Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

I got in an argument with an accessibility engineer about this recently...

The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge...

It's interesting especially because it seems like companies today pour tens of millions into "accessibility", but I never see a thing's usability in terms of simple and easy-to-do-what-I-want UX fall in to the same category.

One is required by law and/or contract terms, the other is just nice to have.

It’s a completely predictable result if you think about it.

Old style UI was developed with the findings of countless man-hours of UX research performed by field experts, while branded UI is typically whipped together purely based on trends and vibes in an evening by a visual designer who’s probably never performed an ounce of serious research or user trials. It’s natural that the latter is only going to be good at the most superficial of purposes. UI as branding is the McMansion of UX.

Even just simple UX testing with people that have never seen or used your software seems to be a lost art.

I think it’s worse from a time wasting standpoint, really - a lot of modern UX does have thousands of hours of UX research dumped into it, but with faulty metrics driven goal seeking and internal politics bolted on. I agree that Vibe Branding killed UX in the way you describe in the 2000s (remember when every company had some abominable Flash site?!), but now, we’ve come full circle: from the ashes we’ve allowed warring factions of UX researchers to return to create hundreds of carefully constructed disparate systems with no consistency.

I don’t think we’re quite back to where we were, because branded UI widgets are almost always devoid of functionality compared to their traditional UI toolkit counterparts. If a feature is even slightly “power user”, branded UI widgets probably don’t implement it, even in tools made for technical users.

One of my favorite examples is tree-style lists (“outline views” in AppKit nomenclature). On macOS these have a very convenient functionality where holding down option while expanding/collapsing a section performs that action on all children as well, and it’s practically never implemented in custom-built tree widgets even in cases where the primary audience skews Mac-heavy.

Companies are outsourcing testing. I'm not surprised that they get rid of UI testing. Back in the day companies used to invite people to sit down and use their software. Nowadays they just push out whatever they have and then start collecting bug tickets. Then they let the community to vote on the tickets. It's basically a huge "pay for being a beta tester" scheme.

> The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability.

This is caused by a change in who is hired as UI/UX developers. In days past it was HCI experts and engineers, now it's graphic designers. "Pretty" is the order of the day, not "useful". "There are too many menu items" is now answered with "So let's hide them" when it used to be "How can we organize them in the UI us a simple, discoverable manner?" But then that "overflow" menu (really? Needed menu commands are now OVERFLOW?) gets crowded so they start just removing features so the UI is nice.

And that is why we can’t have nice things, apparently.

It's also repeating what the hellscape of inconsistent skinned UIs did in the late 90s and early 2000s. People are looking back at those times with a rather selective memory.

> The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability.

Imagine if Active Desktop had taken over.

I eventually came up with a not-awful use for AD but that was a few years after it went away.

>This is caused by a change in who is hired as UI/UX developers.

„UX/UI developers“ is a strange name for it.

In 2000s the web enabled more sophisticated presentation designs and there was a push from client-server to web-based applications using incredibly strange technologies for building UIs — HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which gave the rise to UX design as a interdisciplinary job (HCI+digital graphics design). By 2010 the internet of applications kicked off and in mid-2010s moved to mobile, dramatically increasing the demand for UX designers. By then it actually mattered more who is hiring designers, not who is hired. Since only relatively small fraction of hiring managers does understand the scope of this job even now, they even started calling it „UX/UI designers“ or „Product designers“ as if that name change could help, still judging design work by often-fake screenshots on Behance rather than by case studies in the portfolio. Even HCI professionals are often reduced to mere graphic designers by those managers who skip research and apply „taste“ to a science-based discipline. At the same time, since UX design is one of the most well-paid and less stressful creative jobs, a lot of people switched to it without proper education or experience, having no idea what is statistical significance or how to design a survey. And voila, we are here.

UX testing is not UI testing and it is not QA.

It did under several ways since w98SE and Explorer with IE merged on.

Having worked with amazing HCI experts over the years, you've hit the nail on the head. It's wild how much design is done for designs sake at my work, with nary a nod to HCI given. The a11y team try to patch over it as best as possible, but we end up with a mess, and I'm treated like a pariah for pushing back on some of it

Quite, but lots of companies jam them all together these days.

People forget having to use IE with 12 toolbars when going over at some friend's house.

The themed UIs of that era were very superficial -- if they applied to serious software at all, they were just a cosmetic layer on top of an otherwise well-engineered interface, and could be easily disabled. Most people I knew, for example, disabled the theming engine that shipped with Windows XP. Most applications that supported UI skinning still had a default or fallback UI that adhered well enough to modern conventions.

Not so much anymore. The abandonment of any coherent organizing principle to UI layout in favor of pure aesthetics has been a massive regression. Reasonably complex software often doesn't even include menu bars anymore, for example.

I'm glad to hear my suspicions and impressions are accurate. I have a number of friends who have gone into UI over the past 20 years and while they're all very smart people, In my opinion exactly 1 of them has what it takes to work in UI/UX. The rest are mediocre graphic designers with average to no training in graphic design, and zero experience in anything technical. Only one knew what Fitts law was, or what HCI meant, or what GUI meant

> „UX/UI developers“ is a strange name for it.

I agree. It's a UI Engineer. User Experience is just the fluffification of the title to something that sounds expansive and nebulous when it's actually pretty focused and critical.

You are probably right, just saying in general...

Then you don’t understand it too. Software solves user problems by offering experience, not UI. Not every solution requires UI, but every solution creates user experience.