I always point to wikipedia as something that has great UX (though I think some of their recent choices have worsened usability). Like making their table of contents a hamburger dropdown.
Indeed. And I get totally stupefied by how much freedom and authority they are given in relation to the other people supposed to provide inputs for the project.
My stock broker did that. They had a web app that didn't just work -- it was acknowledged as very good. Fully customizable, you could open many sub-windows and monitor an arbitrary number of quotes depending on your strategy. The screen could turn into a mess, but it was your mess, and that's ok as long as it made sense to you, the user. I used their web app for more than a decade.
Last year they replaced it by something they have the guts to call "the enhanced experience". That fuming pile of sh*t enforces a certain geometry for the screen that makes it absolutely clear that the kids who designed that garbage never traded stocks in their lives.
But what scares me most is: what the hell the managers who approved that crap had in their minds?
If it comes down between someone whose design looks like it came out of Win98 but has the information density of a terminal, and someone whose design looks cool but has the information density of a picture book, most teams pick the latter. Those same people go on to design the applications that get shipped.
The OP is right in that we lost the ability to design something like mIRC - the people doing the hiring value form over function.
Sounds a hell of a lot like leetcode-optimized interviewees...
They often lose sight of the goal of usability in pursuit of their own aesthetic sensibilities. A lot of UX designers hate that the most usable designs are actually some of the ugliest/plainest.
Don Norman got a lot of blowback from designers, when he published The Psychology of Everyday Things (which was changed to The Design of Everyday Things).
He even wrote a sort of “let me explain” follow-up book, called Emotional Design.
But I am actually going through exactly this, right now. I just got off a Zoom call, with our designer, because the first batch of test users couldn’t figure out that there are action buttons.
Many designers want users to admire the UX; not use it.
I still go hunting for the TOC, get confused, and take a second to remember they hid it. Like, daily. It’s a couple extra seconds but it’s all the damn time.