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UX clichés

uxdesign.cc

81–90 of 172 posts

Re: UX clichés

#81
post #79

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. The…

Ah, I think this is a bit simplistic, as it leaves out testing, which is critically important.

Too many UX people don't follow or even know what a proper user-centered design process looks like. Talking to users and looking at data is a lot of it. Testing is another critical component.

The other big part is to be methodical with how you do ideation, design, and prototyping.

Re: UX clichés

#82
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what your designing. If you're working on highly distributed, microservice based backends then single sources of truth can quickly become a serious bottleneck. Check out Event Sourcing if you're not already familiar with it. This is essentially a pattern where each area of your domain maintains its own view of the data it needs through immutable "facts" (events). In this case you could say the source of tr…

Even worse in my case, we are using event sourcing, but the client reads the Eventstore streams indirectly. It's terribly uncomfortable being the only one on a team of 7 who thinks this is terrible.

Can you describe what you mean by indirectly?

Re: UX clichés

#83
post #79

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. The…

“UX” should go away. What everyone calls UX is just proper UI design. Too often the term “UX” is put on this pedestal. It’s thought of as more important or cerebral than visual design. The problem with that thinking is that UX _is_ very obviously visual. Those that try to distance UX and visual UI design often have terrible aesthetic taste and lack any creative skill.

Which should give you some indication why the design industry is a shell of its former self. The homogeneous nature of modern web products is concerning, but it makes sense unfortunately.

Re: UX clichés

#84

I am not a designer nor a software engineer, nor a business person. I am just a (heavy) user of all sorts of software for a very long time. I am a competent coder, and I code for research and pleasure. I don't have a dog in this, let's say, professional race. Every time I spot "UX" in relation to something I use, I cringe. Not because I have anything against the idea of design, or good interfaces, or designing good i…

This is not true: "The human brain is incredibly plastic and adaptable. Unless the interface is truly absurd, most people can get used to it and never give it a second thought again."

I've interviewed and observed enough users to know this is not true. There are a lot of interfaces that are suffer from issues with discoverability and understanding, and even when a user figures this stuff out one time (or is showed it), the interface is not memorable.

I put together a list of guidelines for thoughtful product design. Most products don't meet all of these. Really good design is hard work: https://uxdesign.cc/guidelines-for-thoughtful-product-design...

One huge mistake you are making is that you are a power user. You probably use computers more than most people and understand interfaces and paradigms better than most people. I implore you to actually observe real users using real products.

Re: UX clichés

#85

I'm feeling that cliches is not the right word. To call something cliche generally means it's over-used, tired, boring, etc. But the article itself is not saying that. Perhaps maxims or truths, would be better?

I think they're kinds of platitudes.

They offer an answer in unequivocating packaging but if you look at them too closely, you'll probably see that they are vacuous.

Re: UX clichés

#86
post #79

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. The…

Ah, I think this is a bit simplistic, as it leaves out testing, which is critically important. Too many UX people don't follow or even know what a proper user-centered design process looks like. Talking to users and looking at data is a lot of it. Testing is another critical component. The other big part is to be methodical with how you do ideation, design, and prototyping.

Testing is important, absolutely. But it too can be summarized with exactly those two points. It’s part of the same cycle. The proper way to test anything is to launch it, talk to users.. and look at your data.

Re: UX clichés

#87
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UX for laptops/desktops was solved in the early 2000. In the early 2000, my music library was a few dozens GBs played back using mpeg123 or something. Nowadays it’s a Google Play Music subscription. Things have moved to the cloud, a lot. That’s a huge change in how computers work, requiring some serious UX changes. I too hate gratuitous UI changes, but things need to keep evolving.

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 .

Foobar is still working fine though <3

Re: UX clichés

#89
post #79

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. The…

“UX” should go away. What everyone calls UX is just proper UI design. Too often the term “UX” is put on this pedestal. It’s thought of as more important or cerebral than visual design. The problem with that thinking is that UX _is_ very obviously visual. Those that try to distance UX and visual UI design often have terrible aesthetic taste and lack any creative skill. Which should give you some indication why the des…

Actually, I'm finding that UX design translates to "documented design", i.e. providing proof for every design decision.

Re: UX clichés

#90
> UX should be a mindset, not a step in the process

Every specialist in every branch of software engineering thinks like that. Designers, architects, testers, compliance people, everyone seems to think the software development process should be framed according to their priorities. Who knows, maybe this is a healthy way to establish a balance of power.

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