Too many UI designers and not enough real work for them to do?
Seems to me there's far too much of that sort of thing going on in the software economy (not just UI designers!) -- far too much redeveloping existing wheels (and usually not for the better) and far too little actual advancement of the state of the art, far too little actual innovation.
What I find difficult is the lack of communication. Programming UI changes is hard work, and when a developer isn’t convinced of the benefit to users, it makes it seem like the change is being made for the ego of the UX designer.
What's going on is that UI designers keep thinking people care more about balancing negative and positive space than seeing all the information they want. At the same time, UI customizability has gone out of fashion. So we get lowest common denominator mediocrity that looks good in a slide show but is awful to use for serious work.
No company should have full time UI designers on staff. Eventually they look for reasons to justify themselves, and start ruining things that were perfectly fine.
The UI designers I had worked with do not have much experience working with the web platform as a user or developer, are not aware of capabilities default controls provide and almost never use the products they've designed. Additional exposure of UI compared to under-the-hood stuff begs for additional bikeshedding and micromanagement by people who understand this even less, like management. Maybe I never met good a designer or worked in a company with sane process.
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