ux design is broken

dragging boxes and praying

Dec 28, 2022

i was really lost my sophomore year of college – i didn't like my business classes and in a myriad of 'i want to do art but art doesn't make money' i decided to try to pursue design, specifically ui/ux design.

i switched my major to cognitive science and then obsessively absorbed all the content online about being a ux designer, making wireframes, and using figma. i watched every video about 'how i pivoted to being a ux designer,' talked to every designer i could find, and carefully saved each portfolio and hung them up somewhere in my apple notes links hall of fame. i spent all of my time in design communities, listening to design podcasts on walks, admiring all the designs i saw on behance, saving inspiration.

i so strongly believed ux design was the answer to my turmoil. i thought that it was the perfect role for the way i thought, of how orderly and neat i am. that being the in between of the liminal space when we cannot communicate with computers that dragging these buttons on a screen would be the ideal creative field within tech.

it felt like the golden ticket, offering the tech pay while also satisfying my creativity.

or so i thought.

i felt something was off about it. but it was not discernible enough to pinpoint why it didn't feel right. the feeling kept catching up to me.

“It’s time to get angry about the quality of user interfaces,” exclaims Ben Shneiderman, head of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland
“The public doesn’t understand what they could have had by now,” agrees Bruce Tognazzini, a designer who helped to develop the original Macintosh interface

i started to see the pieces that felt off jut out:

the saturation of self-labeled 'design leaders', 'ux design professionals', 'mentors' as opposed to people who just did the design and didn't care about what they were calling themself
sitting in a tesla and realizing that the ux of this thing literally dictates one's life or death and being frustrated when important buttons were hidden behind menus and not being able to use the interface without turning my head off the road
'ux bootcamps' to get people ready 'to be a designer' in a week
copying others' portfolios and seeing the same case studies repetitively
making the same design patterns over and over again instead of trying new things, copying bad patterns just to look the same and continuing the vicious cycle

i realized ux design was a field that quite literally anyone could do – the entrance barrier is so low that it's hard to tell what good design is.

my problem with ux design today is that we're ceasing to move forward because we're using the same solutions to the problem over and over again. that we outsource it to design studios, to freelancers, because it's so hard to identify who's the real designer and who's just posing. that we’re ceasing progress because we’ve already tackled third-world problems such as ‘productivity tools’ and dashboards, so what’s left is now addressing first-world problems dragging around and recreating button combinations. that it's so easy for designs to lack a purpose, to not be intentional and improve because there's no incentive to go beyond the copy-pasted solution.

the people who want to do something different just self-select themselves out of being in these situations and the cycle of bad design continues.

it's even harder to tell whether something is designed well now than before. anyone can drag pre-made components and create something that looks good but isn't functional. but non-functional slick design is like a character with no personality.

at my internship this summer my manager told me to make apple photos again and i was just like wait, but that was already solved by apple. he told me to shut up and go do it. i had never felt more useless in my life doing the exact same thing someone else has solved. when i asked the full-time product designers why they chose to come here after an internship they said it was the ‘easiest option’ and told me i should retreat elsewhere if i had ambitions. that tech product design has become too corporate to handle and if i stayed i’d become ‘jaded’1 like them too.

in a state of confusion i dove into the archives. i knew this was exciting at one point, but it just felt buried under some layers of noise. i found semblances of excitement in game design and storytelling, in entertainment, in computing history and early renditions of what a computer screen might look like. i found the people whose research has influenced the user interfaces we use today, whose work became ubiquitous. it was in these nooks and corners and back in art that i started to feel alive, where i felt the thrill of designing the future. these interfaces we have today stuck because they were created by people who cared, not from designers who continued to let themselves be sucked dry by design systems and rigid lines and frameworks.

i've been playing indie games just to see their interaction patterns and it's so much more innovative than what's happening in ui/ux design.2

in edith finch they tell a story by walking around and opening trap doors to explore. you follow the words in the environment to go next. walking around is like turning the pages of a book
in gorogoa you take apart layers of a puzzle by moving them and seeing how the separate panels intertwine with each other to tell the story
in soma you go around a post apocalyptic world and hear audio recordings of people who've uploaded their consciousness to robots
in sayonara wild hearts you see how the songs in the album connect by experiencing each song as a beat game story. it's amazing
in unfinished swan you progress through the game by splattering paint to reveal the scene. it's like putting ink on a canvas to turn the pages
in florence you piece together words in a jigsaw puzzle to talk on a date. it gets easier to piece together words as you get to know your date more. it's beautiful
club penguin started out as an indie game and players participated in events that happened and came back to the game each day during events to see what happens next in the story, it was like the developers were creating new content live as the game progressed. they designed it so we felt invested to all to work together in a collective visual novel

Tech product design as a field feels like an intellectual desert these days. No discourse, no research, no dreams. It’s just eerily quiet. If I had started my career today, I most likely would have done something else. –yitong zhang

when people used dalle-2 to make ui designs, designers sprang to the defense.

they argued they could do it so much better. that they were still not replaceable because this and that. why are you defending it? because you are now faced with the truth that what you were doing was mostly useless?3

cool studios

a term thrown around at lot within fb which means that a person is basically a shell of themself and just do what is ordered of them without caring much anymore, also described as basically being an ‘npc’ or non-playable character. was super harrowing when i first learned about this term

i highly recommend all of these, i like to say i like to play ‘games that don’t feel like games’ and these all fall in this category, they don’t shame you for being new and are designed to be more like an interactive movie than a game

i think ux design is still really useful, it’s just a space i’m quite disappointed with of date and i think we could all strive to reach higher and think larger

ux design is broken

dragging boxes and praying

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cool studios

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