[goldenchrome]

As a former UX designer, this is a wonderful device and I love it. It was clearly made with a particular user in mind and they thoughtfully designed around the user constraints.

It’s effective because it’s as simple as possible, and relies heavily (as pointed out by the designer multiple times) on very old metaphors like switchboards, telegrams, and binary state indicator lights. It feels obvious because these metaphors have been in our lives for decades, so we’re very familiar with them. But it doesn’t mean that we didn’t have to learn them at one point. It’s sort of like how the Beatles sound like regular music today, but in their heyday they made very new sounds and lots of people thought it was shit music.

I feel like UX designers are devalued because they often seem to create irritation rather than harmony. Let me tell you, it’s a real pain in the ass making harmonious experiences when you’re playing second fiddle to short term business goals, or even third fiddle to short term engineering constraints. I would love to go into Gmail and declare it a finished product and get the whole team to spend a year figuring out which features we can strip out to simplify the product and design it holistically like this Yayagram, but it’s a terrible business decision so we’re not doing it.

In real life, UX designers are there simply to prevent large apps from devolving into CRUD hell, and it’s nearly Sisyphean.

[sevencolors]

Yeah i feel like a new UX idea isn't fully appreciated till many years later when they're widely accepted