Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever?

[impactology@mastodon.social]

Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? by Scott Jenson @scottjenson | Ubuntu Summit 25.10

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"Desktop UX hasn't meaningfully changed in 20 years"

"This talk focuses on that evil little term “UX/UI,” which is responsible for so much confusion and tension in open-source projects. Not only does it unnecessarily pit programmers against designers, but it also limits our vision of what we could be doing

[impactology@mastodon.social]

Ink & Switch is doing something worth knowing about. They fund small 1–3 person teams to do open-source research tight focus, 4 months. 3 months building a prototype, 1 month writing a paper about what worked and what didn't. Everything is open source: the code, the paper, all of it.

What makes it powerful is the compounding effect, universities pick it up, build on top of it, and suddenly you have a whole open-source research community growing from a tiny seed, all on a shoestring budget.

[impactology@mastodon.social]

The speaker calls it a role model for how we should fund and grow open-source UX research. Hard to disagree.

[impactology@mastodon.social]

"The way I like to phrase it is I hate the term UX/UI with the heat of a thousand sons"

"It is the most destructive term we have inflicted upon ourselves because it confuses everybody. So when I started back in the 80s we called it human interface and then as things went along it turned into UI. Same job we just were kind of like oh it's UI now. And then Don Norman and his friends came along and they called it UX still design"

[impactology@mastodon.social]

"And then along came Figma and just fucked everything up. Because we needed more UX designers the industry got flooded with visual designers who got really good at Figma and they're like, "We don't like being called visual designers, so we're going to take this word and we're put it over here and we're going to call it UX/UI"

[impactology@mastodon.social]

""And they confused the shit out of everybody because design is 12 different things, it's not two things. To break it up into two things confuses everybody.

And so what do they end up thinking? They think, "Oh, it's just pixels." If you talk to somebody who's not a designer, they think design is pixels"

[impactology@mastodon.social]

"If you go to @opensourcedesign https://opensourcedesign.net/ points to Eriol @erioldoesdesign she's involved with this. Please talk to her. She's really good at this and I think she's got this really lovely website and I went there and 80% of the jobs were icon and image requests"

Hi there I’m Eriol Fox 🦊

Copyright @ 2024 Eriol Fox Eriol Does Design is the portfolio and hub for Eriol’s design, research and open source work.

Eriol Does Design 🦊 (erioldoesdesign.github.io)

And it's just so frustrating. In fact, if you really want to piss off a UX designer, this is guaranteed to work you basically say UX just makes things pretty. Guaranteed to start a fight"

[simulo@hci.social]

@impactology

> ...basically say UX just makes things pretty.
> Guaranteed to start a fight

On the implications of »making it pretty«
https://www.fordes.de/posts/makingPretty.html

[impactology@mastodon.social]

@simulo The frustration comes from the fact that the folks who want to make things pretty dominate the discourse now and have more hiring power which makes them devalue usability

Its not about being low status work but rather the way they completely erase usability as a skill that should be valued

[simulo@hci.social]

@impactology
I do not think that people who focus on visual design have the professional power to erase usability (They do have too few abstract knowledge to argue with in the discourse)

I would suspect that
a) visual designer might have been cheaper to hire than programmers and psychologists.
b) Apple had a lot of success with good looking UIs and devices
c) The market focusses more on web and thus A/B testing

(the last two are taken from Grudin, 2017)

[impactology@mastodon.social]

@simulo See for example this

I think Grudin would be astounded to see how much of HCI cannonical concepts and methods are really used in industry nowdays, especially startups

[simulo@hci.social]

@impactology I would see this as an example not of designers wanting to make things pretty, but of people being hired to make things pretty (Though the "interactive" also hints at "use AI tools a lot"). It is deprofessionalizing (due to devaluing any concept), but does not seem to be driven by visual designers (they might hire for something like "taste", "trends", "sense of balance" etc.)

[dahukanna@mastodon.social]

@impactology Apple’s barely usable “Liquid glass” #tyrannyOfAesthetics design system is a case study of investing in this kind of thinking.
This like asking an automotive designer to show up with an “interactive, drivable real scale model”!
You can’t divorce the interaction and function from the interface (liminal space or boundary)

[erioldoesdesign@hachyderm.io]

@impactology @opensourcedesign just to clarify, opensourcedesign.net is not my website, i'm just one of the current maintainers there. I'm not even a founding member.

But re. the comment about pissing off a UX designer re. make things pretty. I feel like that comes from a place in OSS where OSS coders/devs etc. aren't encouraged to learn about and pursue design as an interest, lest they be tarred with the brush of distain from other coders that do 'harder' 'technical' work or whatever. A lot of this is corpo posturing and power/heirarchy games that get played out in these spaces whenreally, most people that love OSS and care about it's purpose just wanna figure out how to collaborate with whatever language they have to express their needs at the time.

If an OSS dev comes to me and says 'Somethings not right with my OSS, can you make it prettier or better?' i don't scoff at them and get mad, i try to understand what they think needs help, i collaborate, I explore and i do my very best not to judge their proficiency levels in design language until they've had a chance to explore design without judgement.

[realn2s@infosec.exchange]

@dahukanna @impactology
The Steve Jobs quote comes to mind

"Design is not what it looks like. Design is how it works."