Comment by evilduck
Lack of concern or outright contempt for front end and the users is why front end development is a subfield in the first place, because backend devs can't or won't produce something people can use.
Lack of concern or outright contempt for front end and the users is why front end development is a subfield in the first place, because backend devs can't or won't produce something people can use.
I do a decent amount of ux work and probably fall into category 1 here. The problem isn’t “we don’t want to spend money on support”, the problem is “people really do need to be babysat for a lot of things, and no matter what you do, they will not read the documentation.
I think "users are not paying attention" is a friendlier way to describe it.
A while back, I was supporting an e-sports event. We had professionals, competing for an awful lot of money who were deeply familiar with the game. We had taken mobile phones, etc from them so no distractions.
They were briefed before hand that all they had to do was wait until they were given the green light, and click the big OK button on their screen to enter the game. We added a giant modal with the OK that explained "press this button when you are told to". This was a last minute workaround for the fact that we could only tell how many people were in the queue for something, but not which of our expected players were not in the queue. Our telemetry tells us one person is missing, so we have to go walking around to find them. Found the guy, sitting in front of a giant modal saying "Click this when you are told to", and his response was "I didn't know I was supposed to click it".
Now add mobile phones, children, doorbells, cooking, neighbours, and this becomes widespread.
It's a decent approximation, if you remember it's an approximation for "the user is tired/stressed/not paying attention/doesn't actually want to deal with your app". I remember a talk which suggested "The user is drunk" as a better approximation, because it's more obviously not literally true.
> Paternalism - "users are idiots and need to be babysit at every step, or else they hurt themselves (or make us spend money on support)"; this one is pretty overt in UI/UX.
Reminds me of a quote I'm not too sure if it's authentic but it's way too believable: "There is a considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists."
Like, over half the population is barely literate [1]. That's why we're seeing so, so many interfaces being "dumbed down", with options for "power users" being hidden behind ever increasing hurdles, font sizes and margins/paddings increasing, and visuals being dulled down. It's all being ground down to be palatable to an ever increasing amount of utterly braindead people.
[1] https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-s...
> backend devs can't or won't produce something people can use.
Where by people you mean management and sales, and by produce you mean add 150 different tracker scripts? :).
Snark aside, contempt for frontend dev and contempt for users are two different things; the latter has thoroughly infected the fields of UI/UX. It's most visible in webdev, because that's where most UI work happens. Second to that is mobile app dev, where it's just as bad.
Also, there are actually two somewhat distinct types of contempt for the user:
1) Paternalism - "users are idiots and need to be babysit at every step, or else they hurt themselves (or make us spend money on support)"; this one is pretty overt in UI/UX.
2) Exploitation - "users are livestock, the purpose of the site/app is to milk them as much as we can - whether it's taking their data, money, or both; the design must guide users to allow extracting maximum value from them before eventually discarding them"; this one is less talked about, even though it underpins many UI/UX patterns (not all of them known as "dark patterns").