[gargs]

Bad design is slowly becoming an industry trend, which is surprising because Twitter today has more design influencers than ever before. Personally, I feel that the marriage of design with data has created such a huge mess that there’s just no good escape hatch.

It’s all about simplicity and the 80/20 principle today, which means that designers are bound to look at usage metrics and clicks as evidence of a successful design. Upper management doesn’t have to care as long as the bottom line is doing well and they’re able to kill competition in other ways.

From a user standpoint, though, once you get attuned to the basic functionality you want more power features that cost a lot of effort to build but don’t really make you pay more for them. You just can’t win.

This is why we need competition.

[65]

My theory of software design is that the designers who are designing software don't really understand how software works. They got into "product design" because it sounded creative and fun. They're glorified graphic designers rather than people who think about "products" as software. They think of software as sleek consumer goods. They're not engineers.

Perhaps that's why nearly every software engineer's blog that gets posted on Hacker News has significantly better UX than the websites of professional product designers, if those designers even took the time to make their own website in the first place.