Maligning the devs? Not so much. Wanting them to show their work and explain why they think looking more like VSCode is a good idea? Very much so.
Not JetBrains, but I worked at a small app company that embarked on multiple UX re-dos for the vaguest of reasons. If your company has a charismatic VP of Design who has the CEO's ear, you're going to be spending your time on UX rewrites yearly. "It's not modern or sleek! It doesn't pop enough! We need to change our branding so it's fresher! Or, Users are confused with our current design! (without qualitative or quantitative user studies that show this)" It's never a measured attribute that they want to change. If you were a digital artist or interaction designer, you would have been able to build a great portfolio there in a matter of a few years.
Worked for a company that went full circle multiple times on its UI for what was ultimately a very large form between a single page with collapsible modules and tabbed UI layouts as the UX feedback oscillated between "Users don't know all these options are there and we want them to discover them because they keep asking us to implement features we already have" and "Users are overwhelmed by the number of options on screen"
I aimed for something that _wouldn't_ need to change visually with the times. UI Design is often the exact opposite: showcase that your property is on the bleeding edge of design.
I wonder what they'll do once they realize you can only round a corner so much.
Not fun, but giving themselves work.
Unfortunately, no UI team ever got rewarded for leaving a good product alone. They're hired to work, so they work.
Anyone old enough has seen the quality of certain products peak and then decline, after the company just couldn't leave well enough alone, and ruined excellence with needless tampering. I've hung on to various applications long after their EOL because the new versions were really worse. History is replete with great websites absolutely ruined by redesigns.
This field needs more of an old traditional craftsman appreciation for excellence.
I still miss Office 2003, it was so much better than new versions
To be fair, this tendency to prioritize your own values above those of your users is not unique to designers. For example, Linus' insistence that kernel developers "don't break userspace."
Wait, what? Is that meant as a counterexample?
I only hope nephew didn't mention Electron backend.
But it is a giant problem that the industry has been "simplifying" everything so mindlessly for so many years that today my iOS device gave me a legitimate prompt that just didn't contain enough information to decide about at all.
Something along the lines of "Change in app administration [...] will you allow [...] to administer Gmail [...] Your data will be administered."
Now tell me: is this thing going to administer my private mails? 2 factor verification? (Yes, Google often use their mail app for that.) etc etc.
At this point it is utterly meaningless: the only correct thing to do with such a vague prompt is to say no until an explanation has been given.
But I can surely imagine UX developers patting themselves and each others on the back for such a brilliant simple design.
To be fair, good UX designers exist, but everytime I hear about ux-designers near any of my products I get a little scared :-)
Why does this surprise you when it happens all of the time? As a UX professional myself this is one of the banes of my existence.
Consider it's less often a "team of UX professionals" who make these decisions, and more often the manager of the month passing out a resume item.
So yeah, fuck giving them the benefit of the doubt. Been there, done that, have the t-shirt.
If it turns out not to be 90% gratuitous changes it will be the anomaly, not the rule. They don't deserve that benefit of the doubt at this point.
It's not "just for fun". If the UX doesn't get updated, then they are out of a job.
I suppose it is human nature to randomly change things (see the other submission about gardening (continuous small changes are different from big changes time to time, still equally annoying)), also a result of the free market, there are too many UX people for coming up new products and make them final.
I bet if architects could change the buildings in minutes and for free, now we all lived in constantly changing (but obviously not improving) buildings.
I’d say they were doing it because they were getting paid for doing it. But that doesn’t mean it actually needed doing. What I have found in tech especially is that a product may get to a point where it’s meeting all its functional goals and really only needs small tweaks and fixes. But this is at odds with company growth. I’m not saying this is the case here but it’s prevalent in this industry.
And it's experience that says that they do. Maybe not for fun, but for another 3, 6, 9 mos of pay.
It's not offensive to question it, and you trying to police people with legitimate grievance is disgusting.
