Companies are definitely not saving money here.

They're actually spending a shit-ton of money on designer-hours and developer-hours in order to have everything custom, but still with a subpar experience.

It's similar to accessibility: a huge chunk of free off-the-shelf options are more accessible compared to the non-accessible chimeric design system of most modern web apps and sites.

Here's the funny thing though (as a developer which worked for various companies that didn't have designers):

It looks custom designed because... it's not designed at all :D

At this point I'm not even sure if what you said is an insult or a compliment.

Almost all projects I worked in looked more or less like the following:

- a BA meets with the client and creates unstyled wireframes with all of the requested features. (BA doesn't really think about UX here, more or less applies some generic patterns).

- the development team grabs the wireframes, uses a generic preexisting "design system" which is the cheapest for the chosen technology (can be whatever: Bootstrap, Tailwind, Material Design) and max. adjusts colors a bit to match the client's brand

That's it. There is no design.

Doesn't match my experience as a developer.

I haven't worked in a place that doesn't use Figma, since Figma was released.

And haven't worked in a place that didn't get a dedicated designer before the company was 6 months old.

However: I must have worked with 30 different designers in 10 years and TWO of them actually knew how to properly use components and Figma. The rest just copy pasted shit around.

And on the rare occasions where there is a designer on the team, they just throw their fantasy user interfaces over the fence to be interpreted by developers as well as blamed for any complaints.

What we really need is developers with solid design skills, that should have been part of fullstack from the start.

Totally agree. I can count on my hands the number of developers that actually produce consistent good-looking shit.

And the number is *two* if I count the ones who also understand technical nuances, accessibility and proper usability.

I second this, it’s like people live in completely different worlds when it comes to getting stuff out the door.

Of course, that’s still better than a 1 pizza team of full stack devs attempting to create their custom UI component library from scratch, now that’s a total mess.

Grandparent here. Alright, I totally believe you and everyone else, and would probably also be much happier in a less wasteful environment that you mention.

In which industry/company size are you? Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places.

Unfortunately the environments without dedicated designers are also likely to be understaffed or under tight deadlines.

Think along the lines of companies with either <200 employees that can't spare the resources (and also might be lacking in DevOps or other regards, often times falling behind the curve when it comes to all sorts of development practices), or the likes that work in consulting instead of building the product that they sell/dogfood themselves. There you'll get all sorts of people but more fluid team structures - full stack devs that just throw something together for the front end and it's considered good enough.

Of course, it's also possible for companies without the actual means to delude themselves into thinking that they must do everything Google or other big orgs do - that's how you get bad bespoke components and frameworks without the mettle to make them good, as well as stuff like architectures based on microservices without a good reason to do so and so on.

> They're actually spending a shit-ton of money on designer-hours and developer-hours in order to have everything custom, but still with a subpar experience.

Are they though? My impression is that most companies are just using frameworks or sdks that promise some degree of cross platform uniformity, and that’s why they don’t use the native toolkits. The savings come from not having to develop UI for multiple OS targets.

Pretty sure there's places doing it, but I haven't really worked anywhere that used a Vanilla framework, except for the first few months, or have used an app that just uses something off the shelf.

I'm in the YC startup space, though, but have seen this also in enterprise.

Yes they can (tm)!

Consider the latest UI disaster - Apple with liquid glass making stuff worse in the most fundamental way - decreasing readability. Doing worse was extra cost, so yeah, in many cases companies can just do things better by not wasting the design money and spending part of it on actual design improvements. No need to bring up the myth of the huge 50% savings when using a single menu everywhere, there is no way it costs that much (neither does having different padding values per platform)!

They don’t have to do things better. They just need to stop changing things. Computer UIs used to be designed by HCI people. There were volumes of books explaining best practices. Then companies prioritized curb appeal and forgot their own heuristics that were backed by actual research.

I too prefer to get things cheaper (all else being equal). But in this case they aren't equal, which is kind of the rub. I would much rather have desktop software which doesn't suck, even if I had to pay more for it. And of course don't forget that just because the company is saving money, doesn't mean you the customer do. Companies are very happy to cut their own costs and pocket the extra profit, so it's difficult to say whether this reduction in software quality is actually benefiting us by making things cheaper.