Honestly, picking the destination first makes more sense.

But the primary law of UX is you don’t change shit up on people. I’d have taken a stand if I was on that team

Curious why you think destination first makes more sense.

I just can’t get over the idea that when you move a thing to a different place, you go to where the thing is first so you can take it to the new place.

Sure… If I want $300 in an account, that’s my goal. I don’t want to decrease another account by that amount

So my goal is to move X money into Y account, or maybe all but X money into Y account

The second half is where it comes from. It’s not the goal, it’s the means

But again as I said, flipping this is a worse solution than either direction

Seems a convoluted way of looking at it to me, but i guess it’s just another case of different strokes for different folks.

I mean, I do this professionally, I took courses that break down what makes something feel intuitive

I don’t doubt that, but courses are selected/designed by their teachers - who likely select what fits their pre-existing biases. Virtual nothing humans do comes out without biases affecting things, which is what makes the “reproducibility” of studies such an important part of science - and even those reproductions need to be done numerous times to truly start to become trustworthy.

You realize this is actually a field of study? Like, this isn’t a particularly soft science… Companies have done massive A/B campaigns and written papers on it, universities do studies on it… It’s not just opinion

Yes, as it has been for decades. I also learned some about it back in the early days of the '80s into the '90s. It’s constantly evolving along with the tech (and the capabilities of the current majority of users), so there’s never been much of an absolute set of standards that have withstood the test of time. Again, there are a wide variety of people in the world - all with their own perspectives and ways of doing things. As such, the goal of a universally intuitive interface - while laudable - is a bit of a quixotic pursuit, IMHO.

They don’t teach material design or something, they teach you to look at the interfaces people use the most and copy the shorthand and general layout

Then they teach you what not to do… Don’t make buttons appear and disappear, don’t make interactions move things around… These are basically universally confusing

They get into a bit of color theory, making certain actions “weighty” by adding loading, and all sorts of other techniques

But the most important piece is figuring out what the main use cases are, and making the tradeoffs to make the experience as frictionless as possible. Stuff like minimizing clicks, piching things by default, hiding unnecessary information, etc

It’s like teaching art. You put labels on concepts and make them practice picking apart the composition so they can understand the individual elements at play and how they fit together

I get the gist. I’ll use myself as an example in an attempt to make my point. I hate, Hate, HATE the very reduction of “complication” you’re referring to. Dumbed-down interfaces that contain no “unnecessary information” drive me nuts. What’s unimportant information to you may be important to me.

By all means, design for the “most common use cases,” but the buck stops right there FAR too often anymore. There’s minimal, if any, customizability, alternate layouts that are more information-dense, or just any accommodation for those that didn’t fit that most common use case. It’s dumbing things down for those who don’t want to learn anything, or use their device to it’s fullest capabilities, and those of us who prefer to use our brain just get ignored and have to suffer.

I get the desire to make things approachable for non-technical people, but if that’s all that ever happens then they’ll never learn anything more advanced than that. So our society gets more and more coddled, and capable of things for themselves - making them all the more dependent upon the tech oligarchs, which is, of course, more profitable for them and more power handed over to them.

No thanks.

Well, that’s just capitalism for you. Maintaining code takes man hours, so of course the minute they had the slightest excuse to reduce code and fire people, that became the norm

It’s profit dictating style basically

I’m aware why it happens, but if even you are aware then that means you know what I’ve said is true. As such, it seems you also should know that you’re not designing for the best interface, but just the one that the largest proportion of the masses are able to use well enough to win out over alternatives in a quest for market domination. Dumbed-down wins in the numbers game, but isn’t necessarily the “best” interface.

Another part in the numbers game is cost. As someone reminded me recently, the “best” solutions rarely win over ones that are “good enough,” but cost the end users less. Technology’s history is veritably littered with superior options that lost out against their competition because of such cost differences.

Definitely… But you can both streamline an interface for the masses without taking away from power users. OSX was a pretty good example of this - they kept a simple veneer, but if you dug a little deeper you used to be able to do some pretty advanced things and configure it all just how you like it

It just takes more time and effort, so it’s becoming rare

Agreed, and that’s what’s frustrating the shit out of me over where things have been going for several years now.