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Comment by nottheengineer | Hacker News Reader

Good read, but it focuses a lot on conveying information to the user. The issue nowadays is often the other direction: Interacting with GUIs often feels clunky because there are unnecessary steps, moving buttons on websites or weird mouse rituals that require dragging something a very certain way.

Improving on that should be more of a focus imo.

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I share your feeling. It feels like design almost became a goal in and of itself due to the fact that--for some users--a good design will be a decisive factor in making a purchase. This is much more measurable than user satisfaction and efficiency since the influence happens at the purchase point which is observable to the business. Good designers know this, hence the related mantra of, "The customer is not the user," but when you have gotten that far, McNamara fallacy often is your default: you know all the metrics are biased, so you use the only thing available.

Touch pads in automobiles feels like the prototypical example of this. Terrible for functionality, shipped due to... it being fancy? People purchasing it because there was no alternative or it took actually using it for quite some time for the defects to be apparent.

Well, companies adopt design fads for rational reasons.

Yes, we have "Fisher Price" UIs because people buy (or at least brought) them. We have touch screens everywhere because that's what was on scify and makes people think it's advanced technology.

But the same way that fads come, they also go. Currently it's chic to have physical buttons, and a lot of people already pick the "VB6 looking" software instead of the "Fisher Price" one. Large companies are always late to fads, so expect them to only move after those decisions are universal. Those also almost universally lack good taste, so expect them to push those new trends way beyond any reasonable amount.

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