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Comment by boomlinde | Hacker News Reader

I clicked on one of the book covers and ended up with an abstract full screen animation that ran for five seconds before I figured out it was a full screen page header.

I'm confident that web design is the way it is mostly as a means to keep the people that work with it employed. A simple, straight forward implementation with a little color and layout to make it stand out would have been much easier to navigate and digest, but making check boxes not look like check boxes, drawing cryptic metaphorical icons, random show-off CSS animations that serve no purpose etc. creates work opportunities.

I'm open to the idea that I belong to some sort of cynical minority, but I know for sure that it often happens to the detriment of things like ergonomics and usability. When I see a site like this I can't help but think that they never considered the experience they're supposedly designing.

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>I'm confident that web design is the way it is mostly as a means to keep the people that work with it employed.

I work with web designers and can corroborate that.

Most of the time, their product is sold, negotiated and approved before anyone has actually used it. An unusable mess can be a "successful" project, while a usable product can be completely kiboshed and not even paid for or used. This pushes the emphasis towards beauty instead of functionality, often to the latter's extreme detriment.

This gets worse when the stakeholder has some pet attribute they believe is important, especially "cleanliness." These "clean" designs mindlessly strip away anything that can physically be stripped away, without regard to its importance. As long as the design still kind of reminds the client of their company, they don't see it as a problem.

It doesn’t help that the designers often do not code and model the experiences in animation software.

I am currently working on a redesign and just saw the agency’s suggestions for animation. Seem to be highly influenced by iOS apps’ transitions and motion. But this is a website, for browsers, to be displayed on a variety of screen sizes, on a variety of browser versions.

And the users of my website use mostly other websites so if I create something that behaves very differently, the training they have will be wasted and the experience — unintuitive.

So the agency will present this to high management, in an ideal layout, designed in animation software, moving perfectly smoothly and solving for only one case without a clue on how to approach corner cases. If management finds it sexy, we’ll be stuck with development and maintenance of ultra complicated code. And the pleasure of discovering and resolving all corner cases ourselves, on a deadline, with limited budget.

> It doesn’t help that the designers often do not code and model the experiences in animation software.

I don't think even that is a good enough reason. They simply don't approach the problem the way someone using their app would. It's the developers' problem to turn a difficult design into code, but the real problem is that even when that is done perfectly, the UX still sucks.

Every time we redesigned a major UX component of the dashboard of our (desktop) app, we would grab a random secretary, HR person, accountant, or anyone else we could find and borrow an hour of their time and just watch them try to use it without any prior preconceptions that come as a result of designing/coding the interface yourself.

It's been 10 years since we used that trick and I've moved on from that company, but I still think it's the best approach I've ever come across short of outsourcing some sort of panel testing.

User testing is a must have for digital design, otherwise the designers you work with are just graphic designers who pretend to know the tenets of UX through skimming some medium articles occasionally and do a great disservice to us folks who come from academia with degrees in HCI.

>So the agency will present this to high management, in an ideal layout, designed in animation software, moving perfectly smoothly and solving for only one case without a clue on how to approach corner cases.

Oh lord, I don't really have to deal with complex animations on websites. Even though I wouldn't be the one physically building it, I don't look forward to the day. That sounds like a 2d problem becoming 3d.

IMO, the problem is that the ones that approve the look-and-feel aren't exactly the users, but the hirers. And since they already live inside the company, some things might make sense to them, and not the wider public.

Yeah precisely. The CEO can connect the dots, so they don't stop to think if a customer could connect the dots, or if anyone would bother to think that hard (about their cryptic site, which is 7th website of 10, in a row of browser tabs).

Even on the desktop site it hides the navigation. It could use an index on the left -- not to mention that the entire law page is so brief that it does not need its own page.

Which one of those laws tackle UX bloat and ornament for ornaments sake?

The site is pretty, that's true, but it's not made to be a useful source of information, it's made to be pretty above all else. The entire site is a great example of what to do if you want to make information minimally accessible and create a vapid slideshow.

The irony is that they're perfectly demonstrating the importance of Jakob's law (03): "Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know."

  users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites

And yet, the last one contradictory reads: "[…]when multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered." There are no such things as 'rules' in this field. People don't realize how wishy-washy this is and because of that, they throw around some arbitrary rules and then write about it on Medium in a desperate attempt to show authority and demonstrate expertize in their line of work. I could whip out ten other rules that are more applicable and closer to the digital sphere, starting with the notion of 'functionality' instead of some overly complicated and obtuse lingo. In fact, the very first slide has a very weird syntax to it.

And most other sites have dark text on a light background, not light text on a dark background.

I share your opinion. I guess I'm in the minority too.

Maybe we need a flag or some banner, or something.

Some rare and unique symbol, like an unstyled form submit button.

It also creates differentiation in a competitive world.

Different doesn't equal better.

how are measuring "better"? If it wins you a contract, then the market has judged your fancy-checkboxes as "better"

Not necessarily. There's a good chance there was just someone who knows nothing about UX and is never going to actually use the software approved it for others to use. Or it might be that despite a poor UX, it's still the only product to do what you need. Despite a poor UX, it's better than the other guy's even worse UX, at least for now.

There's been loads of software that has been successful just by taking the idea from already existing software and making it more user friendly.

You seem to be confused about better in the objective sense. I am saying that designers make things fancy to get attention, especially from product managers. No claims about what is better need arise. From the perspective of the ux designer, they are doing what the market is selecting for and rewarding them for.

By analogy, You don't get to claim what is better in evoulution and natural selection. There is only what is selected for, which might not have any preference for what you consider good or not

That's IMO the root of the problem. Market works as it always does, it optimizes for profit. So things are designed to be sellable instead of useful.

can't even program a computer these days without becoming a marxist!

Haha, no :). I'm just advocating the same thing you seem to - understanding market incentives as an optimization system, and realizing that its goals are not always aligned with human goals.

I know I am just teasing

While dark patterns make money, I choose to not engage in them because I also value trust, convenience, long term relationship and this means that I create certain experiences for my client.

Just one example where profitability is unfit to be the only criterium.

I did not assume "dark patterns". I am explaining behavior from the viewpoint of the UX Designer, especially getting work. As a product owner, you are free to choose what you want to prioritize. You don't get to chose what other product owners prioritize. Some product owners really like fancy checkboxes. go to any apple page and tell me if you see standard, unstyled html text boxes, combo boxes, and check boxes.

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