As someone who did some UX for a touchscreen product in Healthcare, it’s 100% just boring old capitalism making real work impossible.
Any time immediate profit is put above the company “Mission Statement” (which is every time) it becomes impossible for designers to do a good job.
I was working with a broken and 90’s looking UX/UI and made a modernized Material 3 style redesign that never even got full evaluation because it “wasn’t a priority”.
They’d regularly recognize UX problems and ask for the best solution. I’d research, test, and design options, explaining how I got there, and then a non-designer from an unrelated department would say some nonsense and we’d scrap the whole thing.
Thank you for bringing this forward. It’s simply too easy (an understatement, really) to impute malice, even incompetence, to the gritty mechanics behind complex systems.
In most cases, every single actor is willing a different outcome, but the system kinda has a life and goals of its own. And so those apparently nonsensical behaviors emerge.
We can call them stupid, but they’re stupid by their own accord…
As someone who did some UX for a touchscreen product in Healthcare, it’s 100% just boring old capitalism making real work impossible.
Any time immediate profit is put above the company “Mission Statement” (which is every time) it becomes impossible for designers to do a good job.
I was working with a broken and 90’s looking UX/UI and made a modernized Material 3 style redesign that never even got full evaluation because it “wasn’t a priority”.
They’d regularly recognize UX problems and ask for the best solution. I’d research, test, and design options, explaining how I got there, and then a non-designer from an unrelated department would say some nonsense and we’d scrap the whole thing.
Thank you for bringing this forward. It’s simply too easy (an understatement, really) to impute malice, even incompetence, to the gritty mechanics behind complex systems.
In most cases, every single actor is willing a different outcome, but the system kinda has a life and goals of its own. And so those apparently nonsensical behaviors emerge.
We can call them stupid, but they’re stupid by their own accord…
Oh my god, I have rarely been more frustrated reading a comment. Thanks for the insight, this definitely explains a lot lol.
piggybacking off of this: please for the love of god anyone who reads this, if you intent to start a company make it a co-operative instead.
You will still make money, it just won’t go to hell when it grows large enough.
As a SWE perhaps they were actually prioritizing more important work.