[burningChrome]

This.

I was a UI/UX guy for about 5 years and worked for a company that pumped out thousands of sites a year. A bunch of their designs won awards and I saw their model and thought I could do that, it seemed easy.

The hitch was that I was going to design really cool sites, with all kinds of animations, huge text, have really cool navigation menus, etc. In short, I had a very romantic idea that I would dictate some incredible design to my clients. I thought I was like the Frank Lloyd Wright of design and whatever I showed people they would swoon and then go with whatever uber cool thing I showed them.

Reality set in with my first client. Same thing, they didn't want cool shit, they just wanted their potential clients to find information about their work and contact them to hire them. After another 4-5 clients, I suddenly realized that web designers aren't some artist creating ultra cool, ultra rare stuff that your clients must absolutely have like a Banksy piece, they have more fundamental problems they're trying to solve and want you to solve them for them.

I got my ego checked in a hurry, but it was a good lesson to learn. You're not selling art, you're selling a solution to their problems.

[ozim]

It is not only that. For example wannabe EDM DJs think they have to be creative and find tracks that no one ever heard to be edgy or whatever… most of people pay for having cookie cutter songs played so they can dance and have a good experience and they don’t want to be surprised on EDM event - well there are big names that can do whatever they want of course but that is different expectation.

The same with software devs that they think, it must be “framework like code, extensible, reusable that will be there for 20 years” - well no if it is crud app most likely it will be trashed in 2 years stop overthinking and just do it :)

[caseyohara]

Wow, this couldn't be further from the truth. It might be true for DJs playing "main stage" style EDM (poppy mainstream music) but for most electronic subgenres – especially techno – the crowd absolutely expects the DJ to be a superb crate digger and pull out new and deep tracks they've never heard before.

No one goes to a techno club to hear rinsed tracks; they want the DJ to show them music they've never heard before. Before the digital age, people would go out to see touring DJs specifically for their collection of rare records that no one else had and you couldn't hear anywhere else. This is still true today in the more underground scenes. It's the opposite of cookie cutter.

[jrflowers]

Most DJs do not make their livings at techno clubs. The majority are hired to play bars and events that do not cater to particularly discerning audiences.

[phpnode]

Exactly. The DJs that are innovative, crate digging, slightly pretentious music nerds are almost exclusively hobbyists, with a vanishingly tiny percentage of them being able to eek out a meagre living from it. The majority of full time DJs cater to mainstream audiences who absolutely do want to hear the same 50 - 100 tracks on rotation every time they go out. They want to dance and sing along to music that they're familiar with, and if the DJ doesn't play what they know then they won't dance, they won't stay, and the DJ won't remain employed.

It's actually very similar to web design - innovation has its place, but 99% of the time people want familiarity.

Source: spent a decade as a professional DJ

[bluGill]

A typical DJ is allowed one weird song nobody has heard before. If it is a long show maybe one per hour. The rest better be songs the majority of people know and sign along with.

[phpnode]

Yes, ideally played when the dance floor has been full for a while to encourage people to go to the bar and buy another drink.

[runelk]

You might have a bit of confirmation bias based on the particular environments you've been in.

Having taken part in various types of electronic music/art scenes since the early 2000's, I've met all kinds of people. Local hobbyist bedroom producers playing for free. Semi-professional artists juggling gigs&touring with one or more side jobs. Full-time DJ's playing everything from small underground parties to some of the biggest parties/festivals at the time. They all cater to their audience to varying degrees, mainstream or not.

Granted, the scenes I've bumped into tend to be on the non-mainstream side. That's where you can actually go professional being that "innovative, crate digging music nerd" you refer to (removed "slightly pretentious" because that hasn't been my experience). It's tough, but it can be done, and it's a larger group of people than you seem to think.

I've also met some professional DJ's that fully cater to the audience in the way you describe. Many of them make statements like yours like e.g. "99% of the time", "almost exclusively hobbyists", "slightly pretentious", etc. I really don't get why, because it's just not true, and it comes across as a bit defensive or passive-aggressive to be honest.

I mean, of course there is the mainstream audience of the type you describe. But even that audience changes its opinion about which 50-100 tracks they expect you to play on a regular basis. That change has to come from somewhere, otherwise they'd still demand disco tracks from the 70's. That somewhere is the stuff that hasn't gone mainstream yet, and while the percentage of people that can make a living of it is probably not very high, it's a lot higher than what you claim it to be.

That vast overlap between underground/alternative scenes and the mainstream is super interesting, and I'm pretty sure that if you included that part into your statistics, you'd see a different picture.

NB: I might have a bit of confirmation bias based on the particular environments I've been in ;)

[CRConrad]

> with a vanishingly tiny percentage of them being able to

eke. Yeah, really: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eke_out#English

> out a meagre living from it.

[carlmr]

It's like the perfect conterexample, a good DJ needs to have really good taste and constantly listen to new tracks and think about where they can be used.

Designers everyone thinks are more creative than they are. DJs most people think are less creative than they need to be.

[brailsafe]

Sounds to me like they work out to be the same in this respect, only differing in perception. Both are solving problems with approximately similar levels of caching ideas and techniques and experience, while developing proficiency with similar quantities of tools. They're both generally making their money solving problems with all of that, only occasionally getting a chance to express themselves in some unusual artistic way that most likely won't be a viable income stream until they've really made a name for themselves; save for the rare circumstance they are Aphex Twin

[maeil]

I'm not sure how to phrase this in a way that complies with the spirit of HN (open to suggestions!) but that's a pretty American take on electronic music.

It's not necessiraly wrong, but it holds just as much for any other genre of music and the choice of "EDM" to make the point is pretty typical.

[morbicer]

I am with you, let's get bashed as Euro-snobs.

I listen to electronic music for 25+ years, different genres and I never grokked what exactly is EDM. To me it's a vague hodgepodge of mainstream pruduction spanning anything from Guetta to Skrillex.

People around me who like electronic music refer to it as techno, house, dnb, psytrance, hardcore, what have you. There are crossovers and there are multi-genre festivals. But no one says "I am going to an EDM event tonight"

There's expectation that you will hear some classic hits but people expect to hear something new as well.

Edit: Wikipedia actually shines a light on the resurfacing of EDM "brand" in USA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_dance_music#Termino...

[britzkopf]

That actually points to the problem I have with it. I don't think many jazz lovers would balk at reference to a performance as a "jazz performance" without a specification of which one of its subvariants (which by the way are far less numerous than EDM - compare here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_jazz_genres, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_electronic_music_genre...). But in my experience, electronic music fans quite often feel compelled to endlessly nitpick over which subgenre some (almost always) 4/4, uptempo, 4 minute track belongs to.

[maeil]

It could be that I'm just not trained enough on other genres, but I'd argue that the differences are generally bigger, and the genres being much more numerous makes perfect sense. Because "Electronic [Dance] Music" just means that electronic instruments were used more prominently than any acoustic instruments. That says extremely little about the music. Whereas Jazz means something very specific.

To name three "Electronic Music" genres, if you compare Hardstyle vs UK Dubstep vs Tropical House, I'd say the difference is much bigger between any pair than "Nu Jazz" vs "New Orleans Jazz".

You can conveniently grow an opinion on this here: https://everynoise.com/

There are genres of electronic music that are like metal (very uptempo, in-your-face, maximalist) and ones that are like jazz (smooth, free-flowing, open, not maximalist). Both being very common and huge subgenres. But where's the jazz that sounds like metal or the metal that sounds like jazz? They might exist, but would be incredibly niche.

Besides, people nitpicking over subgenres exists in many genres. Metal (or really "Music featuring heavy electric guitars") is famous for it. But in both it's only a small minority of people who spends their time doing this, mostly teens or people online, very rarely people actually visiting and enjoying shows.

"Jazz" should be compared to "Techno". And people definitely go to "Techno" festivals, even though you can further divide it into "Hard techno", "Industrial techno" and so on.

[britzkopf]

Whoa there. I've not done the polling but I suspect most EDM consumers think of themselves as music lovers the same way other people like jazz etc. I tend more to agree with your assessment that the vast majority of it is not in the same category as "real" music but I don't think attendees of a rave would go along with that.

[chefandy]

> The hitch was that I was going to design really cool sites, with all kinds of animations, huge text, have really cool navigation menus, etc. In short, I had a very romantic idea that I would dictate some incredible design to my clients. I thought I was like the Frank Lloyd Wright of design and whatever I showed people they would swoon and then go with whatever uber cool thing I showed them.

hmmm... That approach is anathema to every other UI designer or UX person I encountered in that field. The core of UI design is 100% about clarity-- letting the user focus on exactly what they need to solve their problem. The core guiding principle of UX work is designing based on empirical research, and then iterating based on user testing... even if it doesn't work out like that in practice, it's still laser-focused on helping the user achieve what they need.

Did you transfer into the field from a non-web-design background? The people I've seen approach web design with the intent of making some sexy website that's flashy for its own sake were a) front-end developers that thought the technical know-how was the hard part, b) branding and identity designers, or maybe print designers that never had to consider designs that people actually had to do stuff with, and c) small-org IT people that were sick of IT and were charged with maintaining the organization's website so they figured it would be an easy switch.

[The5thElephant]

So many comments here are just anecdotal experiences pretending to be absolute statements.

Web design used to be filled with ridiculously detailed and "over" designed websites that rarely were hyper-focused on clarity or efficiency of communication. It's only recent years where that has become such singular focus, and in turn has created a sentiment that UI and web/app experiences have lost their charm.

Many of the currently popular marketing site designers in the design community do come from UI/UX and web-design backgrounds, and they are popular because they design over-the-top big-text animation-filled websites that catch your eye.

The core of UI design is not "clarity". That is one adjective you can aim for, and you will find a wide range of opinions on what it means and how to measure whether you were successful or not. But "user interface/experience" does not imply it HAS to be an efficient one. Some UI/UX is designed for delight and delight alone.

The person you are replying to got into the industry with the same attitude most UI/UX designers I know had starting out. The people who approach it with your attitude have mostly been engineers. In the end most meet somewhere in a happy middle.

[chefandy]

> So many comments here are just anecdotal experiences pretending to be absolute statements.

Well I've got a pretty recent design degree and have a lot of exposure to what people are thinking and how people are practicing in this field. If you've got some empirical evidence that challenges that, I'm happy to consider it.

> Web design used to be filled with ridiculously detailed and "over" designed websites that rarely were hyper-focused on clarity or efficiency of communication.

Yes, I've been in the field for decades. For most of the internet's history, web design was done by "web people" and not designers. Additionally, lots of it has been done by visual designers and not interaction designers-- that yields very different results.

> It's only recent years where that has become such singular focus, and in turn has created a sentiment that UI and web/app experiences have lost their charm.

So where's your non-anecdotal support for this absolute statement?

> Many of the currently popular marketing site designers in the design community do come from UI/UX and web-design backgrounds, and they are popular because they design over-the-top big-text animation-filled websites that catch your eye.

Sorry, no. Most people who put marketing sites together come from advertising, which is almost exclusively filled with visual designers. There's nearly no reason for a marketing website to employ the services of either a UI designer or a UX designer. There are a lot of people-- as you can see in this comment section-- that call themselves UX designers that don't even realize how wrong they are. Just like there are lots of people who cargo-cult PHP snippets from tutorials that call themselves software developers, or even software engineers. Again, if you have any non-anecdotal evidence that says otherwise, I'm happy to look at it.

> The core of UI design is not "clarity". That is one adjective you can aim for, and you will find a wide range of opinions on what it means and how to measure whether you were successful or not. But "user interface/experience" does not imply it HAS to be an efficient one. Some UI/UX is designed for delight and delight alone.

The fact that you say UI/UX is telling. While a UX designer may concern themselves with UI design, they are not even close to the same field. UX is about product design, overall. UI design is a communication discipline in the vein of HCI in which the goal is to communicate the functionality of a program to a user. While there are lots of colloquial misuses of these terms in companies that don't really focus on these things, any organization that has codified design practices and structured design roles that actually needs to define what these people actually do all day uses them correctly.

> The person you are replying to got into the industry with the same attitude most UI/UX designers I know had starting out. The people who approach it with your attitude have mostly been engineers. In the end most meet somewhere in a happy middle.

I'm an art school trained designer having switched careers from web development. Most engineer types I've encountered call anyone that touches the front-end without coding a UI/UX designer, and think the purpose of design is aesthetic. I've had dozens of discussions on HN, specifically, with developers that think exactly that. Within the big UX organizations I've worked with and fellow UI designers, what I've said is the rule rather than the exception. Go and look at UX portfolios for people with professional experience in the field-- they're full of case studies, not visual design, and CERTAINLY not flashy visual design.

[The5thElephant]

All of what I am saying is anecdotal observation of trends and behaviors, nothing objective or measurable, just like what you have been saying. I also have been in the industry since the era of table layouts and slices.

I bundle UI/UX together because that's what most design teams end up doing, both. In my experience only very large companies commit the resources to having dedicated UX research. It's only telling of the practical reality, not of my knowledge of UI or UX.

My point is that there is no universal "purpose" to design. Design is a practice that can be applied to a wide range of purposes, some more aesthetic, some more functional, and in all cases are struggled to be measured by subjective or objective means.

The popular designers I refer to are not from advertising backgrounds. They are all "design engineers" who make things that stand out from the rest because they can actually produce their work and thus are capable of way more than the crazy limitations Figma or other design tools put on us. The trend amongst tech startups has been landing pages that follow the aesthetics of companies like Linear and Stripe. Whether or not they are functional, they stand out because they are flashy.

[bluGill]

UI and UX designers had their heyday in the 1990s. Every UI I see today shows that UX designers were not invited to have input.

[Suppafly]

>UI and UX designers had their heyday in the 1990s.

But also back then, anyone could and did call themselves a UI/UX developer because it was trendy to do so and paid well. Most weren't actually good at it.

[chefandy]

That's weird because the dozens of UI designers and also UX designers and researchers (UI design and UX Design are not the same thing) I know are employed doing exactly what they were trained to do. If you think UX was at an apex in the 90s, you haven't actually looked.

[bluGill]

There are more today than the 90s for sure. However there are a lot more UIs around, and the big players don't give the UI and UX design people near as much control as they did then and so bad UI dominates. today's flat UI fad would not be allowed in the 90s.

[chefandy]

Lots of developers think that. When you've got a working mental model of how software functions, generally, you interact with computers completely differently. Most people don't even think about 90% of the interfaces they use— from text messages to microwaves to ordering kiosks to car radios— specifically because UI design is light-years beyond what it was. You want to see what usability looks like without interface design? Look at FOSS... And guess how many non-developers use end-user-facing FOSS apps? What about big ones like Firefox and Blender and Signal? As in, the only ones that have any nontechnical user base? They're almost exclusively run by foundations that employee product designers and UI designers for their important features.

As much as developers like to imagine they're somehow experts on interface design because they've used so many interfaces and understand the tooling, empirical evidence points to the contrary. I worked as a developer for a decade before I moved to design, and I hate to say it, but damn near 100% of the confidently stated interface design knowledge among developers is because they haven't learned enough to get over the dunning-krueger peak, and echo chambers like this only reinforce that.

[f1shy]

In UI you want to be anything but original. It should be as “the same” as possible.

[DigiEggz]

Do you have any examples of some "cool" sites that you designed, even prototypes? You piqued my interest.

[burningChrome]

When parallax scrolling was cool and different, I designed an architecture site for a local architect using the effect.

It was very similar to this site where you had jarring transitions, background changes and images moving at different speeds. https://doubble.group/sg/

The end result was very similar to site above and we all got a lot of positive feedback when their current clients saw it because they were blown away. While I was busy separating my shoulder patting myself on the back - we realized a few months in, the engagement was horrendous. The leads from their contact form dried up to almost nothing. Analytics showed an insane drop off from the home page. None of the internal pages were getting any traffic. We quickly realized that nobody could find any content on the site, they couldn't get to the contact page very easily, the content was hard to find and or read because of the motion and animation that constantly took your focus off of what you, as a user, were trying to do.

We had up for four months before having to pull it and put up their old site, then re-design another simple, more refined site that would work better for their users. It was a great lesson to learn about solving problems or trying to create something cool that nobody could use.

We also designed a site for a local event to support a women's shelter and used parallax again to tell a story of how women are shuffled through a system that does little to protect them from their ex-husbands or violent abusers.

It used the same techniques in this, where you had both horizontal and vertical scrolling in both directions to show a timeline and story with illustrations and infographics. https://collagestudio.ca/en

This also got a ton of good feedback and we had a few other non-profits approach us to do something similar for them and we did a few more using the same template we had, but switching some elements to make it original for each client. This worked out much better because if people were able to digest the story and the points you were trying to make, it had a better impact than new clients trying to find specific content and the contact page.

Hope that helps!

[carlmr]

>When parallax scrolling was cool and different, I designed an architecture site for a local architect using the effect.

A friend of mine designed such a site with his web design company. I instantly thought, amazing but horrendous.

On that note, why is Apple still successful with this? Everything is moving on their website.

[lancesells]

They use their product landing pages as a commercial but you can see they make that top nav easy to get to buying it or tech specs.

Personally, I dislike scrolljacking but the other animated elements that come up in the viewport are pretty well-done. It's all ultra-sanitized and corporate but there's a lot of effort and finesse put into it.

Phone comparison landing pages:

https://www.apple.com/iphone-15-pro/

https://www.samsung.com/us/smartphones/galaxy-z-flip6/

https://store.google.com/category/phones?pli=1&hl=en-US

[pimlottc]

The iPhone 15 Pro page is a good example, as soon as you click “Buy” or any other link on the top nav, the pages become much more conventional while still retaining a consistent and functional style. The dynamic scroll hacking stuff is only on the main marketing pages.

[krisoft]

> On that note, why is Apple still successful with this?

It is very possible that they are successfull despite their web design choices.

[DrScientist]

> On that note, why is Apple still successful with this? Everything is moving on their website.

Everything apart from the navigation bar at the top - which is well organised and static ( over-time ).

ie in terms of the functional 'find-stuff' part of the site - it's all there in the top few pixels(1), and the sub menus. The rest is entertainment.

(1) There is also a footer at the bottom of the scroll - with a whole host of simple links - if you get that far and haven't found what you are looking for.

[ben_w]

> On that note, why is Apple still successful with this? Everything is moving on their website.

IMO that's Apple being a high-fashion trend-setter rather than good UI/UX design.

The current choices of videos they auto-play actually give me motion sickness, which I don't normally get from video content.

[whywhywhywhy]

> On that note, why is Apple still successful with this? Everything is moving on their website.

Think of it more like a scroll controlled trailer and that the metric they might be working on it the longer a customer spends on the site the more likely they are to convert.

Reason I think it's this is their sites are mega long and information packed with everything moving these days.

[melagonster]

I don't know anyone bought iPhone from their website, so this is not so important.