[jstanley]

There's a time and a place for it. If you already know exactly what the program needs to do, then sure, design a user interface. If you are still exploring the design space then it's better to try things out as quickly as possible even if the ui is rough.

[Enginerrrd]

The latter is an interesting mindset to advocate for. In almost every other engineering discipline, this would be frowned upon. I suspect wisdom could be gained by not discounting better forethought to be honest.

However, I really wonder how formula 1 teams manage their engineering concepts and driver UI/UX. They do some crazy experimental things, and they have high budgets, but they're often pulling off high-risk ideas on the very edge of feasibility. Every subtle iteration requires driver testing and feedback. I really wonder what processes they use to tie it all together. I suspect that they think about this quite diligently and dare I say even somewhat rigidly. I think it quite likely that the culture that led to the intense and detailed way they look at process for pit-stops and stuff carries over to the rest of their design processes, versioning, and iteration/testing.

[gmueckl]

Racing like in Formula 1 is extremely different from normal product design: each Formula 1 car has a user base of exactly 1: the driver that is going to use it. Not even the cars from the same team are identical for that reason. The driver can basically dictate the UX design because there is never any friction with other users.

Also, turnaround times from idea to final product can be insane at that level. These teams often have to accomplish in days what normally takes months. But they can pull it off by having every step of the design and manufacturing process in house.

[ivan_gammel]

There exist other ways to do the research. „Try things out“ is often not just a signal of „we don‘t know what to do“, but also a signal of „we have no idea how to properly measure the outcomes of things we try“.

[abustamam]

I'm the lead for an internal tool for a non-technical team. We iterate so quickly that the team we're building it for was like "can you guys stop changing things so quickly? We can't keep up with where anything is." which was a fair assessment.

[bfbf]

But that’s the point, no? Prototyping is useful but beyond a proof of concept, you still need a suitable user interface. I have no problems if there’s a rationale behind UI changes, but often we have stakeholders telling us to do something inconsistent just so their pet project can be presented to the user. That’s not design.