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’ve been realizing that for some businesses design is simply not a differentiator for where they’re positioned in the market and other factors (that may compete with design quality) are more important. This could be quantity over quality (“we offer every possible feature, even if none of them are very polished”) or simply cost (“we didn’t invest in design quality but the product is cheap”).
@parkermalenke Yeah, I do feel it is a nuanced problem. Sometimes a company just wants to "get everything out" to see what sticks. It's a very expensive way to do user research.
But what frustrates me is this belief that this quality of quantity is actually seen as a viable way forward. When in reality it's significantly slowing them down. I'm trying to understand what advantages they see in this approach.
@scottjenson yeah I do see projects get rushed and labeled “finished” when in reality the speed created a bunch of debt. The classic inverse of “slow is smooth, smooth is fast”.
But I also see scenarios where “meh” quality design is good enough for their market. If they had $100 to spend it would create more ROI to tack on more meh features than to polish the ones that already exist.
@parkermalenke You’re mirroring my own half-formed thoughts. There’s a continuum here: sometimes "banging something out" works, but "vibe coding" a UI without discussing market fit feels incredibly naive.
The nuance is that most software, like a food ordering systemm is generic and well-tested. Those cases can afford to be templated. I’m just looking for the right words to describe the alternative approach.
@scottjenson ugh. It shouldn't be about individual app design, but a cohesive OS.
@bakuninboys Agreed, that's where the deeper wins lie hidden
@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).
@khaldoonalnuaimi That's a challenging problem! You have an "accepted legacy" which you are constrained into supporting. The Ghost Post approach is interesting, but as you say, it would introduce a significant new model.
My naive idea was to have stories just be another tab but then you've got normal, reels, AND stories all competing. What's why I got grumpy, you don't have a UI issue, you have a product vision issue.
@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 @katzentratschen Take a look at SAP business one. I'll send you an article I'm writing about it later today.
@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 i think this somehow still pales in comparison to the terrifying ways Flowtoys Capsule lights use a single button to control and program RGB prop lights. they start by defining 8 distinct types of button presses:
https://flowtoys2.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/6000187767-types-of-button-presses
then they use that for navigating a 13-page settings menu (each page containing numerous individual setting items) for controlling everything from wireless connectivity to playlists of rgb lighting effects:
https://flowtoys2.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/6000187766-the-pages-interface-pages-1-13-overview
it's so cumbersome to use that they had to make it so that some of the "pages" are actually shortcuts to different places in the menu
i haven't been able to find a flowchart explaining all this, i think that's because if anyone ever tried to create one their head would explode
@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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