I think you're missing tsunamifury's point. My interpretation is that he means UI designers have relegated themselves to UI decorators, while the real design challenges these days are on a completely different level.
Think "interior decorator" vs. "city planner". In software, a designer can have enormous impact because there are no physical limits preventing scale... But many designers never look at the big picture, and instead are content to tinker inside their digital artboards looking for the shade of light grey that's most fashionable this week.
I feel like your last sentence fails to acknowledge the conditions that a lot of UI designers are often just one in a line of cooks.
A great deal of UI designers aren't given the leeway or opportunity to make profound impacts on their particular projects for reasons including limitations of: engineering manpower, data, time, budget, or corporate willingness.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of the time, the majority of UI designers are given project criteria LONG after a lot of things about the project have been set in stone, including if the solution for a particular problem should even be a UI in a device!
The city planner you are thinking of is often a Director/Chief of Product (if an organization even has one) or CCO, not strictly a UI Designer.
I'd say the problem is that most "Product Managers" I work with now are falling behind Product Designers and Engineers in expertise on making those decisions. Don't get me started on Directors and Executives, who literally could not know less about the decisions being made.
Yes I think you've said it better than me. So many designers are devolving into decorating interfaces instead of designing new products. To be fair, many of them were never truly up to the task, but then I suppose we need a new nomenclature for Product Designers vs Interface layout specialists.
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They're interface designers. If everyone was trying to be disruptive, we'd have a mess of interfaces and no usability standards.
I think you're missing tsunamifury's point. My interpretation is that he means UI designers have relegated themselves to UI decorators, while the real design challenges these days are on a completely different level.
Think "interior decorator" vs. "city planner". In software, a designer can have enormous impact because there are no physical limits preventing scale... But many designers never look at the big picture, and instead are content to tinker inside their digital artboards looking for the shade of light grey that's most fashionable this week.
I feel like your last sentence fails to acknowledge the conditions that a lot of UI designers are often just one in a line of cooks.
A great deal of UI designers aren't given the leeway or opportunity to make profound impacts on their particular projects for reasons including limitations of: engineering manpower, data, time, budget, or corporate willingness.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of the time, the majority of UI designers are given project criteria LONG after a lot of things about the project have been set in stone, including if the solution for a particular problem should even be a UI in a device!
The city planner you are thinking of is often a Director/Chief of Product (if an organization even has one) or CCO, not strictly a UI Designer.
I'd say the problem is that most "Product Managers" I work with now are falling behind Product Designers and Engineers in expertise on making those decisions. Don't get me started on Directors and Executives, who literally could not know less about the decisions being made.
Yes I think you've said it better than me. So many designers are devolving into decorating interfaces instead of designing new products. To be fair, many of them were never truly up to the task, but then I suppose we need a new nomenclature for Product Designers vs Interface layout specialists.