I think it turns on the distinction a lot of people have been pointing out between design as the superficial appearance of the app in the first fifteen minutes of use, and design as something that goes deep into the stack and brings everything together into something beautiful.
What you're talking about is more like the second kind, and I agree that the tools to do that are sorely lacking.
The problem as I see it is that the world has been building tools that allow a college freshman to build a superficially professional-looking app in a month (which often turns out to be unusable crap upon close inspection), rather than tools that allow a team of seasoned professionals to build something awe-inspiring in six months instead of two years. Because the current market allows you to get your dollar from millions of suckers selling the superficially pretty junk before they realize what they paid for.
To extend the development tools analogy, it's the UX equivalent of having loosed Visual Basic onto the world and thousands of noobs are happily churning out Visual Basic software, when what we really need is the C family and its toolchain. So the hope is that the incentives can be to produce that rather than just iterating onto the next version of UX VB.
Most of Zynga's products come to mind. Mindless crap designed to be attractive and psychologically addictive without teaching the user anything or providing any intellectual stimulation.
I wouldn't expect many high profile examples though. By its nature junk tends to have a short shelf-life, last years junk just gets replaced with this year's junk.
I'm still not sure there's a real pattern here, beyond the always present 'make a quick buck' style of business, which has probably been around since business was discovered. Good discussion though. Thanks. You on twitter?
What you're talking about is more like the second kind, and I agree that the tools to do that are sorely lacking.
The problem as I see it is that the world has been building tools that allow a college freshman to build a superficially professional-looking app in a month (which often turns out to be unusable crap upon close inspection), rather than tools that allow a team of seasoned professionals to build something awe-inspiring in six months instead of two years. Because the current market allows you to get your dollar from millions of suckers selling the superficially pretty junk before they realize what they paid for.
To extend the development tools analogy, it's the UX equivalent of having loosed Visual Basic onto the world and thousands of noobs are happily churning out Visual Basic software, when what we really need is the C family and its toolchain. So the hope is that the incentives can be to produce that rather than just iterating onto the next version of UX VB.