Comment by constantcrying
20 days ago
Designer right now value aesthetics over usability. If your design starts out from the question "how do we make this more user friendly", you will arrive at a totally different answer than when you ask "how do we make this look like everything else, but also stand out".
Aesthetics are essentially worthless for a user interface and should always be a secondary concern. But clearly designers have elevated aesthetics over usability, hence the numerous and constant redesigns of everything.
If you care about usability you know that a redesign necessarily comes at a great cost, since you are breaking many of the mental connections of your users. It is only justifiable if there is some serious gain by doing that.
> Aesthetics are essentially worthless for a user interface and should always be a secondary concern.
That is one of my random thoughts: Windows could have kept the Windows 95 look and been perfectly usable. Sure there might have been a need for certain UI tweaks, but for most office/home use there was no reason to change it.
The whole "let's make it friendly" is annoying. If it's a tool make it practical. If you need to write a manual because of that, then please, go right a head and do that.
The problem is that design tends to be driven by the marketing department...