UX people tend to advocate for simple, boring stuff because they test. Like you pointed out, UX professionals like Krug, Nielsen, Norman constantly advocate for boring navigation:
"Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know."
- Jakob's Law of Internet User Experience
However, someone simply designing UI will often suggest new and complicated designs, because they don't test. If they don't test, they are not practicing UX. Even if their job title is UX designer, they are just doing UI design.
Disclaimer: Yes I am defending my UX job, which involves testing and face time with users :)
This is precisely what drew me to start making Mac apps 10 years ago. There was a whole philosophy behind Mac OS X's Cocoa framework that contrasted sharply with my experience with all the programs I had been accustomed to using on Windows 95-98-2k-XP. In all those OSes, there was invariably some program I would need to run that had its own custom scroll bars that didn't work like normal, and the body of a scrollable page didn't respond to arrow keys and the scroll wheel, or the buttons had unusual semantics and required pressing them in certain ways. This was the norm for Windows programs. When I came to Mac and everything all worked the same, it was a breath of fresh air. The philosophy behind Apple's Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) at the time was that every app should follow the same basic rules with only slight variations where it made sense. I went full force into learning Cocoa because of this genius idea, but unfortunately now every app is Electron and each has their own UX paradigms that reinvent the wheel all over again. It's frustrating and I hope and plan to make apps that hearken back to the days of predictability, familiarity, and simplicity so people can just use their computers to get a thing done and then get off their computers ASAP, like it's meant to be.
Just wanted to say thank you for trying to make native apps with thoughtful UX! I also frequently bemoan how far we've fallen since the golden age of app design and implementation.
Navigational difficulty increases site stickiness, and I hope nobody is going to try to say sites left that idea behind 10 years ago, because they haven't. I think any UX/UI person opining on this topic, by mere businesswise proximity, is behooved to contribute understanding of BizDev and Marketing's role in all of this.
A number of others seem to have mistaken simple and boring for dumb and useless.
What happened to the familiar menu?
UX Designers decided it wasn't simple enough and replaced it with hamburger menus and ribbons because "dumb users".
I'm not saying you are one of these UX designers, but lets not pretend they aren't there cause they run the shop at most places it seems, including a number of places in FAANG land.
A 14" CRT monitor from The Olden Days has an area of about 523
cm². An iPhone X has a screen area of about 127 cm². A 5.8" screen is tiny, regardless of its resolution.
Resolution will only get you so far; people don't have infinitely acute eyesight and infinitely precise dexterity. Most people can't reliably hit a touch target of less than ~10mm in any dimension, which equates to ~180 real pixels on an iPhone X.
> A 14" CRT monitor from The Olden Days has an area of about 523 cm². An iPhone X has a screen area of about 127 cm². A 5.8" screen is tiny, regardless of its resolution.
People hold phones much closer than you would sit from an Olden Days CRT, too. It's not just raw area that matters, but something like degrees, as observed by your eye.
Still, there is a point: even if we could easily see the design elements from Netscape 4 on a modern smartphone they'd be hard to hit consistently.
So that is not what I argue above. In my post above I argue against the dumbification of desktop apps and websites. Things that were working until UX designers came up with the idea that people are to dumb.
If the mockups are boring then you have done your job well. The problem is that mockups that stand out, are what gets steak-holders interested. Some of my design work involved selling concepts, and the ones that sold were those that broke the UI conventions in some way. Those features that broke the conventions were then set in stone! Instant regret.
Uniformity is bad! They want bright colors, low contrast text, and each page to be unique. If every page looks the same then they obviously are paying you too much. This is how lots of print designers get started in the web-industry, and wowing people is the main objective. UX doesn't come into it.
The other thing that I've found happen, is business requirements sometimes further complicate the UI. We had a simple app that was a report of damages as part of a return process.
This was mandated by the project manager to be displayed as a progress bar. Sofar as a vehicle that was 100% fucked would be 100% complete. I tried to push back with exclamation points for damaged areas, but progress bars were already sold to the customer.
If you have to sell yourself on a portfolio then you are talking to the wrong prospects.
Some of my best clients have never seen my portfolio. Even the ones who start off with "where can I see some of your work" forget all about my portfolio by the time we are done speaking. If you do a proper job of explaining what your job entails, what the client gets out of it and where to focus priorities, you'll likely never need to show your previous work.
Sadly, most junior UX wannabes don't understand this and continue to try and impress people with portfolios. They get the client they deserve. This does the industry no favors, but I could care less. Once that business is butt hurt by a previous designer and decides to commit to a real process, we can talk.
If you are part of the problem, you don't get to complain. Be the one designer who does 80% data and 20% design. Just say "no" to stupid ideas and squash them like a bug. If you are an entrepreneur running a business, you are in charge. Do you tell a plumber how to do his job? No. Then act like the plumber and do things the right way and tell them to thank you later. Results speak for themselves.
I'm going to get your comment tattooed on my hand and then slap people whenever they tell me their opinions in real life. (I'll also need to use it to slap myself.)
Re: Unfortunately UX people seem to hate boring and/or simple stuff...
That's probably true of many professions. Our software architect got us stuck with microservices for example, which we don't need. He did it either because he's bored, or wanted to put something fancier on his resume.
If not managed well, many employees go off the deep end. I admit, I've over-engineered parts of software for the sheer fun of it. But I try to limit my "experiments".
Unfortunately UX people seem to hate boring and/or simple stuff...
Many years ago I was working on a project for a major UK high street bank, and on the team was a designer who genuinely believed "users like a challenge". No users do not like a challenge. Users like spending the absolute minimum time possible doing their online banking, then they like getting on with their lives.
I believe he later went on to win loads of awards... as judged by other designers. Anyway a large part of why the web sucks and runs like molasses is guys like that.
Unfortunately UX people seem to hate boring and/or simple stuff...