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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

> I stare at the page for a second. My brain hurts. I hate it. It felt... distracting, maximal, cluttered, weirdly transparent. Little sparkles animate over the page.

> "How old are you?" I asked.

> "Twenty-five."

> "Of course you are."

You will never, ever, ever do good design while holding your audience in contempt.

They are fully and completely entitled to their aesthetic preferences and those preferences have absolutely no bearing on their worth or right to enjoy the products they use in whatever way they choose to use them.

If you can't have enough compassion for your users to design something they love respecting who they are then you shouldn't be designing for them.

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This person wrote an entire blogpost on how to understand and compassionately design for Gen-Z aesthetics and your response is to slam them for... not understanding and compassionately designing for Gen-Z aesthetics?

Come on.

The post I read was a person defensively justifying their choice to not design for Gen-Z aesthetics.

The author did design for Gen-Z aesthetics. At the end of the post, he says they may even complete the feature.

They did design it but in the whole post he was making fun of it. This Gen-Z mode that he designed is not made out of compassion for the users but rather as a parody of Gen-Z aesthetic.

I had fun reading it but I feel it is a bad business move to attack your user base, and I assume that they have more users around the 18yo of the spectrum than 75.

Would he also make fun of a boomer mode, with large buttons everywhere and "get me out of the app and just call person" feature?

Why do you think it was parody or an attack? It fully admits that millennial design is intentionally boring and sterile and it tries to figure out what Gen-Z wants instead.

From the "You are unique. You are different." in the screenshot which is parodying the style so hard, but also the random clap emoji. It feels like googling "Gen-Z tropes" and then applying every single of them. But also the "Of course you are." which is extremely dismissive.

There is a way to design a more "fun" experience but just slapping the biggest tropes on like your users are 5 year olds is probably not it.

Gen-Z is a parody though. Culture parodies itself time and time again. If you can't see that in the trends of the 90s in our own generation, then perhaps you respect generational preferences a bit too much..

I’d argue you should always design for yourself and build products you want.

When your needs aren’t in alignment with your user’s needs then you’re the wrong person for the job anyway.

User feedback is important for getting additional insights, but the implementation of the feedback should always feel correct to you too.

I like your sentiment, but I think this only works at the start. After the initial MVC phase, you discover additional potential target audiences, and often (but not always) it makes more sense to apply empathy and adapt the software to also benefit their needs, rather than just abandoning then as "not the intended audience".

MVC phase? That's where my projects end, not start... Betting that was MVP! (Actually they start there, too, to be honest)

My projects seem to end at MVP.

(Which might have been the joke you were attempting to tell, while we're being pedantic.)

D'oh, yes, I meant to write "MVP", and editing is already locked

Designing for yourself is definitely the easiest way to have good affinity for your users. But it also limits the set of products you can create.

People that aren't software developers and designers deserve to have good software designed for them too.

All you really need is genuine compassion for others to do good design for them.

I don't think professional designers have the option of only designing for themselves.

It's a bit like only programming for one's own problems. Sure, some people can do that, but most need to solve other people's problems to pay their bills.

That's a little bit like saying a barber should only cut hair the way he'd want to wear it. Being part of a professional, maybe the defining feature is to be able to understand what customers want and to do it without bringing personal preference into it, unless that's asked for.

As much as I would like to agree in principle, I am slowly starting to see author's POV. Modern web is a clusterfuck and modern UI, to me, is not even meeting the needs of the current generation ( what with the A/B testing and dark pattern galore ). It is prettier, but that is only thing it has going for it.

Whenever I need to help someone on their phone/PC or answer a question it's a UI problem in 80% of cases. On phones button icons are an inconsistent mess with no visible way to find out what they mean. The menu bar on Android is at the top, the hardest to reach place on the whole display. Fast list scrolling and other details on phones/tablets are ignoring left-handed people. Phones have 6 inch screens but maximum font sizes are still too small for some users.

Interacting with Android's notification list while it's being updated is simply impossible if an app shows and hides progress updates multiple times per second when fetching new content, making the whole list jump up and down.

All those problems affect not just one generation and were solved at least a decade ago. And it feels like all I can do is press a few buttons for them or say "turn it off and on again", and yell at clouds inbetween.

One is rather small sample size for what users want.

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