[wang_li]

> to produce something to justify someone’s career,

This is the curse of being a UI designer for a long lived product. Once a thing has been created and future work consists of 99% code and 1% UI, your UI designer job has evaporated. And so we see that everything changes every major release of an operating system, so the UI people can justify their pay checks.

[hnlmorg]

I think you have cause and effect the wrong way around.

These changes in design are intended to appeal to our magpie brain of wanting the latest, shiniest, things.

You have to understand the vanity of consumers. If every new product looked the same then a lot of people wouldn’t both buying the latest gizmo because there’s no magpie appeal. So when the market stagnates, you need to redesign the product to convince consumers to throw away a perfectly good, working device.

And it usually works as a sales strategy too.

So designers then get told thy has to come up with something that looks newer and more futuristic than the current designs. Regardless of how much those designers might love or hate those current designs.

They come up with this shit not to justify their jobs but because they’re hired exactly to come up with this shit.

[gmd63]

If it's coming down from the C suite, that just makes it worse. That's cheap marketing tricks winning priority over lasting intent. It's not just the design folks trying to justify their job at that point, it's the executives surrendering to the "stock must go up during my quarters at all costs" mentality.

[hnlmorg]

Worse in some ways, but understandable an others.

If Company X didn’t reinvigorate their product line then consumers might switch to Company Ys products because they look shiny and new. Which is literally why people switched from BlackBerry et al to iPhones in the previous decade.

Consumers are fickle and want that dopamine hit when they spend money. I know this and even I find myself chasing shiny things. So there’s no way we can change that kind of consumer behaviour.

To be clear, I’m not saying it’s right that companies do this, but I do think they’d go out of business if they didn’t because consumer trends will continue like this regardless of how ethical companies tried to be.

So the problem here isnt that Apple tried to refresh its operating system look. It’s that they completely jumped the shark and created something that was too focused on aesthetics while failing in literally every other metric.

[gmd63]

People switched from BlackBerry to iPhone for far more than just iPhones being "shiny and new." Visual voicemail, Safari, touchscreen, etc. The recent UI redesign effort is not remotely comparable to the investment and strategy that went into distinguishing the iPhone from the rest of the cell phone market.

We're discussing this on one of the most bare and plain sites on the popular internet. Folks who are attracted to value don't care if stuff isn't redesigned if it works well. It's a bad sign if executives at Apple feel the need to invest in cheap dopamine hacks for the sake of novelty farming.

A company that stagnates or even shrinks to a healthy size can be more valuable to society, and the stock market in the long term, than one that mutilates itself in chase of unnecessary growth.

[ethbr1]

In my experience, it's usually just UX hubris and ignorance about a product's expert users.

UX folks usually have no understanding of the impact of moving a common control and/or keyboard shortcut.

[hnlmorg]

You’re talking about very specific rearrangements of controls. Whereas I was talking about why these big redesign initiatives get green lit to begin with.