I've worked with people who will look at code they don't understand, say "llm says this", and express zero intention of learning something. Might even push back. Be proud of their ignorance.
It's like, why even review that PR in the first place if you don't even know what you're working with?
I cringed when I saw a dev literally copy and paste an AI's response to a concern. The concern was one that had layers and implications to it, but instead of getting an answer as to why it was done a certain way and to allay any potential issues, that dev got a two paragraph lecture on how something worked on the surface of it, wrapped in em dashes and joviality.
A good dev would've read deeper into the concern and maybe noticed potential flaws, and if he had his own doubts about what the concern was about, would have asked for more clarification. Not just feed a concern into AI and fling it back. Like please, in this day and age of AI, have the benefit of the doubt that someone with a concern would have checked with AI himself if he had any doubts of his own concern...
It's a new problem in the sense that now executive management at many (if not most) software companies is pushing for all employees to work this way as much as possible. Those same people probably don't know what stack overflow even is.
In my experience, no - I think the ability to build more complete features with less/little/no effort, rather than isolated functions, is (more) appealing to (more) developers.
I don't think so. I'll spend a ton of time and effort thinking through, revising, and planning out the approach, but I let the agent take the wheel when it comes to transpiling that to code. I don't actually care about the code so long as it's secure and works.
I spent years cultivating expertise in C++ and .NET. And I found that time both valuable and enjoyable. But that's because it was a path to solve problems for my team, give guidance, and do so with both breadth and depth.
Now I focus on problems at a higher level of abstraction. I am certain there's still value in understanding ownership semantics and using reflection effectively, but they're broadly less relevant concerns.
These people have always existed. Hell, they are here, too. Now they have a new thing to delegate responsibility to.
And no, I don't understand them at all. Taking responsibility for something, improving it, and stewarding it into production is a fantastic feeling, and much better than reading the comment section. :)
Yeah! I recently discovered those, mainly because Claude seems to love mermaid diagrams, and Cursor has a renderer for it (it's not great but it's pretty easy to port to Miro)
I've also observed the third direction, which is the message storm.
That's when someone breaks down their point into multiple separate messages, one sentence at a time, when a single coherent paragraph or two would have worked. Why send one message when you can send 7 in rapid succession?
It's arguably the most annoying method of communication because it spams your notifications and you have no idea when someone has finished dumping.
I think that is in line with what I said: a balance is best. I have seen the opposite of what you described: long messages with no paragraph breaks. Not great either.
They're also getting into cloud compute given you can use the desktop app to work in a temporary sandbox that they provision for you.
I was about to call it reselling but so many startups with their fingers in the tech startup pie offer containerised cloud compute akin to a loss leader. Harking back to the old days of buying clock time on a mainframe except you're getting it for free for a while.
I reckon something like this has only been possible to develop because of how homogenous the internet has become in terms of design ever since the glass effect and drop-shadows took over in Web 2.0 and Twitter Bootstrap entered the scene.
You'll get a competent UI with little effort but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing.
Impressive technology, but that old skool artisanal weirdness of yore only becomes more valuable and nostalgic.
There's no shame in being homogenous and obvious, though.
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.
> There's no shame in being homogenous and obvious, though.
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.
It is actually a rational choice. It is a defense against extremely bad experiences.
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.
> The standard for large chain hotels in the US are much, much lower than everywhere else in the world.
this is true for fast food as well. mcdonalds in poland and spain were MUCH better than the slop in america. I had taco bell here in srilanka recently. it was DELICIOUS and tasted like real food. same goes for popeyes and pizza hut here. pizza hut in america on the other hand tastes regrettable and left me feeling like shit.
mcDonalds in Poland used to be the luxury brand. This is the part Americans don't get.
It used to be the new, western chain that you only saw in American movies, and then you could experience it for yourself. When I was a kid (middle / solid working class family), we'd semi-regularly do mcDonalds trips as a treat. The experience of going to mcDonalds because you were too poor to do anything else was unthinkable to us.
Other brands that are staples of the American experience were also like this. CocaCola definitely comes to mind here; most of our tapwater is drinkable, and bottled water is much cheaper than coke, so that was the default option for most people, along with coffee and tea of course.
Somebody did the calculations on Polish Twitter recently, and apparently taking a 4-person family to Pizza Hut in the early 2000s used to cost more than our average daily wage.
I'm guessing if they see McDonalds coffee as "okay and drinkable", this might be a different problem than the way the hotel makes the coffee. Or maybe the McDonalds we have here in Spain is just much more terrible than in the US, but I'll take random bar/pub coffee or even machine coffee over what they serve at McDonalds.
This will do as much to solve your problem as talking to Google on why a search result was bad. Even if they agreed they won't change their coffee machine while you're there and they won't rehire more skilled staff etc etc.
I second that. There is a mile difference between the sorry excuse of a burger that’s called Big Tasty and McCrispy in the Netherlands versus the already way better proportioned and fresher one you get in Germany, up to the better ones in Italy.
Besides the bun, it is noticeable in every part. The amounts and quality of the sauce, vegetables, and meat. And finally how the burger is presented.
So if this difference can occur within 1000km of each other in the same continent, I fully accept that it is even more varied in the whole world.
Maybe your sample size is too small? I've lived close to the NL/D border for a while and the McD quality was indistinguishable on both sides of the border. The variation between restaurants in the same country and also between different days/times in the same restaurant was much greater than between countries.
Thatis, if you happen to go to a random McD in some country and the big mac was great that day and you go to a different restaurant in a different country on a different day and the big mac was bad, then that difference has likely least to do with them being in different countries. It's not like they actually use different recipes.
Okay, granted maybe it is. In NL it is mostly in cities (Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam, Dordrecht, Lelystad), in Germany with smaller places, and in Italy only in touristic places like Siena and Genoa. So maybe it is just a problem with McDonalds in Dutch cities.
I’d say the only place I’ve experienced McDonald’s to be ‘extremely’ different is in India due to the obvious prevalence of vegetarianism and outlawing of beef.
In other countries the do have a lot of additional meals which are specific to their local taste (rice/fried chicken/different sauces) but the core burgers like a Big Mac, mcChicken and sides such as fries are there.
Considering that people expect literally the same thing, I can understand how even small regional differences can seem extreme. Like not finding any beef on the menu in India, or any bacon in the Middle East.
The American McDonald’s is a magnitude worse than the European (all of them), Australian or New Zealander. The menu is different in every country. However, it’s getting more uniform. Cheeseburger is the same basically everywhere outside of America, but not there. As somebody who got used to the European McDonald’s and tried it in about 30 countries all around the world, American McDonald’s is inedible. So there are differences. I completely understand the American sentiment of it, because it’s really, really terrible there.
Especially americans? The popularity and demand for homogenous american products and services (and other similarly homogenous things from other countries) overseas shows that it's not just "especially americans". What point would that even make? If anything the amount of people and customers of such things worldwide could easily outnumber just the people who live in one country, even as big. Desiring a level of service is not really a "uniquely american" thing. Perhaps there's also some impression that there's some "international homogeneity" that blurs things and makes it seem like it's coming from one place (even though it's a mix), but seemingly "cultural and local" things in other countries can be no less homogenous. Going from one japanese ryokan to another you're gonna experience the same level of homogeneity.
Good homogenous experience is the hallmark of good design. There are no surprises with good design. It just works the way you expect it to work. Good design should not generally challenge your expectations.
Would you like your hammer to have a new and innovative design, or do you want it to look exactly like any other hammer? The majority of UIs exist for the user to perform a task as effectively as possible, and they benefit from being familiar.
¹ Only to have Steve take it away. Jef left and created the Canon Cat, an opinionated computer that eschewed the WIMP interface in favour of anchoring n incremental search. Steve would also leave and create NeXT, and Canon would invest in NeXT as well.
More accurate to say that he was forced out. We (Mac nerds) were shocked when he came back. My father told me that I was super excited talking about his return, though I don't remember that. I do remember having a Mac Addict magazine with SJ portrayed as a priest on his return. Internet Archive ftw.[0]
More important than “same”, you don’t want any weird shit going on.
I travel 300 days a year work for and stay in hotel apartments, and I still miss the Hyatt I stayed in Manchester in 2021… last place I stayed that had gotten everything right.
Personally, if I had to go to Phoenix, AZ for work and stay at a Marriott hotel, I think I would rather convince my boss that this business trip could be a zoom call, and during that zoom call I notice that participants have all sorts of fun virtual backgrounds, filters, emoji in their statuses etc.
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.
> all sorts of fun virtual backgrounds, filters, emoji in their statuses
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.
> I don't want more pieces of flair in my life, thanks
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).
That's why I miss the days of old fashioned GUI toolkits (before the web thought of itself as an application distribution platform): you would just design any app as a bag of typical controls in typical containers, and you and your users would live with the expectation that they would look and feel just like the rest of the operating system, nothing more, nothing less. Frivolity would be generally frowned upon, with the result that applications were overall more homogeneous, effective, discoverable and efficient (also in dev time).
I remember when people would vigorously complain that Toolkit X was simply unsuitable for any task because it did not conform to the operating system's standard visual appearance.
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.
I'll still die on this hill, but I think that the reason there's a computer literacy problem is because we moved away from following OS conventions (when they existed) and into bespoke, branded UIs for everything, and then eventually to web where every site and webapp behaves differently.
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.
Notice that several examples in the Claude Design demo video are typing in English things that could be accomplished through UI controls, if the user only knew where to find them.
Not all OS's, unfortunately. I'm on the boat that says conforming to Gnome HIG's is a bad idea.
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.
I have the opposite experience. I have no trouble navigating Gnome apps, and now when selecting an application for a task, I'll choose a Gnome or GTK4 one first. Other apps implement odd controls that don't mesh with the rest of the system.
To me Gnome mostly feels like someone deliberately researched how to make desktop apps as intuitive as possible and implemented that as the policy. And I guess that's what they did, and they did a good job.
> In the early days, if you learned the OS, those usage patterns and skilled transferred to every app on that OS
And locked your thinking into the OS' way of thinking. Every software vendor had to do their application a few times over with a different release for each OS, because the design is completely different.
As someone who uses multiple OSes (work macOS and iOS, home Windows and Ubuntu, Android) I hate nothing more than apps that behave differently on the different OSes, with different logic or features.
I miss the days when there was no "standard visual appearance" for the OS (e.g. DOS). I liked the diversity of interfaces.
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.
That may be true, and had you asked me half a lifetime ago, I would have likely said "The old days were better".
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.
I don't remember people complaining about Winamp being a non-standard UI, but if it were slow then there'd be tons of complaints - and many of the "fancy" UIs were terribly slow (or the programs were, hard for a user to tell the difference).
> I don't remember people complaining about Winamp being a non-standard UI, but if it were slow then there'd be tons of complaints - and many of the "fancy" UIs were terribly slow (or the programs were, hard for a user to tell the difference).
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).
Winamp been really unique, probably because they able to combine that unique design with very practical UX. Even when better players released a lot of users got hard times to switch because of UI, visualizations, skins...
It was also much "bigger" on the earlier screens, because the resolution just wasn't there (I remember finally getting a 1024x768 screen for Windows 95).
That is in large part because there was no uncanny valley, so to speak. Where it was different, it was different with a purpose and was intentional about it. Where there was no purpose, like in secondary menus, it still used native widgets like users expected.
The parent is talking about toolkits like Swing where things looked[1] almost, sort of, but not quite like the native system. That wanted to be native, but for technical reasons fell short. These are what many considered to be completely unfit for use. Whereas today, designers wouldn't think twice about applying the same kind of almost-native-but-not-quite theme to match their arbitrary whims and think they are doing the world a service by doing so, the UI conventions (to the extent that there remains any) of the host system be damned.
Of course, there is indeed no shame. There is also no pride.
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.
not only possible but sometimes necessary because sometimes you need to sacrifice familiarity and question the assumptions we have to truly make meaningful improvements
True, but why would people use yet another lookalike tool over the one they're currently using? Or is the implication that looks don't matter as long as it works? Because if that's the case, Why do we need CSS?
A better example might be why we build stairs with a standard riser height and tread run. If you've ever accidentally tripped on an unusual or non-standard stair, you already know this.
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.
Your point is true, but the one I was replying to was focusing on the aesthetic aspect. For them, the sameness of UIs, while functional, make for a drab experience.
My point is that I don't find this to be case. Rather, consistent UIs, while functional, are also beautiful to me. The constituents of the UI can be designed with aesthetic taste, but the way it is all put together consistently and functionally has a beauty all its own.
> 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.
To prove the above person’s point, sap and salesforce have some of the most notoriously bad ux in the market and yes they make bank.
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.
Because the people making purchasing decisions for SAP and Salesforce are not people who spend any substantial share of their time using it directly or care about the UX.
There have been but the strength isnt in the ux. Both are effectively enterprise ruby on rails where you can customize and integrate with anything. That is also why they are sticky. They become part of core business pipelines. It is hilarious because the performance is terrible too.
Much of the sadness of the current tech industry comes about because the user's problems were solved in the 90s but now we need to make up new ones to justify the fat salaries, headcount increases, and stock price.
> They're paying for insight, leverage, velocity, convenience, whatever.
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.
the "solving users' problems" framing works for most products but gets complicated for developer tools, where the design is the interaction model. a CLI that gives you typed errors and predictable verbs is design. a confusing API surface that makes you guess is also design, just bad design. the pride question becomes: did you respect the user's mental model?
I don't take pride in having an original UI for most tasks: I take pride in having one that's easy to use and gets the job done. I am not disrespecting people who are making a creative/artistic UI: That adds fun and life to the world. But it's not required for every project.
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.
> You should feel pride when you deliver the easiest-to-use system
If there is no person in the team who prides themselves to deliver interesting/elegant product, then it is very unlikely the product will be interesting/elegant.
I believe this is not something we want to happen, a world with no interesting/elegant products.
I think there's something nice about the idea of a store owner which has unnecessarily decorated the store with love, even with the liability of a cat; it's not delivering the product better and the cat may actually make things worse because of allergies.
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.
There's nothing stopping people from decorating their boutique stores (or personal blogs, portfolios, and fan websites) the way they want. And that's fun and delightful for me, as a visitor, just like boutique shops are IRL.
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.
I think many companies need a UX professional to stop developers from deploying bespoke interfaces and forcing them to follow whatever idioms and patterns the users are most familiar with.
There's a real problem with everything looking the same though. For a consumer product, you lose brand recognition. For a B2B product, you can confuse your users because Tool A and Tool B look exactly the same. You have to look hard at the name, kind of like prescription pill bottles.
There is little reason to invent a completely new design system if your goal is to encourage brand recognition and prevent an operator from confusing tools.
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.
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.
Agreed. I only make internal tools where I work, and homogeneity is great here. These apps should be the most boring apps, yet clear, easy to use, and importantly, consistent across the company.
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.
This is reducing the role of Design as some lego-blocks assembling process. And higher quality being seen as adding ‘pizzazz’.
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.
We can skip Web3... Web 4.0 is twilight gradients, glassmorphism, text size xs in tailwind, and cards and pills for every UI component. Along with self-explanatory help text acting as filler under every header.
It's no different to people trying to reduce the role of Programming to the same lego-block assembling process. And I believe the same conclusion follows.
Is "design innovation" a thing we really need? I'm not trying to be flippant, but every time I've come across an "innovative" design the only thing it's done is made me spend time learning whatever bespoke conventions the designer put in.
Yeah. It's kinda funny we read blog posts, or comments complaining about the lack of a good consistent UI and then, complain that on the web "everything is boring because it's homogenous".
If people wanna have fun designing a cool, original website design, go for it. But if we need a fast, easy UI for someone that just needs get the job done, consistency/familiarity is obviously important.
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.
Yeah I think the web is more a tool than anything else nowadays and it being homogeneous is a good thing.
Think of roads. It’s one of few things that humans have managed to agree on across the planet and there’s a good reason for that. The system (regardless of which side you drive on) works. Signs, markings and materials are all pretty much identical wherever you go.
Hmm. The design of left turns on "stroads" seems to vary in the US. Mostly left-turn/U-turn lights in California, loop arounds in suburban Detroit, unprotected left turn lights in Kentucky, differs if the route is a national, state or local road etc.
On the other hand, right turn on road now seems to be universal unless a sign prohibits it. And all states apparently enforce slowing down or moving to the adjacent lane for stopped emergency vehilces.
absolutely no shame, it's good engineering. it's not even about homogeneity, it's about recognizability and lowering cognitive load for your users who, let's face it, don't give a fuck about how hard you worked on the UI they just want to do what they need and return their attention to the 99% of stuff that is not-your-app. That's their normal.
The issue is that you actually don't want it to look like the modern ubiquitous UI we see everywhere, because it's some of the most jarring, least-intuitive crap we could possibly design. Even I struggle with it when trying to help my parents out, so of course they have no chance, and if they have no chance neither does the hospital lawyer. Modern UI is garbage, and thus this just outputs garbage. Believe it or not, creating good UI takes real skill and experience. You can't just slop it out and expect your tool to do what it's supposed to do.
you are absolutely right, standards are so important in web design esp when you take into consideration ppl with ADA needs, elderly people having a familiar env etc
For internal stuff you’re absolutely correct - but using “main stream” design language (the current trend of rounded 3 column AI layouts, corporate Memphis, skeuomorphism, stock photos of help desk workers, wordart, etc) that isn’t unique makes your brand forgettable. Sure it was mind blowing when it first came out but it quickly loses its uniqueness and starts becoming a sign of crapiness/scaminess/enshitificarion.
Your users will never make it to your no-nonsense backend if your marketing is completely cookie cutter.
And no-one is preventing you from caring about those things. I build UIs with Claude a lot and I still spend a lot of the time thinking about the user experience and working with Claude to make an app as intuitive and easy to use as possible.
I do similar, but I dislike writing CSS because it's practically impossible to keep up with the standards. And because I dislike writing CSS I don't feel like writing HTML that much either.
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.
> You'll get a competent UI with little effort but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing.
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.
The core principles of interface design (even graphic design to a slightly lesser extent) have nothing to do with aesthetics. People, mostly developers, dick around with an interface’s aesthetics until they get something that looks cool… but the design still sucks because they didn’t do the actual design parts— knowing exactly what the design communicates to the user about program state, available actions, etc etc etc just through things like information hierarchy, gestalt, visual patterns, focus through visual composition, and things like that. Things that are well-designed are easy to make look cool because they’re sane, organized, and have subconscious meaning to the user. A good interface designer will spend as much time on aesthetics as a chef spends on plating. It’s a nice bonus, but you can have beautifully plated food that sucks, or horrific-looking food that’s phenomenal. I do the world’s biggest facepalm when I see projects doing things like adding customizable color themes in response to people saying their UX sucks.
> You'll get a competent UI with little effort but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing.
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?
The remaining issue is that even an AI-generated UI needs considerable UX input in order to work well, especially when you have to fit it around domain specific knowledge, use-cases, and prior art. Is it for power users or not? All that.
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.
There are still SO MANY insanely ugly, hard-to-use, absolutely horrible apps out there though. Sure, in consumer-focused apps, there's a lot of competition and pretty much everything popular is well-designed. But in enterprise? My god, it's still a massive shitshow.
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.
> 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.
Having just checked my child in for their doctor appointment, 90% of web software would be dramatically improved by using very boring best practices and readable and accessible web practices.
I hear it all the time in the recent two years: web development is apparently dead now, because anyone can just slap together a web site or build a dashboard in minutes etc. because of LLMs.
But that has been true for decades: Templates, component libraries and so on.
But I guess it’s now easier to adjust them if you‘re not familiar with their configuration or something.
It's a legitimate boon for throwing together little internal apps, mind.
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.
I know what you mean.. and me as traditional none designer have been using bootstrap css since the start. As usually my css would look like an engineer trying toso design.
When you say old school artisnal design and weirdness do you mean something like this: (shameless plug, but relevant to design)
I'd argue it's relatively unimpressive given the ability to create design systems and apply themes to them to create relatively generic content has existed for a long time now.
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.
I wasn't suggesting that the problem would be solved by large companies internally. If anything this is worse for smaller companies, who have already solved this problem for decades at this point by simply not caring about design too much and using the web UI framework du jour. We've already seen with Tailwind that moving to "just put money in the AI machine" comes at the expense of open source UI framework sustainability, with the upside of being slightly faster at making a first-pass boring design.
I hate it so much. Ah, your website/app/program is comprised of rounded-corner cards in four colors (color/pale color/white/grey), with a dark theme. Your clickable text isn't visually distinguishable from your non-clickable text. All of your logos are sans-serif SVGs. Your settings and action menus are split across four different primary hidden locations. Your scroll bars disappear even when there's text hidden offscreen. You try to guess what I want to click on by showing a series of competing horizontally-organized pills over the top of the content instead of just giving me a consistent set of action buttons.
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.
What's great is I can take what you just said now and use it as context when generating my new DESIGN.md system and making sure it doesn't look like any of the other stuff. Thank you! Superpowers will show me all the options in their built-in visual companion when brainstorming. :)
I don't know, I looked at their demo video and it was tile/cards all over the place. I haven't seen an old-fashioned user interface like the kind we saw before 2020 in ages.
There was a screenshot of Valve's front page back when Half Life 2 was released in the early 00s[0]. It was well laid out, straight to the point, and had design flourishes that would have been painful to put together at a time where CSS was new and not supported very well.
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.
IMO it doesn't flatten design into one thing. it splits it. cheap obvious work at scale, and a way smaller premium tier for real authorship. the middle is what actually gets crushed.
Music isn't really new either it's just recombining riffs already created. But the recombinations create new experiences. Might be the same with design?
AI can already generate music and it stands out a mile both in terms of the lyrical content and how middle of the road it all is. People will create some slop on Suno and lip-sync to it on TikTok because they absolutely don't sound like a thousand country singers blended into one.
So it's competent, for sure, but that is damning it with faint praise.
I am not so sure. I lean towards client work on desktop/mobile/web and while the initial output is workable as new requirements come in it starts to fall apart largely because the vibe coder doesn’t understand design basics. It is one of those you dont know what you dont know and not that ai cannot write workable css or w/e.
Most day to day apps and websites should be boring and usable, not truly unique or mind-blowing.
In fact, humans waste countless hours trying to figure out what is what and how things work, just because there's always some designer trying to do something nifty. And by "designer", I don't necessarily mean professionally trained designer - although the pros can be given to trying to make artistic rather than functional interfaces.
Design is primarily craft, not art. The designers who believe they’re artists are often dangerous and toxic, coz they feel the urge to inject their “art” into everything they touch. I say that as a professional designer.
> Impressive technology, but that old skool artisanal weirdness of yore only becomes more valuable and nostalgic.
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?
Sort of. At the moment there is a fad of websites that mess with your scrolling and have very low content density. They are all trying to imitate Apple's marketing pages. Most startup websites do this. It's not at all good design, it's user-hostile, but it's trendy and popular right now.
> You'll get a competent UI with little effort but nothing truly unique or mind-blowing.
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.
Homogenous design is a good thing. The internet isn't nearly homogeneous enough actually. The mid-90s desktop apps got it right and we've been regressing ever since then because web designers are like kids with crayons.
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.
Facade are to be looked at, not to be used. Most things that are to be used in a practical manner has retained the same basic form: desks, chair, handle, cart, cup,…
Dunno, I have been in IKEA and saw 50 types of drawer handles, for example :)
(Same for car interior design, or things like even doors that some swivels on one axis, some split on multiple, some slide.)
I don't think that us humans really actually like/want standarts. We think we do, but there are 100+1+1 standart from which to choose. So Claude becoming "standart" iš just +1 standart to choose from. Unique is fun!
UI Design is an art. Like any other art, it's bound to have constant currents and counter currents. More than the designer's whims, it's the population's need for novelty, generational differences, and the desire of companies to stand out what is driving the wheel.
that's how i've felt about all AI design. the harnesses get better and cooler, and the outputs up the baseline of utter crap to "whoa that doesn't look bad at all!" which works for probably 90% of the web, but anything truly unique still requires a lot of human taste. maybe that will change one day, but I hope it doesn't.
Everyone else is already pointing out how competent over unique is purely a positive, so I want to criticize the other implicit assumption here.
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.
Screen size is probably responsible for a vast majority of the homogeneous of the internet; but that a good thing. The space has matured and horrible experiences fewer. There’s a fine line between creativity and bullshit. Less bullshitting is a good thing.
p.s. Perhaps “quirky” is less because it’s simply not fulfilling? Too often it’s visual gaslighting pretending to be design?
I've noticed a lack of product cohesion in general and it does make me wonder if it's a result of dogfooding AI.
For example, chat, cowork and code have no overlap - projects created in one of the modes are not available in another and can't be shared.
As another example, using Claude with one of their hosted environments has a nice integration with GitHub on the desktop, but some of it also requires 'gh' to be installed and authenticated, and you don't have that available without configuring a workaround and sharing a PAT. It doesn't use the GH connector for everything. Switch to remote-control (ideal on Windows/WSL) or local and that deep integration is gone and you're back to prompting the model to commit and push and the UI isn't integrated the same.
Cowork will absolutely blow through your quota for one task but chat and code will give you much more breathing room.
Projects in Code are based on repos whereas in Chat and Cowork they are stateful entities. You can't attach a repo to a cowork project or attach external knowledge to a code project (and maybe you want that because creating a design doc or doing research isn't a programming task or whatever)
Use Claude Code on the CLI and you can't provide inline comments on a plan. There is a technical limitation there I suppose.
The desktop app is very nice and evolving but it's not a single coherent offering even within the same mode of operation. And I think that's something that is easy to do if you're getting AI to build shit in a silo.
Even a distributed or silo'd org chart has some affinity across the hierarchy in order to keep things in overall alignment. You wouldn't expect to use a product suite that is, holistically, not fully compatible with its own ecosystem, even down to not having a single concept of a project. Or requiring a CLI tool in an ephemeral environment that you cannot easily configure.
That's clearly a trade-off that Anthropic have accepted but it makes for a disappointing UX. Which is a shame because Claude Desktop could easily become a hands-off IDE if it nailed things down better.
And the multiple concepts of subscriptions for products, and the idea of MCPs/connectors that arent shared between the different modalities, and the idea of api key vs subscription, and two different inbound websites (claude.ai and claude.com)...
Agreed. I use the Claude desktop app almost every day, and have used Code and Cowork since their respective launch dates, and even I still have a really hard time grokking what each is for. It becomes even more confusing when you enable the (Anthropic-provided) filesystem extension for Chat mode. Anthropic really needs to streamline this.
YES! I thought it was just me being a bit scattered. But uploading an important file to a project only to have it not there because....<garbled answer from Claude> is distracting to say the least. I don't know what I've enabled offhand but I hate having to stop and try to work out why Claude can't reference a file uploaded to the project in a chat within that project. I think they should pause on all the wild aspirations and devote some time to fundamentals.
Add to that that notion mcp works for the chat but not code. now my workflow has docs I comment with others in notion, while the actual work and source of truth is in GitHub.
Need to fall back to codex to keep things in sync, but that's a great opportunity to also make sure I can compare how things run - and it catches a lot of issues with Claude Code and is great at fixing small/medium issues.
Absolutely its dogfooding AI and vibing huge features on the house of cards. Its a fucking mess, and the product design is simultaneously confusing and infuriating. But the product is useful and Im more productive with it than without it now.
I could tolerate Windows more if it stopped being a rental OS that thinks MS own your laptop more than you do. Like it was in Windows 7.
All I ask is that things I uninstall stay uninstalled -- I got rid of OneDrive and Teams for a reason, stop adding that shit back! -- and that it doesn't shove Edge and Bing down my throat and decide that MS knows better than I do about what I want.
I'm a huge fan of SCP, or at least early day SCP. The problem I've found with a number of the longer form sagas is that they tend to rely on world-ending apocalyptic events (which really does get boring, it's not high stakes any more) and are heavily anime-coded.
The authors do put in a great deal of effort, which is laudable, but it does make me wonder if the writing style and story telling is a deliberate choice, or if the authors simply watch anime more than anything else and thus the universe-saving power fantasy is the only thing they know how to write.
Personally I enjoy the more 'grounded' and mysterious stuff.
Tangential but that is exactly my problem with Warhammer 40K. I want to get into its lore so bad, but I feel every event is a catastrophe of galactic proportions that somehow is even worse than the previous one that I just am unable to suspend my disbelief. Yeah it’s meant to be over the top, but you can’t start a story at 11 and make people care when you turn it up to 12 and then 13.
The amateur fantasy writers that write this stuff have no concept of contrast and dynamics.
(I have enjoyed qntm’s book, but it lost me towards the end. The concept of antimemetics is one of the most fascinating in science fiction that is still worth exploring)
I've worked with people who will look at code they don't understand, say "llm says this", and express zero intention of learning something. Might even push back. Be proud of their ignorance.
It's like, why even review that PR in the first place if you don't even know what you're working with?
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