
UX clichés - flywithdolp
https://uxdesign.cc/a-comprehensive-and-honest-list-of-ux-clich%C3%A9s-96e2a08fb2e9?source=collection_home---4------2---------------------
======
Zarel
These are overall really accurate depictions of what life in UX is like.

I do have a comment on this one:

> _“Users don’t read”_

> _An overly used argument to convince clients and stakeholders to cut copy
> length in half. If you made this far to this article, you’re living proof
> that this statement is untrue._

The real principle here is that users don't read anything that doesn't look
like it will help them do what they're trying to do.

In the case of the article: Sure, I read the article, because I wanted to read
the article. But notice I didn't read the titlebar, the subtitle, the author,
the nav, the footer, the newsletter subscription form...

Someone reading copy probably wants to know something about your product.
Depending on what they want to know, they might skim around the page looking
for the most relevant thing – for instance, looking for a header named "Specs"
when trying to find battery life.

Making your copy shorter will certainly make that task easier and save their
time, and it'll probably make it less likely that they'll decide they didn't
want to know things about your product _that_ much.

~~~
kbirkeland
Honestly I skimmed the first part of the article and then checked the
comments. It may be a design cliche, but it may be true. I didn't make it to
that part.

~~~
nkozyra
That was my first reaction.

Though to be fair I didn't make it that far because the counterarguments to
the cliches were not particularly deep or convincing.

------
TelmoMenezes
I am not a designer nor a software engineer, nor a business person. I am just
a (heavy) user of all sorts of software for a very long time. I am a competent
coder, and I code for research and pleasure. I don't have a dog in this, let's
say, professional race.

Every time I spot "UX" in relation to something I use, I cringe. Not because I
have anything against the idea of design, or good interfaces, or designing
good interfaces. That is all great. The problem is that 99% of the time that
the term "UX" shows up in connection with something I use, two things are
going to happen:

1) I will have to relearn how to do something that I already was used to doing
without even thinking;

2) Some feature or option is going to be removed.

The human brain is incredibly plastic and adaptable. Unless the interface is
truly absurd, most people can get used to it and never give it a second
thought again.

My number one (by far) request as a user:

DON'T FUCKING CHANGE THE INTERFACE

Unless there is a very good reason, and I bet there isn't.

I bought my first MacBook in 2007. Thankfully, Apple is one of the best
behaved companies when it comes to not changing things for the sake of it, and
part of the reason why I stick with them. I don't mention this out of some
sort of fanboy-ism (I have no loyalty to corporations, I just buy shit I
like). I mention it to make a more important point:

The UX of 2007 was absolutely fine, and if they would have made zero changes
since then I would be perfectly happy. UX for laptops/desktops was solved in
the early 2000. Everything else since then is just irrelevant bullshit.

~~~
pwthornton
This is not true: "The human brain is incredibly plastic and adaptable. Unless
the interface is truly absurd, most people can get used to it and never give
it a second thought again."

I've interviewed and observed enough users to know this is not true. There are
a lot of interfaces that are suffer from issues with discoverability and
understanding, and even when a user figures this stuff out one time (or is
showed it), the interface is not memorable.

I put together a list of guidelines for thoughtful product design. Most
products don't meet all of these. Really good design is hard work:
[https://uxdesign.cc/guidelines-for-thoughtful-product-
design...](https://uxdesign.cc/guidelines-for-thoughtful-product-
design-4a1c6e19c125)

One huge mistake you are making is that you are a power user. You probably use
computers more than most people and understand interfaces and paradigms better
than most people. I implore you to actually observe real users using real
products.

~~~
bsder
> There are a lot of interfaces that are suffer from issues with
> discoverability and understanding, and even when a user figures this stuff
> out one time (or is showed it), the interface is not memorable.

Oh, dear, God, yes.

The "hamburger menu" is one of the worst travesties of the modern age.

~~~
flukus
What's wrong with the hamburger menu? It seems like a good compromise of
quickly accessible functionality for little screen real estate. For desktop
apps with plenty of screen real estate it's crazy (looking at you gnome) but
on mobiles it's fine, especially when the alternatives seem to be some sort of
hidden and undiscovered slide out menu or long button press.

~~~
bsder
The problem is that you have no idea what is under that menu.

The hamburger menu becomes a default dumping ground substituting for an
intelligently design UI.

~~~
kurtisc
I'm reading this on Firefox with a hamburger menu. It's a hard sell that
someone else's supposed damaged discoverability is worth me giving up screen
space to replace it with a menu bar for things that are rarely used. If they
can't work out to click on it, they're not going to find much use from the
things that are in it.

------
jonahx
The quoted aphorisms, in my personal experience, aren't used for the reasons
being imputed. It feels like forced satire.

For example:

> "Content is king" \- A pretty strong argument to convince everyone to push
> the deadline because you haven’t received the content that will go on the
> page you are designing.

I've heard this a lot, but never from a designer trying to push a deadline.
It's used to say "stop wasting time dicking around with the design -- the
content is what matters" or "it doesn't matter how beautiful it is if no one
cares about you're saying."

~~~
eckza
... that’s because the author clearly states, at the bottom of the article,
that it’s satire.

~~~
jonahx
> This is a satire article, where I use humor, irony, and exaggeration to
> invite reflection.

Except good satire uses exaggeration to lampoon things that _are (at least
partially) true in reality_.

Whereas for half the examples here my reaction was, "No one has ever said that
for that reason."

~~~
dvtrn
Seems to me if you're expecting subjective, _personal_ and otherwise non-
universal experiences to fit and perfectly align with the parameters of an
_objective_ definition, the joke is always going to sail a few hundred-
thousand feet above sea level, and the satire will always smell of moldy
cheese. But that's just my five quid.

------
krm01
While running a UX/UI design studio for B2B SaaS companies for 10+ years -
I’ve seen the UX space evolve into a cult like crowd of designers with too
many “gurus” and design research methodologies. Really, all you have to do is
2 things:

# talk to your users.

# look at your data/analytics

It’s really not rocket science. These two metrics will take you minutes to
find UX problems and opportunities in your product. Then, try to solve them
with the least amount of design possible.

Repeat.

~~~
ryanSrich
“UX” should go away. What everyone calls UX is just proper UI design. Too
often the term “UX” is put on this pedestal. It’s thought of as more important
or cerebral than visual design. The problem with that thinking is that UX _is_
very obviously visual. Those that try to distance UX and visual UI design
often have terrible aesthetic taste and lack any creative skill.

Which should give you some indication why the design industry is a shell of
its former self. The homogeneous nature of modern web products is concerning,
but it makes sense unfortunately.

~~~
radley
Actually, I'm finding that UX design translates to "documented design", i.e.
providing proof for every design decision.

------
AlexTWithBeard
I'd love to see a similar list for software engineering.

\- if your code isn't important enough to be tested, it's not important to be
written

\- every function must fit a single screen

~~~
usea
_\- if your code isn 't important enough to be tested, it's not important to
be written_

Does this rule cover all code? Do your tests, which are code themselves, not
need their own tests? If not, what is special about a test that you know it's
correct, when there is no faith in in non-test code?

Is it possible to write your program entirely out of the special "test" code,
so that it's always correct and doesn't need to be tested?

~~~
mLuby
My tests run during tests, so they automatically have 100% test coverage. :D

~~~
plorkyeran
It's not all that uncommon to have test code which is never actually run.
Usually just because of disabled tests or leftover helper functions that are
no longer used, but sometimes due to bugs in the tests themselves. Turning on
code coverage tracking for the test code itself can sometimes reveal some
interesting things.

------
Yuval_Halevi
My favorite

“If Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, they would have told him
faster horses” Used as a counter-argument to the previous statement, when you
start to realize you won’t have time or money to do enough user research.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Do those people think Ford invented motor vehicles? Before the Ford Motor
Company ever existed we had a motion film of a trip to the moon, and they
didn't go by horse!

~~~
ComputerGuru
Yes, I imagine no one ever thought to themselves a flying horse was the
realistic way of getting to the Moon.

~~~
Jenz
Ahem, actually: in norse mythology there was the flying horse «Sleipnir:»
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleipnir](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleipnir)

While not «realistic,» they did believe it was.

~~~
posterboy
Who says folks believed myths to be realistic? We are actually talking about
knowledge, not believe. There may have been many people for whom between
horses and steam engine powered trains there was no certainty nor prospect for
motorization, only wet dreams of flying.

Interesting fact nontheless, Pegasus comes to mind.

~~~
Jenz
True.

I find it hard to relate to. Do priest believe god is real, (if so: also
realistic,) or do they just believe in him?

~~~
posterboy
Priests _believe_ in an interpretation of what they _know_ and they _know_
they _believe_ because they have been indoctrinated to think so. It's very
difficult and I don't want to disparage it, not actively right now, but
latently--and that's similarly a learned behavior. However, if Goedels
symbolic proof of _gods_ existence, which is subject to interpretation of
course, holds any water, than there might be an elementary truth, the
knowledge that good does exist. Similar to Descartes "I think therefore I am",
it might be trivial and discovering it might be part of everyones development.
In that sense, priests wouldn't be any different. Ironically, I believe that I
know that, the proof at least, subconsciously. I actively believe that. That's
not good. lol.

What does that have to do with UX cliches? If you'd ask priests whether god is
dead, they'd say, "why, horses are good enough"?!

------
open-source-ux
Not a UX cliche as such, but a frequently used phrase:

 _A carefully curated collection of resources_

Translation: a list of links

Even better if you can shoehorn “hand-picked” in there ( _A hand-picked
collection of curated resources to help you learn [technology]_ )

Presumably the hand-picked links are always preferable over the, er, robot-
picked ones.

I wonder what a real museum curator must make of it all (I presume they don’t
really care).

~~~
DonHopkins
Hand crafted artisanal RSS feeds. Each character of text and markup and every
URL laboriously typed into Notepad as raw XML, without the use of copy-and-
paste. Sorry if it doesn't validate!

------
tlarkworthy
My favourite business cliche is a diagram with three or four things in a
circle.

I thought about it so much I know think the circular process is an inevitable
consequence of reality. Still, the business ones are usually pretty vacuuous.

~~~
tyingq
I'm thankful that the words "paradigm" and "synergy" have been mocked enough
that business people avoid them now.

~~~
wumms
Now they are _leveraging_ a lot.

~~~
tyingq
Scaled agile is my current pet peeve. "Value Streams" and "Program Increments"
and a "distilled" book that's 500+ pages.

~~~
cardinalfang
I know those books. I think it means fractional distillation where the volume
of content remains the same but is categorized differently.

------
jimmychangas
> UX should be a mindset, not a step in the process

Every specialist in every branch of software engineering thinks like that.
Designers, architects, testers, compliance people, everyone seems to think the
software development process should be framed according to their priorities.
Who knows, maybe this is a healthy way to establish a balance of power.

~~~
megaremote
Yes. And what they mean is that the developers who actually build the thing
should also think about UX, architecture, testing and compliance. It is all
about moving everything on the devs plate.

------
ivanhoe
I find it amusing that his final disclaimer how "This is a satire article"
really falls under the "if you have to explain a joke, it’s not that good"...

~~~
megaremote
Did anyone read this and not think it is satire? I guess it is better to be
safe when publishing an article, and I wouldn't describe this article as being
an example of UX.

------
Vinnl
I like this one:

> UX should be a mindset, not a step in the process

Mostly because it's not a UX-cliché, but a cliché for everything: security,
accessibility, UX, localisation, etc.; advocates want them all to be an
essential part of the process, but in practice, nobody manages to do all that.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It's also true in so far that for some reason[0], people still think of
building software like of an assembly-line process, which is wrong.
Programmers are seen as construction workers, which is a wrong analogy; it's
probably a cliché at this point to mention that in building analogy, _the
compiler_ is the construction workers; programmers are the people drawing up
the blueprints. At the blueprint level, you have some level of back&forth
between designers, architects, structural engineers, electrical engineers,
plumbers, fire safety people, etc.

Building software is like that. It's a high-dimensional optimization process
in which all those concerns like UX, security, accessibility, etc. are each a
dimension, and in which you initially only know the rough shape of the
terrain, so you have to walk it to discover its features. Or, to use a
different analogy - software isn't like assembling a car toy on a factory
line. Building software is like everything that happens in between the CEO
saying "we need to build a toy car" and the factory getting the BOM and
designs.

\--

[0] - probably because it simplifies management.

------
analog31
Here's one to add:

"UX is based on research and science"

------
graphememes
> "You are not your own user."

Never say this to someone. First, anyone bringing up feedback is doing it for
a reason. Weed out what that reason is.

If you say this to someone re-asses your own emotional reason for it. This is
a very emotional response.

I've seen people voice interface feedback that was dismissed with this exact
response, and 12 months later was implemented. We could have saved 12 months,
instead, we had to deal with a designer's emotional immaturity.

------
dylanrw
““Designers should have a seat at the table” When you are not able to prove
your strategic value to the company based on your everyday actions and
behaviors, and you have to beg to be invited to important meetings.“

Or it could be that an experienced designer has more to offer than acting as a
glorified crayon only putting color where the stakeholders want it.

~~~
Waterluvian
It's satire. But it's also speaking to the idea that designers who make
meaningful contributions won't need to ask to be at the table.

~~~
Udik
Frankly, I've been in jobs where I was about the only one who made meaningful
contributions, and I still had to beg to have a seat at the table. Which they
didn't give me. So I know from experience that making meaningful contributions
is not sufficient nor necessary to be involved in the decision process.

------
chiefalchemist
I'm feeling that cliches is not the right word. To call something cliche
generally means it's over-used, tired, boring, etc.

But the article itself is not saying that. Perhaps maxims or truths, would be
better?

~~~
werber
For what it's worth, I hear most of those things so often in my job (ui dev
who works very closely with uxers) that I'd consider them very specific
cliches

~~~
chiefalchemist
Yes, to you they might be cliches. But the way they are presented - to n00bs -
the wouldn't really be cliches.

------
iheartpotatoes
>> Looks particularly great if written in Helvetica, printed and framed, and
hung by the entrance of truly collaborative office spaces.

This is the business model of many successful mall-chain-stores.

------
fjsolwmv
> "Users don’t read”

> ...

> If you made this far to this article, you’re living proof that this
> statement is untrue.

I only saw that because I got bored and scrolled to the bottom to see if there
was a punchline.

------
golergka
> “When escalators break, they actually become stairs”

Properly stopped, but functioning escalators become stairs. Escalators that
break can become death traps that will kill you.

------
saagarjha
> “I’m wondering if this breaks accessibility standards”

> Used as last resort when you are running out of arguments to convince other
> designers their design is not working.

If you break your {app, website} for millions of people because you want it to
look _just so_ and the platform widget just doesn’t fit with your “brand”, I
have no sympathy for you.

------
gnud
It seems fitting that I had to enable reader mode to be able to read a blog
post about UX cliches.

------
DonHopkins
Never use a tightly spaced san serif font to tell users to "click" or "double
click".

------
smrtinsert
The fold is actually true though

~~~
graphememes
It really isn't, and if it is what you're targeting, you're not targeting your
customers.

------
Theodores
UX is a by-product of the mess we have made of web development.

We made web development so overly complicated that vast teams are needed for
the simple task of showing stuff on a page.

Part of the holdup has been CSS. To build out a responsive layout used to be
phenomenally hard. Tim Berners Lee didn't think layout was needed, originally
the web was to just link documents that people would open in other programs,
so the complexity would have been in those other programs.

Need a spreadsheet? Then you would get the link and open it in your
spreadsheet program, not an online Google Docs equivalent with its own special
interface.

With the difficulty and lack of tools in CSS it meant that web pages had to be
hacks. Along the way cruft such as frameworks came along to make it that bit
more possible, but imposing more stuff to learn along the way. Therefore it
meant that teams had to get ever more specialist, you could not just have
'webmaster' doing it all.

Things got increasingly siloed. Then this agile nonsense came along to slice
and dice projects. This made frontend dev a painting by numbers exercise with
designs handed down from on high. Those designs would be done by a designer
who by definition did not know HTML, they would be cribbing from other stuff
and not acknowledging their sources, meaning that frontend dev was an exercise
in reverse engineering whatever was in the PDFs and imagining the way it was
supposed to work.

Bringing on a UX person with the bullshit language about personas and other
nonsense that went with the job took the dev team even further away from
understanding the customer, the task overly specialised.

Along the way we moved to meaningless HTML, back to that early web stuff we
were supposed to get away from. Instead of FONT tags in the markup we ended up
with these silly divs and non-semantic class names on every element put there
for layout hacks.

The thing is that anyone at the coalface of development is assumed to be
useless at design, whereas the kiddo out of art school that can't code is
assumed to be a genius at it.

If you have done 300 test orders of a checkout then you find the pain points
of the process and can fix them (or ignore them). If you just do drawings in
Photoshop of how it is supposed to work then you ain't gonna be having these
insights.

So rather than trust the dev team and let them make decisions the designs are
cast in stone and these UX experts (who can't code) call the shots.

We have developed these huge bloated teams and denied entry to people who want
to code with Notepad and FTP. I don't use Notepad and FTP myself, but I don't
think that people starting there need to be excluded from the web which should
be for everyone.

Luckily a lot has changed.

We now know what works with UX, so there is no point in having a UI bod
putting the menu in the bottom right because they need to 'design' something.
Or changing the search icon to a pair of spectacles because they are an
artist. Those things are now standardised, we have got that.

Equally devs who deliver the deliverables rather than mockups know these
things.

Also changed is that browsers are standards compliant. No need to produce
static mockups when you can do a mockup in HTML.

Also changed is CSS grid. There is now a layout engine in every browser that
does all the things the hacks were needed for. This innovation means that
layout is no longer a major job and real content without the useless div and
class bloat can be directly styled in a quarter of the time it used to take
with clumsy frameworks.

Another change is accessibility. There are laws coming in to make that a
thing. So putting these pieces of the puzzle together I hope there soon comes
a time when web dev teams get usurped by much smaller and more nimble teams
that don't over-complicate the gig and keep it simple. After all web pages
don't need to be that hard.

~~~
patman
> UX is a by-product of the mess we have made of web development.

UX is about much more than web development. It's about the user's experience
of any product or service, including software, vacuum cleaners, attending an
event etc.

~~~
Theodores
That is a retro-fit of the interpretation.

The phrase 'User Experience' was invented by Norman of the Nielson Norman
Group. He had a book to sell and a professional niche to make. That is fine
but the consequence is that now we have thousands of other 'Normans' who
aren't seem to think they are the most important people on somewhat bloated
teams.

Before this Norman chap came along as the god of this new discipline there was
some care for the user taught in computer science degrees. It has always been
a consideration.

When the vacuum cleaner was invented Mr Hoover didn't think 'I must hire a UX
expert for this new hovering hoover (the Constellation model)'. When the
Beatles put on a few gigs at the Cavern Club John and Paul were not using the
phrase 'user experience' to get the sweat on the walls right (or the lack of
alcohol being sold on the premises).

The phrase 'user experience' would have sucked back then for the process of
just designing something right, given technical constraints.

A lot of the best design has been done by engineers who didn't need to consult
a higher authority before a product could be brought into being. But we
remember engineers for what they invent not how they design the user
experience. If we go back to the vacuum cleaner example, some aspects of the
design relate to manufacturing techniques, so if you know that it is cheaper
to drill a series of holes rather than a slot then that defines how you make
something like how the adjustment works. Some intimacy is going on there so
the design is not an abstract thing devoid of understanding of either the user
or the manufacturing.

With this bizarre Norman invented 'user experience' discipline there is a
definite disconnect between this aspect of 'manufacturing'. You have got
people trying to boss the team around and have people do what they say when
they haven't much of a clue on how it works under the hood. Industrial
designers who design things like vacuum cleaners are a different breed. They
used to use words like 'ergonomics' in their framing of understanding the
user.

Human Computer Interaction was what the buzzword used to be. There has always
been consideration of the user, but, if you only have a teletype interface
then you end up with something that gets the job done first, user experience
comes later when an Alan Kay comes along. His trick was to imagine computers
were vastly more powerful and design/build for that.

Our current silo-ing off of design into this 'user experience' thing where
only self-professed experts are allowed to put the buttons in the right place
cuts the 'design is how it works' part of the problem space out, meanwhile it
also makes developers able to slack off in this area. We are all human and we
can all do 'user experience' (despite lots of design that goes to the
contrary).

------
megaremote
This is the font we have to use!

------
neiman
I laughed out loud and rolled on the floor laughing at the same time.

:-)

------
justcodebruh
while we’re on the topic of UI/UX does HN have any recommendations for primers
on the subject?

~~~
DonHopkins
How about this anti-primer:

[http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm](http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm)

Interface Hall of Shame

\- QuickTime 4.0 Player -

Amid much fanfare, Apple recently released a beta version of the QuickTime 4.0
Player. Intended to showcase the technological improvements of the QuickTime
4.0 multimedia technology, the QuickTime 4.0 Player sports a completely
redesigned user interface. The new interface represents an almost violent
departure from the long established standards that have been the hallmark of
Apple software. Ease of Use has always been paramount to Apple, but after
exploring the QuickTime 4.0 Player, the rationale behind Apple's recent "Think
Different" advertising campaign is now clear.

~~~
qplex
Ahh. I remember being forced to install Quicktime 4.0 because I wanted to
watch Star Wars: The Phantom Menace trailer.

Another proprietary menace back then was RealMedia and RealPlayer.

Some time later the .dll codec blobs for both QuickTime and RealMedia were
horribly hacked to run under mplayer (and Linux) by the mplayerhq.hu people.

It was pretty cool feat back then.

------
iambateman
Fantastic article.

My favorite is “users don’t read” being used to create blog articles that are
125 words of nonsense when the topic needs 1500.

------
Kiro
I think UX is like SEO, mostly full of snake oil.

~~~
pembrook
I used to think both those things as well...until I worked on an actual
software product and then on content marketing for said product. It only took
a few months to shake my prior delusions of grandeur.

Important learning: Even though you experience the world as if you are the
center of it, it doesn't mean what you do is _super important_ and everything
else is "snake oil."

