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   Robin Rendle (fonts@sfba.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Jan-2025 17:19:25 JST Robin Rendle

   One thing that drives me *bonkers* about tech culture is teaching designers that the bureaucracy is more important than the output — journey maps, documentation, multiple iterations, user research etc etc. All of these are fine tools but the goal is a good product and you can spend months producing mountains of all these design artifacts and *still* end up with junk.

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     Joachim (joachim@boitam.eu)'s status on Saturday, 04-Jan-2025 17:34:00 JST Joachim

     in reply to

     • Sara Joy :happy_pepper:

     @sarajw @fonts in my mind, the production of these artifacts is a way for the designer to justify their result. Not necessarily a post-hoc rationalization (though I’ve seen it happen, designers skewing the research in order to justify their own preconceptions), but more a diffusion of responsibility. You’re right that design teams have a lot of pressure from every other team, every manager, etc. So everyone has an opinion but very few people have the knowledge and experience of design that designers have. It can be very frustrating for a designer to propose a solution only to have it shot down with spurious reasons and bad ideas.
     So UX design kind of saved the day, with an industrialized way of reaching design decisions. Sometimes complicating things in order to appear serious and your decisions to appear grounded in an approach that business-types and technical-types. No more of this “creativity” and “sensitivity” nonsense.

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     Sara Joy :happy_pepper: (sarajw@front-end.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Jan-2025 17:34:01 JST Sara Joy :happy_pepper:

     in reply to

     @fonts are UX and design becoming, or did they become the same thing? Are they the same? Should they be?

     Please assume I'm ignorant, not that I'm asking probing questions.

     Part of the problem I feel is that everyone, because everyone interacts directly with the design, feels like they have a stake in it, have ideas about how it should be, has an *opinion*.

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     Joachim (joachim@boitam.eu)'s status on Saturday, 04-Jan-2025 19:07:20 JST Joachim

     in reply to

     • Sara Joy :happy_pepper:

     @sarajw @fonts the processes only goal seems to be to justify itself 😅

     I wonder if there’s also a sexist dimension to that evolution. Just like in the frontend world where JS reinvented the wheel using React and sidelined the html+css folks (where a big number of women developers had ended up because of the false idea that html & css weren’t worthwhile, manly languages). Wouldn’t it be possible that the separation of UX and UI as disciplines, and the piling up of new processes and tools, were used to displace women designers?
     In my experience design was a rare place with more women workers. I don’t know where it’s at now.

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     Sara Joy :happy_pepper: (sarajw@front-end.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Jan-2025 19:07:21 JST Sara Joy :happy_pepper:

     in reply to

     • Joachim

     @joachim @fonts yes you've eloquently put much of what I was thinking - everyone has an opinion and lots of people think they could just "do design" (they often can't, but they still have opinions when designs are placed in front of them) - but if the design choices are backed up by all this laborious process, they can't really argue any more.

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     Joachim (joachim@boitam.eu)'s status on Saturday, 04-Jan-2025 19:33:41 JST Joachim

     in reply to

     • Sara Joy :happy_pepper:

     @sarajw @fonts oh thanks, I didn’t know the term!

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     Sara Joy :happy_pepper: (sarajw@front-end.social)'s status on Saturday, 04-Jan-2025 19:33:42 JST Sara Joy :happy_pepper:

     in reply to

     • Joachim

     @joachim @fonts there's an idea I've seen cropping up lately of "male flight" - which feels relevant to this - probably because kottke shared it recently: https://kottke.org/25/01/0045954-male-college-enrollment-c

     Design maybe got too woman-y, the men flew out into UX. Then that has got too woman-y, and now people are starting to ring the death knells for that: https://trends.uxdesign.cc/