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"UI, in my opinion, doesn't mean "pretty," it means "usable," which is sort of implied by U meaning "user.""In frontend land this is often the distinction between UI vs. UX. UX means usability, UI is the more aesthetic side of the exercise, though of course there is considerable overlap.
Part of the issue - at least from my corner of the industry in mobile app dev - is that a lot of good UI designers have renamed themselves UX designers - because UX designers are in greater demand - but are poorly qualified to actually assess and design for usability.
There are also more and more designers crossing over from other design disciplines - graphics designers and print designers are often transitioning to UX design and the results are not always good. To some degree they can bring fresh ideas to the table, but often it results in a lot of designs that aren't competent at a usability level.
> "If a significant portion of your user-base is computer illiterate, which will often be the default, it does well to UI to the lowest common denominator."
I agree with the gist of what you're saying - but I think there needs to be a bit more nuance here.
We're no longer in the 90s, the userbase for most websites and apps largely are not computer illiterate. They are in fact quite technically savvy overall - the issue isn't that your users are technologically ignorant, it's that they're not skilled in your software.
If you look at the modern smartphone user they have a lot of learned expectations and behaviors and they know full well how everything works. The issue comes only when you try to break the established knowledge and do your own thing - which is exactly what the blog post here is about, icons that aren't universally established and have vague meaning to non-experts (and even some experts).
One of the hardest things as frontend people is retaining the first-time-user mindset. You use your own software day in and day out and become experts at it, and your designs and considerations start swimming around that - you are more inclined to build power-user features and implement power-user shortcuts, and you gradually lose the ability to assess your own product from the perspective of a new (or even old, but irregular) user.
The issue isn't that people are technologically illiterate, but that they are not specialists in a very particular expert-user UI you may have designed.
This is made worse when designers start openly egging competitors' UIs, so now not only are you pursuing a confusingly non-standard UI, but this non-standardness starts becoming a meme in your specific niche.
The distinction is important IMO - with the exception of a few demographics (retirees?) it's actually pretty safe now to expect a reasonable amount of tech savvy from your users, but you have to recognize what you think is universal trained user behavior vs. actually widespread user behavior.
