I was watching my dogs crap and talking with some hair-gelled guy whose name I've heard several times but cannot remember. He's about 28, a nice enough guy. He introduced me to his girlfriend, about the same age. She too shall remain nameless. She's the Senior Artistic Director Poobah Supremeus Grand Wizard at some local software company. Or some such conspicuously glittering job title. Millennial designers are all about minimalism right up until they're inventing imperious titles for themselves.
She and I talked shop for a while, and I told a story about how I collaborated with other groups at Microsoft to devise a set of user interface design guidelines. I wasn't 10 seconds into talking about translators' needs when she turned away and emitted the most horrific shriek.
You know the child at the grocery checkout whose mother denies him every bit of candy he can grab, who then explodes in exasperated, feral rage at not getting every single thing his heart desires? It was exactly that sound. It was that primal, that childish. I had blundered into a raw wound: it's a grotesque injustice that her designs should be accountable to anyone. She knows good design. As evidence, just ask her if her designs are good.
I don't know how much time she's spent in a usability lab, watching people struggle to change their credit card numbers, but I'm guessing it's several hundred hours short of my several hundred hours. Yet this fetus not only considers herself qualified to argue, she somehow considers others unqualified to argue back.
And this, dear reader, is why you cannot perform basic tasks lately. It's not you. It's the pouting chick with fewer hours spent in the lab than spent scraping hair gel from under her fingernails. Good design means "low-contrast, flat appearance that's so much like everything else cloned by the cool kids at the coffee shop, all your open windows blur together."
Me, I long for the days when good design meant "you don't have to fucking google how to use it."