Ask HN: How can we stop UX people from changing UIs to get promotions?

8 points·ex-aws-dude··6 comments

Every product seems to go through constant UI churn that has no benefit to users other than changing around whitespace or refreshing the look.

If you have a full time UX person they _must_ change the UI of your product otherwise there is no way to get promoted.

That is just an unavoidable fact of incentive structures.

As a company how can you avoid that issue?

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not sure if UX people changing the UI is the problem or companies treating visible change as evidence for promotion & all.

If you control the company, then you can easily stop this by making the product manager the one who can request a UX change, not the UX team.

If you are an employee, a frontend dev, for example, then you can't change it as much as you want, other than raising it with your superiors; maybe, as an EM, you can have a chat with the director/VP/CTO about it.

Generally, for an employee, it's more work, which is not bad; it means you are safer in your job (if it's Enterprise). Just ask them to use official ways to request a UI change, such as a Linear/Jira ticket.

The person responsible for UI/UX changes is the product manager, the designer does what he's told to do. So maybe fire the PM?

Perhaps user interface should be done by companies of their own, which hire designers and sell their services and expertise to other companies who need a UI. Then they could just serve new clients, instead of having to invent new UIs all the time like an in-house designer.

Start handing out demotions for changing UI.

Give bonuses and/or promotions to those who practice UI preservation.

Examples?

Apart from apple glass I can’t think of UX changes not prompted by feature changes.

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