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It’s when people confuse User Experience Design, which is a systemic and architectural discipline, with UI Art, which is an aesthetic discipline. If you have someone who is professionally the latter doing the former job, you get things people think look good but don’t work well.

This isn’t even to knock either: UI artists are essential to making a UI understandable and enjoyable. But people think the skill sets are the same, and they aren’t.

Disclaimer: am a UX Designer.

Outside of big tech I’ve never met a UX designer who wasn’t just a graphic designer. Not a single one.

I have met exact one and the stuff he made was amazing

Same. He made the project so rewarding for us all.

How do I find and hire a UX person like this?

Recruit from top school masters program.

Hire an empathetic engineer and don’t have the write code.

Because lots of companies pushed their graphic artists and designers into UX roles without providing any training, expecting them to learn on the job. I saw it happen at every job I’ve had and heard about it from people I knew at other companies.

I don’t think work training turns you into someone who thinks logically about systems and about human psychology.

In my experience it doesn’t. I came at UX from the interaction design/HCI side of things so I was already generally that kind of person, but the people who came at it from the design side weren’t as strong weren’t as strong. They were still very good at design though.

Hello, it's me, ur guy (and surprisingly, I'm a part of the new generation!). There's probably dozens of us!

In my software development career I've always specialized on the UX, accessibility and platform convention side of the UI. I can't design any actual "pretty" UIs for the life of me :Dd

Inserted edit: Ok, totally forgot to mention that I am a full-stack dev, but definitely focus more on the abstract side of UI than the actual pixels on the screen.

Aside/relevant: Did you know that click-and-dragging a dropdown/select element to use/select/activate an action is an ancient cross-platorm pattern that was almost lost to time, because almost none of the modern web component frameworks forgot to implement it? Even more emphasizes the pop-cultureness aspect mentioned above :)

Ah, pull-down menus. I love them, use them all the time. Some modern web products actually implement them. Linear for example, and some UI libraries I’ve seen. I always add that interaction at the companies I work for, unprompted haha.

Or rather, information architecture.

>> Disclaimer: am a UX Designer.

Please tell your fellow designers to stop injecting their lifestyle into their UI/UX design. Even in the OP, a simple monday-sunday list of days, the designer has inserted their lifestyle. Friday is popcorn, Saturday is a party popper, and Sunday is for sleeping off the hangover. That might seem innocuous but is a tiny microaggression felt by all those who do not work 9-5 M-F jobs. Or those who have places to be on Sundays other than in bed. Better yet, just avoid all UI/UX designs that reflect a particular schedule or lifestyle.

I didn't know what I wanted to add... ~7,5 kb (seems that the imagehost don't show transparency...but it is...)

[img] img.bildhost.com/file/bildhostcom/2026/10/22/Rastergrafik_26.png

But thanks that you made it a topic, thought it was about the .php and the (spoken in german) "Klirr!" everybody noticed the sound, but nerds-term about the webpage he was building ment "CLEAR" ...crowded room, everyones laughing around...so OT to ask one of those "elderly computerpeople"...CSS... never mind... (-:

Oh, lost my pass...but to explain some of the "brainstormed around"-ideas, in Terms of an UI. So it is possible that any machine can be acting as a server, no? Yes, so... you looked at a 7,5 kb picture, proving some illusionary stuff...but what the heck maybe usefull. You see above processes.. Data-traffic - Incomming/outgoing...(so the background needs a zoom in) underlying lower priority routines... and those 'knots' i would prefer the german word: "Verknüpfungen" for which may bigupp/grow a bit...and there is a doomscroll-option up and down, but after a while you always come back. One look, just one look may show that much. So if it is serversided, and maybe about "a kind of a 'Pawlow's'-type Programming -the Gag with the German word "Klirr!" (CLEAR-) Sound of somethings breaking inside your programming -OR? Or the code had to be 'Good Commented', even if there is some kind of "AI" acting like an assistant. But to came back to this UI-thingy, the thing i knew is, even if you finished your code, you have to run it a few times just to see, that everything works. Seems "AI" switches in, showing you one of those knots in a different color, say 'there is already a soultion for, you like to acknowledge' - or in other words: Bigged up Knots showing you more-frequented parts of your Code, and maybe you risk another look ...to optimize it..."something to make it shorter?", not? Or something is shown as 'a red knot'...broken... one-look to view: "not heavy used..." so it maybe something for later... If you thought it would had been such a thing like the tik-tok-of programming... add only a few colors maybe four at all, but um btt: if it runs on the server-side, maybe it is also possible to act plattform-less...and there your cirxxle of UI goes, ...or? Just some Weekend-disqualifing _unspecified_ ideas you got, enjoy! Think been in a crowded room, ..."Klirr!" Enjoy your weekend, regards...

> Better yet, just avoid all UI/UX designs that reflect a particular schedule or lifestyle.

Are sun and moon icons for dark and light themes a lifestyle thing too then? Maybe I want dark theme when the sun is out or light theme in the middle of the night?

In all seriousness, as a person with non-24 sleep-wake rhythm disorder[1] it's not terribly uncommon for me to be going to sleep mid-day, but I don't think designing with pragmatic assumptions about lifestyle in mind is unreasonable (as long as it doesn't create accessibility barriers)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-24-hour_Sleep-Wake_Rhythm_...

There’s no such thing as UI “art” as a separate process from “UX”. User experience is just a vague term Norman used to describe the general impression of using digital interfaces. He’s never actually even defined what criteria constitutes “good” or “bad”. So the term is as useless as “dining experience” is for restaurants. UX designer as a title and quasi-discipline became a thing the same way “agentic engineer” is a title nowadays, they’re not actual disciplines, they’re titles void of any history that consultancy firms come up with to sell more services.

The real title for this discipline is “interaction designer”, as that stems from HCI research, which itself was an extension of systems design. There is a clear lineage. Also: user experience absolutely is an aesthetic field, but again because the title is vague in practice so is its education. The thinking is that “UX” designers have a set of skills about design that are scientific, but there’s virtually nothing about human interaction that’s scientifically provable. Like you don’t do A/B testing and move a button’s position from a delta result based off of Fitt’s law or Gestalt theory (I don’t think I’ve ever met a UX designer who knows about gestalt theory). You just observe results and move the goalposts accordingly. And again apropos aesthetics: user testing just never works with wireframes, the closer you are to the final result the better the feedback.

The need to science-wash this ultimately volatile process comes from the need to assure clients that their investment in an emerging market (digital platforms from the 80s onwards) has provably positive results.

I think the idea of a separate discipline of UX design came along is because, outside of big companies, a lot of designers in the field at that point in time were coming from a print/graphic design background rather than HCI.

It was a bit of "let's not forget this element of application development".

Fantastic comment, thank you

> Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

- Steve Jobs

Once the responsibilities of creating a UI is divvied up between a visual designer and a domain expert, I doubt there is much for a UX designer to do. At least not at each product/application level. Perhaps at an industry level, there may be a need for a small number of these roles to advance the state-of-the-art of human-computer interaction, but it is not a problem that needs to be re-solved at the level of each product. In the 80s and 90s, these roles existed within the operating system companies and they came up with things like scrolling, pull-down menus and tabbed interfaces.

I concur, though I fear that as a discipline we haven't done ourselves any favours here in how we pass knowledge between generations.

In decades past, books and journals served as the primary mechanism for capturing and transferring CS and Software Engineering knowledge. Older knowledge was curated and remained easily accessible.

When I studied CS and engineering in the early 2000s, I learned a lot about the history and evolution of the field simply by browsing old books on the shelves of the university library. Thousands of them. I read back to the 60s and 70s, and I felt it really helped me have a broader perspective and evolution of the field.

That same university library has now transitioned to mostly online materials. The physical collection has been drastically pruned based on what is currently relevant and in demand.

The online collections don't have the same historical depth. And websites and online repositories come and go - think of the vast troves of knowledge that once existed on Usenet that have been lost to obscurity.

I also think the joy of browsing through topics you didn't know existed as given way to search-driven retrieval.

In our efforts to use computers to document what we know about computers, we have lost all that was good about not using computers for information management.

It’s hard to fully pass on UX knowledge. For one, a lot of software and hardware isn’t available, including recent software. You can’t use a version of Slack from 2019 or AIM from 2001, for instance.

But also, it’s hard to convey the full experience of actually using old software as a tool (or toy)—trying to maintain your company records in Lotus 1-2-3 or looking up something in Microsoft Encarta knowing that if you couldn’t answer your question you’d need to go to the library, or even trying to solve a puzzle in a game with no reference materials.

I’m sure this is true of other technology: You can learn to ride a horse or read about how telephones and telegrams worked, but can you really capture the experience of riding from NYC to Philadelphia in 1840 or trying to convey an urgent business message the same way in 1920?

"Computing is a pop culture with little regard for the past" this literally just clicked so many pieces in my brain all at once I had to close my eyes and sit with it.

I worked with all of the aforementioned people at various companies and cannot see myself working at any of the companies where this experience would be useful or could be transferred to others. Apple, when I left in 2006, was almost unbearable to me.

I don’t know if this means I am jaded, burnt out, overly cynical or what, but the thought of working at Apple, Google, Facebook or any other big tech company is anathema to me.

Steve Lemay worked with a bunch of us, including a very curmudgeonly Don Norman, but just look at what happened to Apple UX while he was there. Yes, he is now running the team and the small improvements may be a direct influence of his, but he sure was steam rolled by others the last twenty years.

> Alan Kay (of Smalltalk fame)

Alan Kay (of Alan Kay fame)

> not being taught enough history of computing

Are they being taught any of significance? In school I only remember a blurb about Newton here or a blurb about Pascal there. Briefest of mentions about Unix at the start of a C class.

All the rest I had to dig up myself, from the Mythical Man Month to Edwin Black's book. Believe it was the Joel on Software blog who got me interested in those type of books, never knew they existed in school.

It depends pretty much on the university, I was rather lucky, my nerdiness for strange OSes and programming languages comes from having had some great teachers, then again maybe up into the 90's there were another quality standards.

"Things seem to hang on in computing just because they work a little bit." -Alan Kay

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8841428

Alan Kay also said this about his famous "Point of View is worth 80 IQ points" aphorism, which I think poignantly explains why React costs a net of 160 IQ points compared to Svelte:

>I have been keeping to "80" IQ points in the saying (thus avoiding inflation). However very few people have noticed there is no sign bit in the aphorism, and that it works just as well for "poor perspectives being worth negative 80 IQ points" (and I think we could claim inflation of stupidity in many bad directions these days ...).

I love this quote! When I taught programming language paradigms at San Jose State as an adjunct, I introduced this quote as a motivating factor for learning different ways of programming, particularly introducing functional programming, logic programming, Smalltalk, and the Common Lisp Object System to senior-year students who coded mostly in Java, Python, and C (though this was during the COVID pandemic, right before the advent of vibe coding).

Here's the whole thread from six days ago, started when I shared the "Folders" esolanguage article and hn discussion, which I think is interesting for students and language hackers:

On 16 Oct 2026, Don Hopkins wrote to Owen Densmore, David Rosenthal, and Alan Kay:

Somebody took your filesystem-as-objects patent idea to the logical extreme!

https://danieltemkin.com/esolangs/folders

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50114342

-Don

On 16 Oct 2026, Alan Kay wrote:

There's a patent for this idea?

I fear there is some really old prior art for several parts of it.

Best cheers

Alan

On 16 Oct 2026, Don Hopkins wrote:

Yes, it's Sun's US 5,187,786: "Method and apparatus for implementing a class hierarchy of objects in a hierarchical file system." Owen and David filed it in 1991, it was granted in 1993, and it expired in 2011, so anyone can use it now, including people writing esolangs about folders.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US5187786A/en

You're right about the prior art, and the idea came straight from your side of the family tree. Tom Stambaugh helped Owen work out how to adapt Smalltalk patterns to it, scribbling on napkins at a poolside table at the old Hyatt Palo Alto. In the patent, directories are classes and instances, PATH files encode the inheritance chain, and you send a message from the shell with something like "SEND aF001 methodA args".

It's the same trick Owen used for the NeWS object system in PostScript. Classes were dictionaries, and sending a message pushed the object's class chain onto the dictionary stack, so ordinary PostScript name lookup did the method lookup for free. NeWS 1.0 had single inheritance through a parent dictionary. TNT added ordered parent lists and multiple inheritance. The patent does the same thing with the shell path playing the dictionary stack: walk the directories, and the first match wins.

Owen's 1986 Monterey paper on object-oriented PostScript:

https://donhopkins.com/home/monterey86.pdf

The NeWS Book, chapter 6:

https://donhopkins.com/home/The_NeWS_Book_1989.pdf

I've been running with it in MOOLLM, which leans more toward Self than Smalltalk. A directory is an object, its files are slots, and a "parents:" list delegates to other directories, in order, first match wins. It's prototypes rather than classes, and the LLM does the message dispatch by reading the directory. The filesystem is the object graph, so it's inspectable, diffable, and versioned in git for free:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/kernel/DIRECTO...

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/file-sy...

The lineage from Smalltalk and Self through NeWS, TNT, the patent, HyperLook, and The Sims to MOOLLM is written up here:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/object...

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/postsc...

Owen and David can correct my history, since they're on the thread.

-Don

On 16 Oct 2026, Alan Kay wrote:

Hi Don

I should have said "prior art before Smalltalk" ...

Best cheers

Alan

On 16 Oct 2026, Don Hopkins wrote:

In a way, the patent is just pure prior art, plus perspective, which is worth a certain number of IQ points I've been told. ;)

Which pre-Smalltalk ancestors were you thinking of? Sketchpad's masters and instances, Simula's classes, and Multics search rules walking a hierarchy of directories all seem like pieces of it.

-Don

On 16 Oct 2026, Alan Kay wrote:

Hi Don

I have been keeping to "80" IQ points in the saying (thus avoiding inflation). However very few people have noticed there is no sign bit in the aphorism, and that it works just as well for "poor perspectives being worth negative 80 IQ points" (and I think we could claim inflation of stupidity in many bad directions these days ...).

I don't like to claim priority for any ideas (including my own). Bob Barton liked a great saying of Goethe's: "We should all share in the excitement of Discovery without vain attempts to claim Priority" and I imprinted on that in grad school.

So, without claiming priority, I would point to Engelbart's NLS for unifying the structure of the file system with the basic hierarchical structuring of their content (and this included how code was represented, written, and read). A few years later I used a different kind of unification in the FLEX machine that Ed Cheadle and I did in the mid-60s to have "every large thing" be an instantiable process, including things that were more "file-like".

This is just FYI, partly because of the above Goethe quote, partly because the FLEX project was done within the aerospace conglomerate LTV, and was proprietary. My thesis advisor Dave Evans had to go to considerable work to get permission for me to do my degree write ups on a tiny subset. The later Smalltalk was a "cold restart" on these ideas (and LTG was not a problem by then).

And -- for Smalltalk -- the notion to make "everything large and small" an object was a quick way to get going on the comparatively speedy Alto, and Dan Ingalls (and his Smalltalk group) were able to do most of the SW engineering to make Smalltalk act semantically as though everything was an object.

Best cheers

Alan

Reminds me of a funny encounter on a flight last year: just before the doors closed two young SWEs from the airline took the empty seats next to me on staff travel. They'd recently entered the airline's graduate programme and when the girl told me she'd chosen the name Ada (Asian country where people generally pick their own international non-legal name) I was shocked to discover she had never heard of Ada Lovelace but "knew of" the programming language. And I am a designer, not an engineer.

I had some hilarious experiences by telling people that they did well, now make the same thing again but make it better. I was quite surprised they put up with it many itterations and even more surprised that each round (with few exceptons) was actually better.

When the senior designers at Apple stared out, desktop UI was still being invented and they needed to be a kind of avant garde UI designer. They’re probably still hiring those people, but the job now is totally different, with desktop UI design being in a kind of maintenance mode.

That sounds like a just so story invented by motivated reasoning.

Ahistoricality is a problem. On the other hand it might be that a small group that worked on some paradigm among the sea of many thinks they're the official forebearers of a large field - while in reality influence came from many places.

> It’s a lack of onboarding and knowledge transfer, ...

I have been trying to kindly forward what I have learnt and experienced over these years to new people we start to work with, and I have been called a wrinkly boomer who doesn't understand modern times more than enough times.

Of course they have come full-circle on some of the things they were disagreeing, but sometimes people have to crash and burn before understanding something.

I have no hard feelings for these people, but kindness goes a long way even if you don't agree on everything.

Do you think the problem is that students are not taught about the history of computer science or is it because the kinds of students who study CS are not inclined to study history?

Every life is lived once. We are always rediscovering what came before us.