UX clichés

These are overall really accurate depictions of what life in UX is like.<p>I do have a comment on this one:<p>&gt; <i>“Users don’t read”</i><p>&gt; <i>An overly used argument to convince clients and stakeholders to cut copy length in half. If you made this far to this article, you’re living proof that this statement is untrue.</i><p>The real principle here is that users don&#x27;t read anything that doesn&#x27;t look like it will help them do what they&#x27;re trying to do.<p>In the case of the article: Sure, I read the article, because I wanted to read the article. But notice I didn&#x27;t read the titlebar, the subtitle, the author, the nav, the footer, the newsletter subscription form...<p>Someone reading copy probably wants to know something about your product. Depending on what they want to know, they might skim around the page looking for the most relevant thing – for instance, looking for a header named &quot;Specs&quot; when trying to find battery life.<p>Making your copy shorter will certainly make that task easier and save their time, and it&#x27;ll probably make it less likely that they&#x27;ll decide they didn&#x27;t want to know things about your product <i>that</i> much.

I am not a designer nor a software engineer, nor a business person. I am just a (heavy) user of all sorts of software for a very long time. I am a competent coder, and I code for research and pleasure. I don&#x27;t have a dog in this, let&#x27;s say, professional race.<p>Every time I spot &quot;UX&quot; in relation to something I use, I cringe. Not because I have anything against the idea of design, or good interfaces, or designing good interfaces. That is all great. The problem is that 99% of the time that the term &quot;UX&quot; shows up in connection with something I use, two things are going to happen:<p>1) I will have to relearn how to do something that I already was used to doing without even thinking;<p>2) Some feature or option is going to be removed.<p>The human brain is incredibly plastic and adaptable. Unless the interface is truly absurd, most people can get used to it and never give it a second thought again.<p>My number one (by far) request as a user:<p>DON&#x27;T FUCKING CHANGE THE INTERFACE<p>Unless there is a very good reason, and I bet there isn&#x27;t.<p>I bought my first MacBook in 2007. Thankfully, Apple is one of the best behaved companies when it comes to not changing things for the sake of it, and part of the reason why I stick with them. I don&#x27;t mention this out of some sort of fanboy-ism (I have no loyalty to corporations, I just buy shit I like). I mention it to make a more important point:<p>The UX of 2007 was absolutely fine, and if they would have made zero changes since then I would be perfectly happy. UX for laptops&#x2F;desktops was solved in the early 2000. Everything else since then is just irrelevant bullshit.

The quoted aphorisms, in my personal experience, aren&#x27;t used for the reasons being imputed. It feels like forced satire.<p>For example:<p>&gt; &quot;Content is king&quot; - A pretty strong argument to convince everyone to push the deadline because you haven’t received the content that will go on the page you are designing.<p>I&#x27;ve heard this a lot, but never from a designer trying to push a deadline. It&#x27;s used to say &quot;stop wasting time dicking around with the design -- the content is what matters&quot; or &quot;it doesn&#x27;t matter how beautiful it is if no one cares about you&#x27;re saying.&quot;

While running a UX&#x2F;UI design studio for B2B SaaS companies for 10+ years - I’ve seen the UX space evolve into a cult like crowd of designers with too many “gurus” and design research methodologies. Really, all you have to do is 2 things:<p># talk to your users.<p># look at your data&#x2F;analytics<p>It’s really not rocket science. These two metrics will take you minutes to find UX problems and opportunities in your product. Then, try to solve them with the least amount of design possible.<p>Repeat.

I&#x27;d love to see a similar list for software engineering.<p>- if your code isn&#x27;t important enough to be tested, it&#x27;s not important to be written<p>- every function must fit a single screen

My favorite<p>“If Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, they would have told him faster horses” Used as a counter-argument to the previous statement, when you start to realize you won’t have time or money to do enough user research.

Not a UX cliche as such, but a frequently used phrase:<p><i>A carefully curated collection of resources</i><p>Translation: a list of links<p>Even better if you can shoehorn “hand-picked” in there (<i>A hand-picked collection of curated resources to help you learn [technology]</i>)<p>Presumably the hand-picked links are always preferable over the, er, robot-picked ones.<p>I wonder what a real museum curator must make of it all (I presume they don’t really care).

My favourite business cliche is a diagram with three or four things in a circle.<p>I thought about it so much I know think the circular process is an inevitable consequence of reality. Still, the business ones are usually pretty vacuuous.

&gt; UX should be a mindset, not a step in the process<p>Every specialist in every branch of software engineering thinks like that. Designers, architects, testers, compliance people, everyone seems to think the software development process should be framed according to their priorities. Who knows, maybe this is a healthy way to establish a balance of power.

I find it amusing that his final disclaimer how &quot;This is a satire article&quot; really falls under the &quot;if you have to explain a joke, it’s not that good&quot;...

I like this one:<p>&gt; UX should be a mindset, not a step in the process<p>Mostly because it&#x27;s not a UX-cliché, but a cliché for everything: security, accessibility, UX, localisation, etc.; advocates want them all to be an essential part of the process, but in practice, nobody manages to do all that.

Here&#x27;s one to add:<p>&quot;UX is based on research and science&quot;

&gt; &quot;You are not your own user.&quot;<p>Never say this to someone. First, anyone bringing up feedback is doing it for a reason. Weed out what that reason is.<p>If you say this to someone re-asses your own emotional reason for it. This is a very emotional response.<p>I&#x27;ve seen people voice interface feedback that was dismissed with this exact response, and 12 months later was implemented. We could have saved 12 months, instead, we had to deal with a designer&#x27;s emotional immaturity.

““Designers should have a seat at the table” When you are not able to prove your strategic value to the company based on your everyday actions and behaviors, and you have to beg to be invited to important meetings.“<p>Or it could be that an experienced designer has more to offer than acting as a glorified crayon only putting color where the stakeholders want it.

I&#x27;m feeling that cliches is not the right word. To call something cliche generally means it&#x27;s over-used, tired, boring, etc.<p>But the article itself is not saying that. Perhaps maxims or truths, would be better?

&gt;&gt; Looks particularly great if written in Helvetica, printed and framed, and hung by the entrance of truly collaborative office spaces.<p>This is the business model of many successful mall-chain-stores.

&gt; &quot;Users don’t read”<p>&gt; ...<p>&gt; If you made this far to this article, you’re living proof that this statement is untrue.<p>I only saw that because I got bored and scrolled to the bottom to see if there was a punchline.

&gt; “When escalators break, they actually become stairs”<p>Properly stopped, but functioning escalators become stairs. Escalators that break can become death traps that will kill you.

&gt; “I’m wondering if this breaks accessibility standards”<p>&gt; Used as last resort when you are running out of arguments to convince other designers their design is not working.<p>If you break your {app, website} for millions of people because you want it to look <i>just so</i> and the platform widget just doesn’t fit with your “brand”, I have no sympathy for you.

It seems fitting that I had to enable reader mode to be able to read a blog post about UX cliches.

Never use a tightly spaced san serif font to tell users to &quot;click&quot; or &quot;double click&quot;.

The fold is actually true though

UX is a by-product of the mess we have made of web development.<p>We made web development so overly complicated that vast teams are needed for the simple task of showing stuff on a page.<p>Part of the holdup has been CSS. To build out a responsive layout used to be phenomenally hard. Tim Berners Lee didn&#x27;t think layout was needed, originally the web was to just link documents that people would open in other programs, so the complexity would have been in those other programs.<p>Need a spreadsheet? Then you would get the link and open it in your spreadsheet program, not an online Google Docs equivalent with its own special interface.<p>With the difficulty and lack of tools in CSS it meant that web pages had to be hacks. Along the way cruft such as frameworks came along to make it that bit more possible, but imposing more stuff to learn along the way. Therefore it meant that teams had to get ever more specialist, you could not just have &#x27;webmaster&#x27; doing it all.<p>Things got increasingly siloed. Then this agile nonsense came along to slice and dice projects. This made frontend dev a painting by numbers exercise with designs handed down from on high. Those designs would be done by a designer who by definition did not know HTML, they would be cribbing from other stuff and not acknowledging their sources, meaning that frontend dev was an exercise in reverse engineering whatever was in the PDFs and imagining the way it was supposed to work.<p>Bringing on a UX person with the bullshit language about personas and other nonsense that went with the job took the dev team even further away from understanding the customer, the task overly specialised.<p>Along the way we moved to meaningless HTML, back to that early web stuff we were supposed to get away from. Instead of FONT tags in the markup we ended up with these silly divs and non-semantic class names on every element put there for layout hacks.<p>The thing is that anyone at the coalface of development is assumed to be useless at design, whereas the kiddo out of art school that can&#x27;t code is assumed to be a genius at it.<p>If you have done 300 test orders of a checkout then you find the pain points of the process and can fix them (or ignore them). If you just do drawings in Photoshop of how it is supposed to work then you ain&#x27;t gonna be having these insights.<p>So rather than trust the dev team and let them make decisions the designs are cast in stone and these UX experts (who can&#x27;t code) call the shots.<p>We have developed these huge bloated teams and denied entry to people who want to code with Notepad and FTP. I don&#x27;t use Notepad and FTP myself, but I don&#x27;t think that people starting there need to be excluded from the web which should be for everyone.<p>Luckily a lot has changed.<p>We now know what works with UX, so there is no point in having a UI bod putting the menu in the bottom right because they need to &#x27;design&#x27; something. Or changing the search icon to a pair of spectacles because they are an artist. Those things are now standardised, we have got that.<p>Equally devs who deliver the deliverables rather than mockups know these things.<p>Also changed is that browsers are standards compliant. No need to produce static mockups when you can do a mockup in HTML.<p>Also changed is CSS grid. There is now a layout engine in every browser that does all the things the hacks were needed for. This innovation means that layout is no longer a major job and real content without the useless div and class bloat can be directly styled in a quarter of the time it used to take with clumsy frameworks.<p>Another change is accessibility. There are laws coming in to make that a thing. So putting these pieces of the puzzle together I hope there soon comes a time when web dev teams get usurped by much smaller and more nimble teams that don&#x27;t over-complicate the gig and keep it simple. After all web pages don&#x27;t need to be that hard.

This is the font we have to use!

I laughed out loud and rolled on the floor laughing at the same time.<p>:-)

while we’re on the topic of UI&#x2F;UX does HN have any recommendations for primers on the subject?

Fantastic article.<p>My favorite is “users don’t read” being used to create blog articles that are 125 words of nonsense when the topic needs 1500.

I think UX is like SEO, mostly full of snake oil.