A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

Given that my followers are mainly bots from my Mojang days and a handful of retro gamers, nobody who needs to hear this will hear it, but: If your entire approach to UX design is "I understand it just fine, the users should, too!", then you pretty much can just fuck right off.

I don't need to hear it, but I love to hear it. F*** modern UI design. Early 2000s was the peak.

The field of UX design has literally never "peaked" because centuries ago, one-off devices were fabricated solely for their makers, and with the advent of industrialisation, UX took an immediate back seat in favour of instant and permanently-rising profit margins.

Ok, so what _is_ good UI/UX design? and where do I learn more?

I would look into the concept of "frame theory" as it pertains to sociology. It's not a hard science - very little is - but the first step is to be able to mentally put yourself in the user's mental frame rather than yours, the developer's.

I need hard guidelines :)

That *is* a hard guideline. If you are unable to at least temporarily dissociate your thought process from that of a developer who knows everything about the software's functionality, and associate it with that of a user who has never seen it before, then it's an issue.

Share your software with others. Observe how they try to use it. Solicit feedback after a user-testing session, but have enough recordings or internal logging in the software to reconstruct enough info to not rely on the faulty human memory.