No it's not their job, and I'll try to explain why I think that.
Apart from the remit being just too broad, designers in any case are
part of a complex team that deal with a multitude of functional,
non-functional, regulatory and financial requirements.
Now, we have many different definitions of "designer", which I am very
aware of, but I believe that, in some circles "designer" has become
romanticised and extended to include a set of perceived "magical"
powers to "deliver what a boss wants". That is a distortion of the
role to something grotesque.
Speaking from a domain in which I have expertise; in sound design a
great battle ensued between designers, users (audiences) and the
'bosses' (studios and publishers) as to how music and films should
sound. You probably know this as the "Loudness Wars". I think it
remains a textbook example of misalignment between technical, artistic
and financial factors. It also remains an example of why I think
"Markets are a myth" [2].
Despite listeners saying over and over that they "Don't want it", the
producers, through a mess of internal motives (mainly financial),
repeatedly foisted their values onto them, being obsessed with what
they think users want in preference to flat-out contradiction that
would be evident in even the most cursory market research.
The job of a designer is to balance factors, and in a sense act as an
advocate (stand-in) for the user by mentalising their actual
needs. It's a very demanding and complex skill. Doing "what your boss
says" is absolutely not it and reduces a designer to a tool.
On the other hand, a job of the designer is also to listen to expert
technical advice outside of their skill-set, and so must not get
carried away with any grand "aesthetic vision", wanting to be Steve
Jobs.
A hard line to tread, and one requiring strong will and ethics as well
as judgement.
Related, the challenges sound designers face in making dialogue audible. What seem like simple problems (make car climate control buttons easy to use, make the speech in a movie easy to understand) turn out to be incredibly complex.
Genuinely curious, what do you like about it compared to Win10?
I've only tried it in a VM for a few minutes so far, but was unnerved by the general feeling of 'pretty, but impractical', mainly thanks to the taskbar and the right-click 'hide everything by default' context menu.
Evidently not if the work they're producing is reportedly outperformed by old school physical controls from more than a decade ago and in most of the vehicles tested it wasn't even close.
I worked briefly as a freelance experience designer hired by an appliance manufacturer. I asked if they could send me physical prototypes of controls so they could be tested. They refused and said it would be too expensive. They expected the controls to be designed, spec'd, and sent to the factory without any usability testing.
Designers can do all those things, but often they're not given the space to.
The best products are typically produced in an environment where the people running the company care about the design. This is a rare environment.
Often they recruit kids with graphic arts backgrounds, hand them some fancy post-it notes and a YouTube video of how Zipcar did a journey map, and set them loose.
UX usually focuses on the critical path for the top-5 tasks. So turning on the car radio makes sense, but changing the radio station didn’t make the cut, so some rando engineer guy stuffed it in a menu.
When it’s done well with a great team and time it’s magic. It’s easiest to see when Apple gets software right, like Keynote - the functions of making a presentation are immediately obvious to an elementary school student. But even then, once you leave the happy path, woe to you - modifying a template is a dark art to most people.
Or you could use Apple's iTunes as an example of how to build one of the world's worst and most user-hostile interfaces, but one that every iPhone user must deal with unless they let Apple have complete access to all their information via iCloud.
I'm convinced most people really don't like iCloud, but since the alternative is iTunes, they basically have no choice...
> tests, observation, psychology and physiology
Is that not their job?