
Time to do away with the UX discipline? - spking
https://venturebeat.com/2019/11/02/its-time-to-do-away-with-the-ux-discipline/
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ivan_gammel
This is dumb, I cannot say it more specific. UX today is both an area of
expertise and a set of tasks to be done - making everyone doing it is the same
as making people from the whole organization writing software in addition to
their other daily tasks. It’s not just that most of people are not qualified
for this job and need to be educated and get necessary experience, it’s also
about them losing their focus. UX as a discipline was created because there
was a need in specialization: the tasks that could not be done by other people
and required a dedicated person to work on them. What is really necessary
today is to go further and specialize more: stop talking about UI/UX and
emphasize that UX is _not_ UI. And even more: UX research is not the same as
the interaction design or data science. And more: DesignOps is something that
needs focus. And more: accessibility design is something that does require
attention, focus and expertise.

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dccoolgai
May just be a coincidence, but no one I've ever worked with who had "UX" in
their title seemed to A) Know or B) Care about users as human beings and their
experiences. Most were primarily concerned with turning whatever app/page in
production into their personal art gallery, almost always at the user's
expense and would respond with a blank stare if you tried to discuss, say,
gestalt issues.

~~~
hombre_fatal
That only reflects the quality of people you tend to work with. It's like
saying engineers suck.

I've worked with UX professionals who were the powerhouse behind amazing
products and were sometimes the only people at the entire company batting for
the end users (which is the point of the article).

It really is a great experience to be a developer when there's a skilled UX
designer working full-time on such a hard problem upstream from you. And it's
a harder job than I think most people realize. Balancing UI with the
constraints of being human friendly is its own class of engineering.

Looking at all the UX turds that developers come up with because UX is hard,
you'd think the top comment would be a bit more understanding or appreciative
of UX work. I guess this hubris is why good UX is so rare, especially among
"Show HN" projects. ;)

BTW, the article doesn't trash UX professionals as unnecessary which is how
you and other HNers want to interpret the title. Rather, the article does the
opposite. It points out that ideally you strive for good UX at the
systemic/organizational level, not just depend on some UX hotshots to save
your ass.

~~~
dccoolgai
I didn't offer any opinion as to whether the work of creating goid user
experiences is _necessary_. Since you brought it up, I think that it most
certainly _is_ - just that in my experience, people with "UX" in their title
tend to be the most adversarial to that concern.

~~~
achow
As parent mentions..

 _That only reflects the quality of people you tend to work with._

Wherever you worked, may be they were low in design maturity ie., without
optimal ux culture. There would be 100 such places for 1 that has robust
design driven product development culture.

Also, that place may be hiring poorly, which in turn reflects on the
leadership of that place, and so on..

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pembrook
_" Extending responsibility for the user experience across your organization
requires at least a six-month plan...Dan Gardner is CEO of Code and Theory"_

I don't disagree with the premise but it's pretty clear this is a thinly
veiled piece of content marketing for his digital agency. Hey I'd love to get
fat 6 month retainer agreements for "digital transformation" projects too!

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golover721
Unfortunately in most companies those who wear the UX title are just UI
designers. Real UX is about researching and performing experiments on how your
customers interact and use your software. So you can make proven decisions on
how to design your product. Not I think buttons should look prettier and how
do we make this look cooler.

~~~
tootie
That's not 100% true. It's like Henry Ford said. If you asked people what they
want they'd say faster horses. Sometimes UX involves taking risks and getting
people to adopt new paradigms. And if you're not working with a screen you'll
probably have to invent something. Research us useful but has it's limits.

~~~
badfrog
UX research isn't just asking people what they want. If you do it right, it
can help you assess the risk and reward of the new paradigms you're
considering.

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rawoke083600
Ja my biggest gripe with UX-Ppl is that the ones I have encountered are all
ex-graphics-artist with a new title.

Not a new education or new field of study they did... It was just on Monday
they were graphic artist... and on Tuesday they were a UX-Expert ! If someone
tells me make this button yellow and move it down. I want to quantitative
science on yellow and why ? Or at least a statistical test(call it A/B if you
want).

I have no idea where all these sudden so called experts came from overnight.

As that one quote goes. "If we don't have data and only opinions let use
mine.(sic ?)"

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Pxtl
I can't help but notice that the rise of designers and UX coincided with the
end of being able to tell which things on the screen are clickable and, having
clicked them, whether I actually clocked them and, having done that, whether
my device is loading anything.

Maybe it's a coincidence, idunno. But Windows got this right like 25 years
ago, and somehow it's gone away in spite of us now having "UX designers".

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thrower123
Eh, specialization is good, if you can afford it. There's real value in having
dedicated QA people, security people, DBAs, Ops folk, and yes, UX people. What
I can't help but notice is that we're trying to make everybody wear all the
hats at once, in many cases these days. There's also value in being a jack-of-
all-trades, or a T-shaped person, but you just can't be expert at _everything_
, and some aspects are going to fall through the cracks.

~~~
httpsterio
I assume you didn't read beyond the title, as your point is pretty much the
basis of the article. It calls for a wider adoption of the design-thinking,
users first mentality and embraces various types of ux designers.

So, the article actually criticises how broad the term ux is and that we
should have more specialisation and appreciate that.

~~~
thrower123
No, I read the whole thing. It brought to mind the protestations that
eliminating dedicated QA teams at Microsoft wouldn't cause any problems,
because now quality would be everyone's responsibility.

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hvs
Something that is everyone's responsibility is no one's responsibility.

~~~
rawoke083600
Side note/rant: I've never seen it more clearly illustrated when working as a
waiter back in the day. The head chef(more like head guy in charge of kitchen
not really a chef). Got flustered whenever it got busy and then just barked
out commands to NO ONE. The end result was, that while the restaurant was at
its busiest there was a scary dude yelling "SOMEONE get me new spoon". Because
he didn't delegate or assigned this task to anyone. THE WHOLE kitchen came to
a stop and ppl looking at each other wondering who is going to give the
yelling beast a new spoon.

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matheusmoreira
Stallman's website linked me to this article on UX that I thought was quite
insightful:

[http://contemporary-home-computing.org/RUE/](http://contemporary-home-
computing.org/RUE/)

> The role of “experience” is to hide programmability or even customizability
> of the system, to minimize and channel users’ interaction with the system.

>UX fills awkward moments when AI fails. It brings “user illusion” to a level
where users have to believe that there is no computer, no algorithms, no
input.

> It is achieved by providing direct paths to anything a user might want to
> achive, by scripting the user and by making an effort on audiovisual and
> aesthetic levels to leave the computer behind.

> We are giving up our last rights and freedoms for “experiences,” for the
> questionable comfort of “natural interaction.”

> But there is no natural interaction, and there are no invisible computers,
> there only hidden ones. Until the moment when, like in the episode with The
> Guardian, the guts of the personal computer are exposed.

~~~
koboll
> We are giving up our last rights and freedoms for “experiences,” for the
> questionable comfort of “natural interaction.”

This assumes intuitive UX _forces_ you to use a product a certain way. There's
no reason this has to be true. Good products can be used intuitively _and_ can
grant their users programmer-like powers.

Take Google Search, for example. It's easy to use; you can largely speak to it
like you would to a human -- type "what time is giants game tonight" and
you'll get the answer you're looking for. But you can also use operators and
other power features to perform specific and precise searches. So good UX
merely gives less savvy users a leg up; it doesn't force a mediocre experience
on power users.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I read the linked article, it's great. And it does make a point that
"experience" part of the UX isn't about being a conduit to experience, but
about designers _authoring_ an experience and guiding users through it.

Tools have always guided their usersas much as users guided their tools; UX is
doubling down on the former.

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djokkataja
> And it means employees can get closer to the work they love.

Wow these people are all in on the koolaid. Am I interpreting the meaning here
correctly if I think they mean employees can work even longer hours to
incorporate this?

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bryanmgreen
It'd be nice if we could but it would require people to have different sets
technical skills and emotional capabilities for one job role.

UX is about cold efficiency and UI is touchy-feely.

Having someone do both UI and UX is like having your architect also be your
interior designer. On the surface, it seems like one person could do both, but
in reality they require VASTLY different skills and knowledge bases.

~~~
fuzzfactor
>Having someone do both UI and UX is like having your architect also be your
interior designer. On the surface, it seems like one person could do both, but
in reality they require VASTLY different skills and knowledge bases.

Good analogy since almost everyone needs an architect for their software as
well as their buildings, but much fewer can be seen to benefit from a designer
in either case whether they use them or not.

I wouldn't cry over it because I've been in favor of broader technical skills
and emotional capabilities for a long time, just old fashioned I guess.

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nnash
There's a reason why enterprise software looks like enterprise software...

~~~
aitchnyu
There are terrible enterprise software with the most modern skin but a pain to
use.

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fuzzfactor
>When the digital revolution first spawned the user experience discipline, it
was a radically new idea.

Nope, by the time Feld was complaining, it was one of the most fundamental
things that had been sorely forgotten; that programmers are supposed to
naturally always craft everything with the users in mind without needing a
non-programming designer, and have it come out more usable that way.

Without programmers adequate enough at all levels, the shortcuts & workarounds
can work out fairly ugly even if the interfaces look fairly attractive on the
outside.

This whole article is about overcoming the technical debt in organizations
that skipped the effort necessary to build their group with fully user-
dedicated programmers from top leadership on down to begin with.

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ryanthedev
No. No. No.

When designing a system you always need to start top down.

Too many times I see a developer sit down an immediately start from the
database.

Start from the UI or API. Just like we have UX for UI, you should be taking
experience into account when designing an API.

~~~
TeMPOraL
If you know everything about your system. Chances are, you don't.

It's a known programming adage that you should start by getting data
structures right, and proper algorithms will follow. In my experience, the
shape of data and ways you work with it have so huge impact on what _must_ be
presented on the screen that I'm starting to feel it might be best to delay
UI/UX work until you have all that figured out.

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whytaka
The better question to ask is, "What are people doing at work if not catering
their work for some end-user?"

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misterdoubt
> It should result in advertising content that is more personal and
> emotionally resonant

Exactly at the moment I read this, an auto-playing Volvo commercial started
making noise just below that paragraph. Ugh. We're a long, long way from
advertising putting "users" first.

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aaronbrethorst
I sure hope my competitors buy into this story's thesis.

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raxxorrax
UX is a stupid neologism for user interfaces. I do think expertise in this
field is its own discipline, but I associate the expression with corporate
misbehavior patronizing users.

Maybe because the first and most prominent products using this term had
profoundly bad UIs.

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cryptozeus
This sounds a lot like...wait for it...agile.

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liveoneggs
The time for DevSecUXOps is now!

