I think a lot of this is bike shedding. Changing the interface design is easy. Understanding usability and building usable systems is hard.

You're making a lot of assumptions about who's doing what, what problems they're trying to solve by doing it, and why. The discipline of UI design is figuring out how people can solve their problems easily and effectively. If you have advanced users that need to make five mouse clicks to perform an essential function, that's a bad design and the chance of that being a UI design decision is just about zero. Same thing with icons. UI design, fundamentally, is a medium of communication: do you think it's more likely a UI designer-- a professional and likely educated interactivity communicator-- chose those icons, or a developer or project manager grabbing a sexy looking UI mockup on dribble and trying to smash their use case into it?

Minimalism isn't a goal-- it's a tool to make a better interface and can easily be overused. The people that think minimalism is a goal and will chop out essential features to make something "look designed" are almost always developers. Same thing with unclear icons. As someone with a design degree that's done UI design but worked as a back-end developer for a decade before that, and worked as a UNIX admin off and on for a decade before that, I am very familiar with the technical perspective on design and it's various echo-chamber-reinforced follies.

It's not like all UI designers are incredibly qualified or don't underestimate the importance of some particular function within some subset of users, and some people that hire designers don't realize that a graphic designer isn't a UI designer and shouldn't be expected to work as one. But 700 times out of 1000, that's something dev said "this is too annoying to implement" or some project manager dropped it from the timeline. Maybe 250 of those remaining times, the project manager says "we don't need designers for this next set of features, right? Dev can just make it look like the other parts of the project?"

Developers read an edward tufte book, think they're experts, and come up with all sorts of folk explanations about what's happening with a design and why people are doing it, then talk about it in venues like this with a million other developers agreeing with them. That does a whole lot more damage to UIs in the wild than bad design decisions made by designers.

+1 to all this. And when did it become cool to have icons that provide no feedback they've been clicked, combined with no loading state? I'm always clicking stuff twice now because I'm not sure I even clicked it the first time.

Normally in this rant I specifically note that non-software technical people are still technical. For genuinely non-technical software, what are the most popular end-user facing FOSS-developed applications? Firefox, signal, blender, Inkscape, Krita maybe… most of those are backed by foundations that pay designers and in Mozilla’s case, actually do a ton of open usability research. I don’t believe Inkscape does but they do put a ton of effort into thinking about things from the user workflow perspective and definitely do not present all of the functionality to the user all at once. Blender, at first, just made memorize a shitload of shortcuts but they’ve done a ton of work figuring out what users need to see in which tasks in different workflows and have a ton of different purpose-built views. For decades, Gimp treated design, workflow and UI changes like any other feature and they ended up with a cobbled-together ham fisted interface used almost exclusively by developers. You’ll have a hard time finding a professional photographer that hasn’t tried gimp and an even harder time finding one that still uses it because of the confusing, unfocused interface. When mastodon stood a real chance of being what Bluesky is becoming, I was jumping up and down flailing my arms trying to get people to work on polishing the user flow and figure out how to communicate what they needed to know concisely. Dismissal dismissal dismissal. “I taught my grandmother how federation works! They just need to read the documentation! Once they start using it they’ll figure it out!” Well, they started using it, didn’t have that gifted grandmother-teaching developer to explain it to them, and they almost all left immediately afterwards.

Just like human factors engineering, UI design is a unique discipline that many in the engineering field think they can intuit their way through. They’re wrong and if you look beyond technical people, it’s completely obvious.