Hacker News Reader

Comment by montagg | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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

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.

>> 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_...

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.

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

- Steve Jobs

Or rather, information architecture.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com