> I'm sorry you seemed to have interpreted this article as a critique of designers from an "exclusively technical" person. I'm sure this wasn't your intention, but some of your choice of words supports what I think is a pretty harmful idea in software development: that technical people aren't qualified to critique or discuss product design.

I think that developers have just as much right to critique the the design process as designers have to critique the development process, and I think it's just as likely to be useful. Sometimes it is, sometimes it's born from assumptions or misunderstandings. I specifically highlighted the benefits that arguments from outside the field can bring, and I said that I didn't think your article, specifically, was beneficial in that way. Frankly, I think you said this because you wanted to try and refute my comment on principle rather than refuting the argument that I made, which is that you didn't actually present any evidence of what you were asserting.

> This felt a bit presumptuous. I am familiar with Instagram and TikTok, but I chose Facebook as the prime example because they were the _first_ massively popular site to implement this type of interface.

Sorry if I was being presumptuous. It wasn't clear from your article that you were attempting to show a progression or highlight the history of these sorts of design decisions so your example, completely out of context, seemed outdated and non-representative. Personally, I didn't associate infinite scroll with Facebook more than Twitter or Myspace or Instagram, but maybe that's me.

>I'm somewhat envious of you, then. I've unfortunately worked with product managers, designers, and engineers who have said that users are stupid. Sometimes, it's well-meaning and in a sort of abstract form, meaning "we should make it so simple that even an idiot could use it". But often, it's unfortunately quite literal.

I have 23 years or so of experience working in technology in maybe half-a-dozen industries and I too have heard, among the people who actually make this stuff, say that users tend to behave stupidly as a metaphor for them not being patient or attentive enough to interact with things that aren't immediately apparent— the sort of well-meaning, abstract form that you allude to. How did you know that in your particular situation it was intended to be literal? How do you know that bad design decisions were made based on that? How even could you know? Did they say they ran their copy through a language analyzer to make sure it was at a first-grade level language when they knew they were targeting an adult demographic without diagnosed intellectual disabilities? With what specific criteria do you differentiate beneficially simplified designs— which you note are touted in Don't Make Me Think— and designs that are simplified out of disdain for users' intelligence? How does that difference negatively impact users? How did you come to the conclusion that this is pervasive throughout the industry?

So in this article I did not see a) that product designers, in general, actually disdain their users' intelligence, b) what concrete effects that has on design, and c) how those things negatively affect users.

> Again, this was more of a critique of software development than of designers' intent in particular.

In what way? You mention product design, highlight a design trend, talk about designers, and the only external work you cite is product design tome. I did not once see one single reference made to software development, coding, or programmers.