<i>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</i><p>I&#x27;ve never understood how the concept of &quot;UI&quot; ever evolved to not encompass usability at it&#x27;s core.<p>I was happy to cede UI territory to the designers who said they&#x27;d do it better.  Even when I was insulted to my face that because I&#x27;m a programmer and liked my arcane typing based interfaces for myself, so therefore I couldn&#x27;t possibly understand making usable software for others.  I bit my tongue, put my head down and went back to the things I wanted to focus on anyway.<p>In the time since, user interfaces have experienced gradual incremental improvement just like everything in computing.  But rather than going for &quot;nothing else left to take away&quot; design (or perhaps due to a shortsighted version of it) visual clutter was just turned into mental clutter. The number of WIMP nouns and verbs the average user has to understand are higher than ever, with less consistent behavior, and overflowing with one-off slightly different implementations to remember.<p>Rather than any grand improvements, I&#x27;ve only seen degenerate phenomenons for making user experience worse. My favorites being: A well-managed brand name, good aesthetics and software reputation means that when someone (eg. Apple) ships a bad interaction, users that would (rightly) blame the software first before working around it, start blaming themselves first for &quot;not getting it&quot;.  Or that products evolving quickly (such as the early years of Facebook) are bewilderingly unusable to people that don&#x27;t log in often enough to keep up with the UI changes as they happen in small increments.<p>Then after waking up from their bender the UI folks start talking loudly about UX.  I thought that was the goddamn point all along!  Oh, but what do I possibly know?  I only have formal training in what we used to call Human-Computer Interaction, and I quite like my console shells.  And shells have bad aesthetics, so they must have bad ux too.  And at least the UI guys managed to get 1 of the 2, I guess I&#x27;ll just go back to holding my tongue now.