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Comment by outofpaper | Hacker News Reader

There is both ux and and graphic design and they both have their place. Saddly far too often one wins out over another instead of finding balance.

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Most UX designers seem to come from a graphic design direction, and they generally do a better job than developers - but not as good as the old school people who did research and wrote detailed guides and such.

The research and guides went out of fashion because actually methodically studying users costs money. I worked at a place that allegedly prioritized design and was really trying to launch more redesigns but also somehow kept losing positions for designers.

>> because actually methodically studying users costs money.

you mean "actually methodically studying users is boring and requires competence"

these people only care about making pretty pictures, they dont care about the actual effort to deliver a good product.

It’s time and labor intensive and you generally need to compensate focus groups for their time. Sometimes that overlaps with laziness or apathy, but who hasn’t worked on something and been told the business can’t afford the time or money to do it right?

this is an understatement.

i remember the studies used to design windows 95

nothing modern ux amateurs do can compare to the oldschool HCI professionals

I'd forgotten there used to be a whole discipline called HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) which seems to have largely disappeared now, at least in a commercial context

I am reminded of the HCI lecturer at university whenever I use something other than my usual KDE desktop.

With a maximized or suitably positioned window, pushing the mouse all the way to the right of the screen activates the scroll bar. To the top right activates the close button.

Small things, but they become annoyances when they are missing.

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