So... I haven't been paying attention to this stuff in a LONG time. In the early '00's, I discovered Jabob Nielsen and honestly, it was a revelation, having spent a bit of time at that point in/around the .dot scene and the handful of big corps getting into Web stuff. He was talking about this stuff not from the perspective not of "this looks good" or "this is the current design trend" but "I hooked a machine up to people and I observed how they used this application, and this is what I found". A while back, I stopped reading NNg, specifically because it became clear that this was no longer happening like it had been; that they were recycling knowledge and studies from years before and not really growing, and worse, they were no longer writing the content themselves. It wasn't exactly hidden, they didn't have the articles ghostwritten under their bylines, but there was some sort of tipoff beyond the tone and language used (like maybe they stopped using their own bylines? or maybe they listed the names of the people who were doing the writing? I forget, it was a long time ago). And to me, that was an issue, because the "magic" was N + N having specific insights based on constantly measuring "how do people use computers?" and when you took N + N *and* the measuring out of the equation, it wasn't too helpful.
So, outside of NNg, I've never been too into reading UI/UX stuff. It was a fun side interest for me at a time when I was writing a lot of applications on my own without the benefit of an actual UI/UX person, or later, overseeing the development of applications where we either didn't have a UI/UX person, or that person was extremely inexperienced.
Fast forward to... now. I cannot remember the last time I worked with a UI/UX person who was aware of NNg. That's fine, and I assumed for a while that NNg simply fell off because they had become out of style (they were never *that* in style). But what I've observed for a very long time, is that their role in the ecosystem has never been replaced. If there is someone carrying the torch of "let's actually measure what works and what doesn't" in the world of UI/UX, it isn't filtering down to the point where UI/UX designers are commonly aware of it.
Instead, I keep working with a string of UI/UX people who commit basic mistakes that NNg (or *anyone* doing measuring... stuff that will never change) would say "don't do that". Things like "light grey text on white backgrounds" and itty bitty little fonts, or not being aware of the "F" pattern that the eyes follow, and on and on and on. Just basic stuff that should be intuitive, but NNg could reinforce or make obvious with their research.
And maybe we don't need a new version of NNg to do this stuff? Maybe someone just needs to distill the really useful stuff from NNg's classics into a useful and usable format and start re-evangelizing it? I don't know, this isn't my field of experience. But I do know, the basic stuff which they really did a great job with is not being used today, and it's a really big issue. If the old greybeard on the team who hasn't paid attention in the slightest to the field of UI/UX understands more about basic "this is how the user perceives this screen" than the person who has been in the field 5 years and was actually trained, that's a big problem.
And in no small part, this goes to your point that the training for this stuff is largely a ripoff, and I agree. UI/UX went through the same cycle as everything else in tech, where orgs realized they needed people, a million schools popped up to meet that demand by certifying people in a few weeks or months, and the people who came through those programs largely are fundamentally unsuited for the work and the training was meant to pump them through and take their money, not to help discern who was suited and train them well, and guide the rest to work that they were better suited at.
J.Ja
