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Product and Design have a common enemy. Yes, you guessed it right, Engineering.

The former aim to solve user problems and focus heavily on aesthetics most of the time. While the latter actually does it.

As a Product guy, I admit that I absolutely hate the role these days because all that are asked to focus on is engagement retention conversion and other fancy metrics. Community has missed the entire point of why the fucking role exist.

On the other hand, engineering always asks the best questions. Focuses on performance and scale while periodically checking on tech debt. Yes, they suck at business or sales but when the solution works, things automatically make money.

I DON'T FUCKING CARE HOW BEAUTIFUL YOUR APP IS, IF IT DOESN'T SOLVE MY PROBLEM THEN IT'S RUBBISH.

Functionality and UX matters to more than colour scheme or fonts. Reason why Amazon is a huge. They are functionally solving a great problem while constantly improvising UX and not giving a rat's ass on UI.

Another down side to your fancy design is that the UI elements make things heavier. No wonder engineers have always been the best problem solver.

We lost our way. Tech world needs to go back a decade or two to fix the tech debt.

Comments
  • 2
    Sounds like a bad design team/environment/leadership? In my experience design drives engineering decisions as much as the other way round, and if you don't have good design your product is basically useless because nobody will care about it. It's supposed to be a collaborative effort to solve the problem from both sides. Functionality and UX is core to good design, aesthetics is just one facet of it and important only in terms of what it gets you functionality or competition wise.
  • 2
    Correct. UI is always a nice to have. The basic need is a workable interface, not fancy heavyweight. Google's lightweight Search Home page comes into my mind

    But making it workable is the hardest part. And that's where all the hard work and thought process should be in
  • 1
    Good UI doesnt need to be fancy heavy weight. Have you all been burned so bad in the past?
  • 0
    Well, my friend, sorry to tell you, but you are kodak who refused to switch to digital.

    UI/UX is THE ONLY thing what matters in an app.

    Cool back end stuff ? Users will never see or understand it.

    your job is to create one or two "Magic" buttons which have "Woooooaaaaa" effect.

    Only UX/UI matters these days.
  • 0
    @RememberMe well well well.. you straight jumped to conclusion that I am in a toxic environment. Infact, this work culture is anything but toxic (as of now). Infact one of the best places I have worked until now.

    And yes, that is what I said, XD or UX drives engineering and it is what matters to me over a fancy UI which is broken.

    IKR that aesthetics are one aspects of design?
  • 0
    @asgs I have a weird love hate relationship with Google. Only company that has its own league and they are the only players.

    @Benutzername Good UI != Good aesthetics.

    @NoToJavaScript I hope you are being sarcastic.
  • 1
    @Floydimus I didn't say toxic, I just said it was perhaps not a great team, if that's the approch they're taking. No judgement as to the character of the team here.
  • 2
    Preach, brother. I’m not product, in fact I’m in my own fresh hell with new product owners, but I 100% agree that if it doesn’t solve business/user problems why are we doing it? UI != UX, if it takes more than a few seconds or a few clicks or requires lengthy instruction - no one will work on that trash all day long. They’ll go back to excel *cringe*.

    I think engineering has some additional things to worry about; scaling, stability, ease of support, however, everyone should be working towards the same goal of solving the business problem. Otherwise, we’re all doing it for funsies…and if you can get paid for wasting time and money, good for you….maybe consulting was your calling.
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