a lot for me to say this, but his pedantry at the time puts peak Richard…

> Now older and wiser, candidly a lot of folks would be well served by default blue links, og html submit buttons and tables for layouts. A fair bit of modern UI is complete trash: it's the product of a designer and a product person putting the next bullet point on their resume. If I were emperor of the world I’d make every consumer program pass a battery of tests that included demonstrating sufficient usability for…

I kind of like this idea of making sure that any UI passes some sanity checks before it is released

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#28

Post by brailsafe »

wharvle wrote: post #26
karaterobot wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you aren't making a consumer product for nursing home patients with sub-90 IQs, then you'd be wasting your time, and the feedback you got from the exercise wouldn't be useful. In fact, any decisions you made based on it could be wrong. The point isn't to design for the lowest common denominator, but for the users you will actually have, and usability test participants should be recruited with that in mind. There i…

A whole lot of us will be mentally impaired sooner or later. Our experience with software when that happens is sad for everyone but bad UI designers. For them, it’s justice.

A UI designer does a good job if the person who's paying them thinks they did a good job, not whether or not they actually followed best practices, unless that's how the work gets approved. A frontend developer does a good job if their tickets are done and their boss likes them, which may or may not include actual quality work that's accessible or usable. That's the secret I wish I'd known when I started working, could have avoided the extra personal cost of trying produce quality results despite there being no incentive structure for it.

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#29

Post by zer00eyz »

tbitrust wrote: post #18
wharvle wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now older and wiser, candidly a lot of folks would be well served by default blue links, og html submit buttons and tables for layouts. A fair bit of modern UI is complete trash: it's the product of a designer and a product person putting the next bullet point on their resume. If I were emperor of the world I’d make every consumer program pass a battery of tests that included demonstrating sufficient usability for…

> a panel of users with sub-90 IQ who were in a stressful environment and trying to complete other tasks at the same time, blind users, deaf users, et c. For me, the first task would be to make absolutely sure that I block any apps designed by you. Such lack of empathy in your wording proves that you cannot possibly be a decent, half-decent, or even mediocre UI designer.

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

— George Carlin

You get that when I was on the other side of that 2 way mirror one of the qualifications to be a user was "can you use a mouse". As late as 2005 people being able to navigate a basic web form was quite the challenge.

Find someone far removed from tech and ask them if they have used ChatGPT.

That IQ 90 user stressed out of their mind isnt that far from reality. Go look at the "bad/poor/low quality" content on Facebook, or YouTube or if your brave tick tock. That is the person you're writing an app for.

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#30

Post by beebeepka »

michaelcampbell wrote: post #7
lakpan wrote: post #4

Nitpick: interesting how a UX website doesn’t let me resize it since the font is likely set via viewport units.

Looks like px if my inspector isn't lying to me. Ctrl-+ and Ctrl-- work fine for me on desktop/chrome.

Firefox has always been even better because you can easily scale only the fonts.
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