No one should underestimate the percentage of "web designers" who don't know the difference between a span and a div, or the damage that level of ignorance is doing.
FFS, I still see PSDs (which is a silly format for web design) - already approved by clients - with small (read: difficult to read) font sizes, in a color that's low contrast with the background color (read: even more difficult to read).
Don't blame the developers some of this do push back. Unfortunately, "the creatives" too often have more juice.
It's so bizarre how developers are simultaneously considered 1. powerful in the job market, highly in-demand, with companies competing for talent, and 2. totally powerless to push back against dark patterns, privacy invasions, and poor product or design choices.
I mean has anyone even tried saying "You know what, I'm not going to implement that. I'm a professional, too, and in my judgment it's [ridiculous | unethical | poorly thought out | whatever]. We need to negotiate it down to something better."
Not going after you in particular, but I see this "developer power" dichotomy all the time on HN and it's kind of hard to understand.
Source: I'm a developer, and I work with other developers. On my team I'm the only person who has studied UX design, which resulted in me getting considerable praise for the quality and useability of my user interfaces. At the same time, I have seen my colleagues design interfaces by literally adding controls to a window in the order they implemented the features, starting in the top-left, and moving slowly down the page in a row by row fashion. Well, that's also a strategy...
The real problem is that most designers just like drawing pretty pictures, and are clueless about UX as well. Pushing that to developers is one option, but it's really a separate skillset.
I’m not paid to care. Caring actually causes problems.
It's not like the recruiter and/or hiring company are going to tell you up front "Yeah, the design team is clueless." True story: you only find that out after the fact. Pushing back is possible, and it does happen, trust me ;) But it either happens too late, management is clueless, or both.
So you update your CV in search of green pastures. That in turn creates an opening. Management won't admit it's them. The narrative is: we need better talent and that means paying more.
And so on.
It's one thing to push against dark patterns, and completely another to constantly fight your design teams. Do you honestly think the developer is making all these design decisions? Lol
But you get to pick one and then you are married and she makes all the decisions.
Iteration is what brings us progress that we enjoy, while also bringing with it the headache of reinventing the wheel over and over again. Both go hand in hand.
I don't know if it's because the HN community is dominated by backend developers who think UIs are pointless and should be generated by code, but it's really annoying.
No, we shouldn't be stuck in a rigid framework of shitty premade components with zero customizability.
Modern web interfaces can be designed to be user friendly, performant, and good looking.
Try marketing a web app which looks like a Java applet from 2003 and let's see how many users you get. As much as so many developers hate to admit it, things looking modern, polished and well designed is important.
Right. Name three examples that are all this, and still considered "good UX" by webdev standards.
> Try marketing a web app
Herein lies the real issue. And it predates the web. I recall a piece of documentation of Windows around 3.11 era, where the developers already threw their hands up in the air over realizing that, no matter how good, powerful, integrated and interoperable components they design, they can't insist on people using them, because marketers gonna market and suits will want their apps to be unique and branded and shite.
Platforms exist to support applications, not the other way around. Applications weren't born wanting to reimplement the native controls, they did it because the native controls are not only uglier but also less usable and hopelessly inconsistent between different platforms.
Examples that come immediately to mind: academic journals, vending machines, car dashboards, magazines, credit cards, TV remotes, washing machines, etc.
I'm not sure what you meant with the second and third phrases, do they relate to the first point?
