If I'm building out an internal tool for, say, a hospital lawyer to search through malpractice lawsuits, I want my tool to be the most familiar, obvious, least-surprising UI/UX possible. Just stay out of the way and do what it's supposed to do.
The trick is, of course, that the human is still responsible for knowing when homogenous is fine, or when there's real value in the presentation. If you're making a website for, say, a VST plugin for musicians, your site may need to have a little more "pizzazz" to make your product more attractive to the target audience.
The real world analog is this...
The reason people (especially Americans) stay in Marriott property hotels is because they are homogenous. If all I want to do is travel to Phoenix, AZ for work I want to know that the hotel room has the same mattress, desk, TV, customer service, etc. There is real legitimate value to that. So I'll book the Courtyard in Phoenix because I know exactly what I'm going to get.
On the other hand, when I'm traveling the Amalfi Coast in Italy, I want the Airbnb experience. Sure the bed is stiff, there's no A/C, and the 80 year old door frame is hard to close, but there is something magical about it.
A personal example from a few weeks back. My SO booked a hotel for a weekend as a birthday present. We went there, it had a fantastic spa, dinner was delicious, the room great, clean, and so on. Individually designed, well thought out, friendly staff.
Breakfast came around and the coffee was abysmal. Really truly abysmal. What did we do? While eating breakfast we looked for a McDonalds, as we know for sure, that regardless where you are - you will at least find an okay and drinkable coffee at McDonalds. It is not a great coffee. And will never be. But the likelyhood is very low that you will find a shit coffee.
Marriott is basically the same for hotels. Or MotelOne in Germany. It is the power of brand - you get a solid 7 out of ten. And to be honest - when I am traveling for work, this is all I want. I want to know, that I will have a clean room, a bed that is good to sleep in. And the knowledge, that I will likely wake up rested the next day when I have to be at my best for my clients.
The risk of ending in a shit-hole got smaller because nowadays people write their experiences - but on the other hand, having seen how many of my reviews were being deleted by Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor and the likes because some lawyer requested it - I don't give a rat's shit for online reviews.
Marriotts are sadly not the same between countries, and that's probably a good thing.
The standard for large chain hotels in the US are much, much lower than everywhere else in the world. Full-service Hiltons in the US don't even have executive lounges anymore.
Canonical UX patterns are generally beneficial and most 'design' attempts are well-meaning dark patterns.
Xerox figured out windows, scroll bars, buttons, groups in the 1970s and most web interfaces are STILL not up to that standard!
Heck - they're not as good as Visual Basic apps from the 1990s.
Largely due to lack of design discipline.
Good pizza in Italy, goos ramen in Japan, grilled Picanha in Brazil, that's why you go there and want it different/original.
But in software UI this is often overdone. I want the pizzazz in my audio software in what it produces, not in how the UI looks like.
What made these Delphi programs so unique in their UIs?
Real design would be changing how beds, showers, toilets, keys, etc etc work.
Yes there is familiarity in the truly banal, but progress in design happens when we really question how things work.
Because it turns out, the type who don’t want fun little differences are exactly the types who will gladly go on a business trip to Phoenix Arizona and stay at a Marriott hotel.
I don't want more pieces of flair in my life, thanks
You generally won't get to know someone well enough to appreciate their unique aspects unless you see them in person at least sometimes, unless that person has the habit of letting their freak flag fly in all circumstances, which has its own downsides.
Then don‘t. My boss didn’t require me to put a minimum of 15 pieces of flair in my status, and personally I just put blur on my background... scrap that, I didn’t turn on my camera at all and just used my standard avatar (which I consider fun in fact).
Now I struggle to even define what an "operating system's standard visual appearance" is. Apple's still the best but not what they used to be on that front even so.
In the early days, if you learned the OS, those usage patterns and skilled transferred to every app on that OS. They all looked roughly the same, shared the same menus, shame shortcuts, same icons, etc. You didn't have to learn how to use Apps x, y, and z. You just had to learn Windows (to an extent).
Then marketing got involved, and then the web, and then suddenly every piece of software had to stand out and look and behave as unique as possible, throwing years of HIG research out the window.
Just today I had the disk usage analyzer (baobab) open and I was navigating inside directories so I want to go up a directory and clicked on the "<-" left arrow in the headerbar, which went "back" a screen, discarding all the work done scanning the filesystem.
If this app had a traditional menubar and a toolbar this wouldn't have happened.
This is a common type of experience I have every time I use a Gnome app. It almost feels like someone deliberately researched how to make desktop apps as counter-intuitive as possible and implemented that as the policy for some reason.
Years ago, I remarked to a friend that I'd spent half of my (computing) life post-high speed Internet, yet almost all my happy memories are from before that. It was the same for him, and we both explored why that was.
The homogeneity of interfaces was actually one of the reasons we came up with on why doing work at a computer is a lot less appealing.
I understand your feelings but it is extremely tipical in human history to keep remembering "the good old times"
But:
I would have still said I enjoyed using computers. And I wouldn't have said "Today's interface sucks" (well, other than my HW not being able to keep up with eye candy...)
I simply don't enjoy using the computer these days. And I do think the interface sucks. Pretty much anything that involves using the web browser sucks - be it a local app or a web app.
Wasn't Winamp 2 the gold standard? I remember plenty of music lovers switching to foobar2000 when Winamp 3 came out, because it was, as you said, slow(er).
Standardized interfaces are as exciting as kettle thermal switches or physical knobs in cars. Useful, probably optimal and will be around for decades to come. Also nobody talks about it, treats it with interest, or pays above market rate to work on it.
The value becomes the architecture of the value of the tool, not the interface. There is still value being generated, but the need for a highly paid UX designer evaporates, and is ultimately replaced by the above.
But there's is "pride" in making tools people actually use without issue
why do we build with right angles, straight lines, regular curves, etc? Why not random angles, crooked lines, etc for style and "excitement"?
Why don't we assemble a furniture set from a random assortment of pieces from flea markets? People sense that that is ugly.
Users don't need to think about how to use them; they are ubiquitous and familiar, and therefore intuitive and automatic.
If every set of stairs (or, worse, if every stair in a set) was radically different, every time you approached some stairs you would have to think carefully about how to use them so you don't fall.
That's fucking funnyyyyyy
The gymnastics keep getting better and better
Is the pride not in solving the users' problems?
> nobody talks about it, treats it with interest, or pays above market rate to work on it.
Definitely needs a citation for this one. For so many products the user isn't paying for standout design. They're paying for insight, leverage, velocity, convenience, whatever. The market definitely supports this by paying above market salaries.
Good design can be a useful differentiator but it isn't the only way for a tool or product to "spark joy" and often _fancy_ design (not good design) is used as a crutch for a subpar product.
Correct, they are paying for work done by people in other roles, who's title isn't UI or UX designer. It's on the backend person for velocity, it's for business development for leverage, it's on data scientists for insight, it's on logistics for convenience. Those people will be paid for solving those problems, not for tweaking CSS. My team, who falls into this category of more invisible work, has not hired UI or UX person at all. Which by mathematically speaking by default, is simply below the average rate for that work. Meanwhile Apple will pay easily mid six figures for someone in a more flashy role.
Design is much harder for power user tools compared to consumer. There is far more complexity and the expectation often is users must be trained to even use the tool.
Design only goes so far.
Describe the idea of what you want to do, not the inscrutable steps the application requires to get there.
Why ? Since its so notoriously bad why have there been no attempts to improve it ?
Respectfully disagree.
You should feel pride when you deliver the easiest-to-use system that the hospital lawyer has ever used. When you get them in and out of the system quickly because it's intuitive and has an appropriate architecture.
I disagree completely. The pride should come from the value that is delivered. Specifically, this:
>> Useful, probably optimal and will be around for decades to come.
Is something to be proud of, full stop.
A cold American convenience store may be delivering the fundamental value at American prices, but there's something to be said about that "extra" human or creative element. One might say the same thing about the changing nature of the web over time, less individual CSS chaos and more Facebook aesthetics.
But I really don't need that quirkiness at Home Depot, the DMV or my bank (or Amazon, or government websites, or my banking site). I'm there to purchase some screws, register my car or pick up some checks. I just need a storefront (or a website) that lets me do that as fast and homogenously as possible.
99.9% of stores (and UIs) are the latter, not the former.
But that said, for a UX'er I believe there should be a bit of shame in just doing the obvious amalgam of whatever 2-3 most popular things that already exist.
If you take on the UX lens, there's a lot of flaws in a lot of popular products, but they are accepted by the market because competition is not perfect. Copying that is not great, and I do think there is a point to be made on how "fine" shouldn't be the goal.
Apple/SwiftUI has accentColor for example where you can inject a brand colour. This is subtle but effective for UI differentiation - colour is a design primitive that evokes subconscious pattern recognition and can be more effective than a complicated design framework that forces a larger context switch in the user's mind.
Bootstrap was great for this. You got a clean web interface that was simple, yet didn't have to be completely ugly. Basic and functional. A form to submit POs doesn't have to stand out, be glassy, or have animations. It needs to be easy to parse and stay out of the way.
There have been studies showing aesthetics matter quite a bit for UX - users perceive things that are attractive as being easier to use and less frustrating.
You are right, though. Many products don’t need more than that. But I fear that this will greatly impact design innovation and progress. We might get stuck in the current UI paradigm for a long time.
Maybe it's true that yellow is just the best, and should be used in 99% of circumstances?
Your users will never make it to your no-nonsense backend if your marketing is completely cookie cutter.
But I reckon, nobody cares. Just let Claude decide and go with it... Sad state for UX designers / researchers.
Web Components were a bit too slow to take off so the mental model of JSX has stuck with me, even if the ecosystem with hooks and various approaches towards reactive state are in many ways inferior to a problem Smalltalk already solved back in the day.
90+% of attempts at making a truly unique or mind-blowing UI produce a mind-blowingly bad UI. For 0.5 seconds of wow factor, you've added substantial unnecessary friction. Outside of art projects where that wow factor is the point, it really should not be attempted, most certainly not by someone without the appropriate skillset.
The old skool artisanal weirdness was not a purposeful stylistic choice, it was a bunch of people trying to do the best they could with crappy tools. There may be some je ne sais quoi which is lost with the shift to mass adoption, but the reason for the mass adoption of these particular design trends was that they were objectively superior.
And people sometimes overestimate their designs because beauty is subjective, and because all children are beautiful in the eyes of their parent.
Also, there’s a reason why the mass adopted plastic, monobloc, stackable chair design is worldwide common and is studied as a cornerstone of design.
Which is exactly what I want. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a competent UI?
Why do people celebrate consistency and uniformity in desktop apps, wanting to crucify developers for not following platform idioms and guidelines... and then suddenly want things that are "truly unique" or "mind-blowing" or "artisanal weirdness" when it comes to a web app?
A competent UI with little effort is a godsend.
This is exactly what I want in a UI.
At risk of shifting the goalposts on what I originally said, unique here isn't meant to mean quirky or weird but, simply, something that hasn't been done before, or hasn't been done as effectively.
This is the challenge for B2B startups that are switching to LLM-based development and are trying to offer more than the reselling of cloud compute at a markup with specialised functionality, because AI turns SaaS into a sexy version of MS Access.
The hilarious thing is that I would be willing to bet than in a decade, it's STILL a massive shitshow in enterprise. That's because the problem with enterprise software is not that good design is all that difficult to pull off (it just requires caring!) It's that the people making enterprise software have terrible taste and can't even see (I am convinced) that the thing they built is ugly and hard-to-use.
Generally the issue with enterprise is that its designed to appeal to the stakeholders who will make the purchasing decision, not the person who is actually going to use it. The people making it may have great taste and know damn well what they could do to make it more usable, but if a clean and easy tool doesn't match someone's preconceived notion of what the purchaser thinks the tool ought to look like then it's not going to fly.
Or “2000s aesthetic” for something before Web 2.0 (although you’ll get a generic 2000s aesthetic unless you provide more detail).
I guess post IPO, after the insiders cash in out of lock period its irrelevant.
I can slap something together with Claude over a few evenings to fill a gap on tooling, or I can wrestle with Jira and CI and all that to tie things together with their own integrations.
No thanks, I'll just take the API keys and build on top, to my exact specifications, and the interface will be passable even if it needs a lot of polish. Tailwind has worked wonders for that.
Sure, some prototypes will be spun up more quickly. But if this was a real problem large companies faced it would have been solved in software already.
Good for everybody who isn't a large company then?
So it's competent, for sure, but that is damning it with faint praise.
AI companies: "good news, everyone! We've automated all those steps so they're even easier to generate!"
I think the same thing is happening in physical construction. Ah, I see you've designed a new box with four primary color tones and slightly offset vertical lines to break up the windows.
Obviously a product of its time and laid out similar to how it'd be printed in a magazine (the characters slightly overflowing the borders and such like). Accessibility wasn't a thing back then.
If a different company did that in 2018 you'd be seeing the G-man in corporate memphis, downloading about 500mb of assets, with 178 separate ad trackers in a consent popup, and then you'd be scrolling like mad to get through all sorts of animations that hijack the scrollbar, in order to get to any useful info.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/HalfLife/comments/10sx4ve/what_stea...
but does it still exists? Even without AI everyone is utilizating the same css frameworks, same libraries and templates... design is pretty much boring these days. CSS Zen Garden anyone?
You might just as well bemoan the homogeneity of Windows 95 apps. All those gray buttons in the bottom right of windows.
The shelf-life of unique and mindblowing has reduced to a week (being generous) before it's copied by slop artists looking for a resume booster or funding, and months tops before it's part of training data for everyone. Unless you find it in that small time window everything will seem homogenous.
It could just be a systemic result; unless you deliberately take the lonely road to parts of the internet where other people aren't, you will not see unique and mind blowing things. Which by definition you can't source from a place that has a lot of users, like social media or popular forums.
In a direction where the AI model basically serves you everything live. No sites, no front end, just databases and model embodying them.
I mean why even code anything in the future where it is cheap and fast enough to just come up with everything each time based on each user need.
I am not saying it’s good but it’s lazy. And if one thing is for certain is that laziness prevails. Some even mistake it for progress.
But then, is human programming language really the most optimal way for an ai to steer the silicon? Some kind of bare AI OS with kernel, drivers and there in the middle a fat specialised asic ai chip to orchestrate everything.
I think it's because Steve Jobs killed Flash.
This is most every corporate website.
This comment is just a rehash of the increasingly outdated and incorrect assertion that LLMs can't possibly exhibit any creativity -- and it's also incorrect.
If you're yearning for "old skool artisanal weirdness of yore", look up the trend on Twitter a month or two ago of people asking Claude to make YTPs. They ended up very weird and artisanal in a way distinct from how any human would do it.
Look up in an old city, look at the facades of the buildings. They have quirks, uniqueness, it makes the city almost a living thing. Every time we shave off another edge we lose that. Nevermind the fact that shoehorning everything into the same patterns is actually an antipattern and very good paradigms have been invented after the 90s.
It's not perfect, but I'd rather have a bit of a mess than boring emptiness.