I had someone tell me that UI and UX design was immoral

Sure you weren't being trolled?

No, I’m sure unfortunately.

quote:

---

Lets just all go back to CLI, who needs a GUI?

---

I thought GUIs were a stupid fad until about 1995, at which point the "fad" part of that belief became untenable.

Anyway, I think I understand the statement that "UI and UX design are immoral." There is some truth to it.

I used to work for a guy who spent an inordinate amount of time mocking up fancy GUIs, some of which he then had me implement. I pushed back on this, pointing at much more objective commitments and goals we had that were in danger, but he was the boss so I ultimately deferred to him.

Upon rolling out the product, we got feedback that this system often ran in very dimly lit industrial settings, and my boss's fancy GUI was blinding users. So I had to unwind all of that work and reskin it with a very basic, monochrome design. (Boss wasn't nearly so "hands on" with that part ).

In my view, what my boss did was immoral, and I had pretty much told him that. It got pretty philosophical, in fact. I remember alluding to stuff like starving kids, the prospect of war with China, etc. (in addition to mere corporate bankruptcy).

Before I even knew about the night blindness issue, I just thought the whole exercise was wasteful. It wasn't what needed to be done, it was what he wanted to do.

I guess one might argue that my boss just did a bad job of UX/UI design, and someone more expert in that area would have wised up to the night blindness early in the process and built a design around that. I disagree. Common sense plus knowledge of the industry were sufficient to allow me to conclude that what we needed was extremely simple. I knew the end users well enough to know that they wouldn't get any value from brushed metal effects, virtual knobs, shading, gradients, and so on. There is no special discipline or job role necessary to figure that out.

This is not the only time I've had this experience, of UX designers (or wannabes) injecting themselves into product development processes where they were completely superfluous. This is just the most glaring example I remember. It happens a lot, and it is a parasitic drag on the economy. There is a place for art, but it's on your walls or in a museum, not littered all over every frickin' computer program your employer makes you use.

Well then.

Does his opinion extend beyond computers? Like would he be OK driving a car with the steering wheel on the ceiling?