It's not just non-technical people who expect good UX.

Jargon BS is invading people's heads and it has to stop.

From Wikipedia: User Interface (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_interface) - The aggregate of means by which users interact with the system (e.g., all the means of input and output)

User Experience (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_experience) - The architecture and interaction models that impact a user's perception of a device or system ("all aspects of the user’s interaction with the product").

UI is the "how" of creating an interface (implementing shiny controls, that sort of thing) and UX is the "why" (creating a good experience for the user).

What's interesting is that there are many counter-examples... for example Craigslist. Terrible UI/UX, yet it is wildly more popular than it's closest competitors. For a while Plentyoffish was the most popular dating site, same thing there.

In frontend land this is often the distinction between UI vs. UX. UX means usability, UI is the more aesthetic side of the exercise, though of course there is considerable overlap.

Part of the issue - at least from my corner of the industry in mobile app dev - is that a lot of good UI designers have renamed themselves UX designers - because UX designers are in greater demand - but are poorly qualified to actually assess and design for usability.

There are also more and more designers crossing over from other design disciplines - graphics designers and print designers are often transitioning to UX design and the results are not always good. To some degree they can bring fresh ideas to the table, but often it results in a lot of designs that aren't competent at a usability level.

> "If a significant portion of your user-base is computer illiterate, which will often be the default, it does well to UI to the lowest common denominator."

I agree with the gist of what you're saying - but I think there needs to be a bit more nuance here.

We're no longer in the 90s, the userbase for most websites and apps largely are not computer illiterate. They are in fact quite technically savvy overall - the issue isn't that your users are technologically ignorant, it's that they're not skilled in your software.

If you look at the modern smartphone user they have a lot of learned expectations and behaviors and they know full well how everything works. The issue comes only when you try to break the established knowledge and do your own thing - which is exactly what the blog post here is about, icons that aren't universally established and have vague meaning to non-experts (and even some experts).

One of the hardest things as frontend people is retaining the first-time-user mindset. You use your own software day in and day out and become experts at it, and your designs and considerations start swimming around that - you are more inclined to build power-user features and implement power-user shortcuts, and you gradually lose the ability to assess your own product from the perspective of a new (or even old, but irregular) user.

The issue isn't that people are technologically illiterate, but that they are not specialists in a very particular expert-user UI you may have designed.

This is made worse when designers start openly egging competitors' UIs, so now not only are you pursuing a confusingly non-standard UI, but this non-standardness starts becoming a meme in your specific niche.

The distinction is important IMO - with the exception of a few demographics (retirees?) it's actually pretty safe now to expect a reasonable amount of tech savvy from your users, but you have to recognize what you think is universal trained user behavior vs. actually widespread user behavior.

To answer you question, no. Such people usually design interactions. Behavior. What happens when the user clicks or scrolls or drags. So they're designing UI and they're called UI designers. UX is a step removed, defining the overarching design language for the app and how it makes users feel.

In my experience there are no people who work only on the visual layout of a page and not on behavior (what you incorrectly called UI). Mockup artists maybe, but even they are usually thinking about behavior.

"UX is based on research and science"

UX (User Experience) is about designing exactly that - an experience. It's about being extremely detail oriented, mathematical inclination (sifting through metrics, a/b testing data, CTR, bounce rates, etc.), willingness to sit down and focus on one concrete task at a time, sifting through hours of user video seeing how people interact with an application and then finding solutions to make the UX more smooth. Sound familiar to what you wrote about your "programmer"?

Not so different after all it seems.

EDIT: Everyone seems to confuse UI design with UX design. They are very different, and in some cases are different job descriptions.

UX is about much more than web development. It's about the user's experience of any product or service, including software, vacuum cleaners, attending an event etc.