I completely agree with you. I’ve met quite a few ‘UX Designers’ recently who hadn’t listened to or observed customers since they started their job. Sometimes years had passed since they actually looked at, studied or considered anything about the ‘users’ of the products or UI elements they were ‘designing’. I often found that they hadn’t even considered the interaction layer within their designs — simple things like error handling, interaction states, transitions, messages — the basics.

Oh and don’t even get me started on contrast issues, or text overlaid on patterned or low contrast backgrounds, or the other can of worms — “font size and readability” haha!

My colleague Abi Hough and I have actually been compiling all these “Crimes of UX” on a series of LinkedIn posts, because we audit sites (and device test them) for a living — and find the same stuff happening a lot.

I love the point you make about engineering. I discovered about 15 years ago that if I used multiple quant and qual data research methods, I could more easily spot, triangulate and then resolve problems. I also got to measure or run a controlled test on the impact. All this required instrumentation, toolkits, platform and code changes — without them, the work wouldn’t have been possible. I’ve often found the simplest and best interfaces require a lot of work, engineering, craft and iteration to get there. Something that can be accessed and used by as many people as possible is harder to build than the resulting product looks.

Website should be up in a few weeks at www.crimesofux.com