The anti-design bias in this forum is genuinely unhinged. I see some saying the entire destruction of the natural world stems from design lol.
Things got pretty bad. More than 95% of all employees (and I'm guessing 99% of designers) were using iPhones at the time. There would be rough edges all over the Android app, but as one of our designers said "people with taste don't use Android".
Imagine knowing that most of your new users were getting a subpar experience, and that not being enough motivation to expense a flagship Android and drive it daily.
But the new users kept coming, and despite mostly being Android users, they still used the product. Turns out that legacy taxis are themselves an ugly interface, and ugliness is relative.
Probably the vast majority of profitable Uber users were still on iOS, though, like most apps?
> but as one of our designers said "people with taste don't use Android".
Based lol
Probably true at the time.
It is 2026 and UIs are still abysmally slow in many cases. How is that even remotely possible? Now, with that in mind, consider (just for a moment) why people might think that UX people don't know what they're doing.
Because UI/X teams were separated from engineering. (Same thing happened with modern building architecture)
It's fundamentally impossible to optimize if you're unaware of physical constraints.
We need to get rid of the "It's okay to be a UI/UX designer who doesn't code" cult. (Looking at you, Adobe and Figma...)
Yes. Yes, it has. I'm currently in the midst of a building project that's ten months behind schedule (and I do not know how many millions of dollars over budget), and I'd blame every one of the problems on that. I - the IT guy - was involved in the design stage, and now in construction (as in, actually doing physical labor on-site), and I'm the only person who straddles the divide.
It's utterly bizarre, because everyone gets things wrong - architects and engineers don't appreciate physical constraints; construction crews don't understand functional or design considerations - so the only way to get things right is for someone to understand both, but (apart from me, in my area - which is why I make sure to participate at both stages) literally no one on the project does.
Seen from a perspective of incentives I guess I can understand how we got here: the architects and engineers don't have to leave their offices, and are more "productive" in that they can work on more projects per year, and the construction crews can keep on cashing their sweet overtime checks. Holy shit, though, is it dispiriting to watch from a somewhat detached perspective.
We have convinced ourselves as an industry that this is not true, but it is true.
I don’t think designers who don’t code are really a problem. They just need to dogfood, and be lead by someone who cares (and dogfoods as well).
I don't think anyone seriously believes Uber, Airbnb and Robinhood won because of "beautiful apps".
RH made a lot of investment tool accessible to people that "I just want to buy stock of some company", I used tasty trades for a while, but their mobile app while has all functionality, but realistically you will just look to overview portfolio.
Unfortunately, most of the SW industry isn't even aware of the difference:
For beauty you hire a graphic designer
For usability you hire a PhD in cognitive psychology
"Behind every great fortune is an equally great crime."
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Honore-de-Balzac/La-Com...
It's slow, bloated, buggy and ugly. Probably one of the worst apps running on my phone.
But there was a time when their app was native and was actually quite good.
In my opinion, this article had very clear and direct criticisms; they were hardly "anti-design bias". The increase in visual clutter is, for sure, a net loss for MacOS Tahoe.
