Hello #UX folk!
Some people seem to think that the "craft of ux" is dead: striving to be polished is naive. E.g. snapchat & Instagram stories, which are horrible UX, are claimed to be "good enough".
I'm writing a blog post exploring this but need links to any examples of this type of good enough thinking?
I'm expecting mostly techbro types will say this
EDIT: I shouldn't have called out Instagram so strongly. It's odd but not horrible.
@scottjenson I think it's true. We employ *zero* UX designers or graphic designers to work on our product. R&D software engineers are expected to just bodge something together that's “good enough”.
@scottjenson What specifically do you think is wrong with Stories? We’re building a social platform on ActivityPub and would love to hear an industry veteran’s take on how to fix and improve that format.
@khaldoonalnuaimi Was a bit too cavalier, my apologies. I was mostly channeling my historical angst against Snapchat, which was "so bad only teenagers could use it" (at the time) Stories isn't like that at all but it has always felt a bit odd to me, tacked onto the top. It's not the UI but the concept that you want two very different things in the same view, one horizontal and one vertical that just feels a bit 'smashed' to me.
@scottjenson We’re trying to rethink Stories as “Ghost Posts.” It would be a separate feed of regular-looking posts that disappear after 24 hours. The challenge is keeping what works about Stories, when you tap on someone's stories, it gives you a snapshot of their day. Ghost Posts would be chronological across everyone you follow, not grouped by person. I like the current Stories UX, but I am unsure how to integrate that same “daily snapshot” feeling into this model (Ghost posts).
@scottjenson I’m not sure Instagram Stories is bad! I think it was grafted awkwardly onto the old Instagram. But there were some interesting moments within it I vaguely remember. It was actually “polished” in some ways.
@dsandler VERY related. That's a very thoughtful connection to my point. Thank you.
@scottjenson Well virtually anything iOS26 related, or even more so macOS26. I'm sure there are more than few complaints if you search, while apple still tries to hold the high ground whil delivering near impossible to read menus and text. https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/
@MakeAppPie @scottjenson Exactly. Looks totally fine in a product presentation, but when you're actually using it, there are a million things which are just "good enough" or rather bad.
@katzentratschen @MakeAppPie Well, there is "we think it is good" and it's not (appleOS) which is it's own issue to discuss.
I'm thinking of so many products that are known to be be bad but because we're working so fast, velocity is so important that people feel that getting a better UX is actually naive. They don't even care that the UX is bad.
@scottjenson Any blog post about AI making "outdated" UX workflows irrelevant fits that bill.
Here's a good one where the author is arguing that UI is irrelevant for UX because the only thing that matters is how an AI bot processes a design — real humans are going to do *everything* with a chatbot now.
@scottjenson Have you seen the UX of high-end flashlights? 😊 https://www.reddit.com/r/flashlight/comments/sk1upj/and%C3%BAril_2_ui_chart/
@Lee_Holmes @scottjenson Is this an escape room
@mwichary Ha! Yes! it's pretty bad! It's a perfect example of "multiplexing" taking to an extreme.
@scottjenson @Lee_Holmes If this is bad then why do I love it so much
@mwichary @Lee_Holmes You love for it's rebelliousness. It's *so* bad you're attracted to how wrong it feels.
@Lee_Holmes I wrote a whole blog post about it! https://jenson.org/free3/
@scottjenson FWIW, it always seemed to me that the north star of "design systems" advocates was to get away from crafting bespoke interfaces.
https://www.figma.com/blog/the-future-of-design-systems-is-automated/
@scottjenson oh have I got a blog post for you to read! Brew some coffee because this one takes a little time but it is worth reading, and it dives into the enshittification of UX design.
@FuturisticRobert So helpful thank you!
@scottjenson this might be a bit too "inside baseball", but pretty much every AWS service has shocking bad UX. Actually, the Amazon retail website is a bit of a mess too!
@scottjenson No articles, but endless product managers telling me this. Things like ‘user research is a luxury’.
One of the reasons I decided to retire.
@octothorpe Ugh... sorry to hear that
@scottjenson Most corps want junior designers (cheap, won’t raise a fuss) who can ticket-take bootstrap layouts based on whatever is in the Jira backlog and delivered at least one sprint ahead of wharever dev is working on at the moment.
Users of course, will use whatever terrible POS they need to use because they have to get their thing done. Product Owners know this. Consequently, over time, all burdens have shifted to the end user.
@scottjenson I am recommending this article primarily for the term to be utilized.
@scottjenson Believe it or not, Snap is extremely design driven 😂
You obviously wouldn't think it from the outside, but having worked there for 5 years (2019-2024), design is extremely important to the company - it's just arguable what they're optimizing for.
@shnhrrsn That is very interesting! I shouldn't have been so cavalier. But I recall many years ago discussion that Snapchat was "so complex only teenagers could use it". Were you there during that period? How did the company feel about that perception?
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