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0 pointsTeMPOraL7y ago0 comments

> There does seem to be a weird user-hostile school of GUI design and I would really like to know where it comes from, so that we may try to mount a re-education effort.

The Web. It comes from the Web.

Web development has this bullshit school of UI/UX design that prioritizes branding, dark patterns, and treating users like toddlers, at the expense of making the software functional and usable. Since we all get industry news from the Web, the Web patterns are the most well-known, and they pollute desktop software development too (doubly so when desktop software is nowadays built as webpages bundled to a browser runtime).

It's not that the Web school of UX is completely wrong; the problem is that it mixes ergonomics with a whole range of tricks designed to make the software more popular and more sellable in spite of the utility reduction they cause, and then sells the whole bundle as "scientifically validated" and "data driven".

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anoncake7y ago

Yeah. People say one of the problems with free software is that its UX is designed by programmers rather than UX designers. Which makes sense, because UX designers should be able to design a good UX.

But not if they don't even try.

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