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The Dribbblisation of Design

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Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#21

Post by rkalfane »

(Disclaimer: I'm a designer and I'm probably very biased about the matter)

In my opinion it's very often a matter of expectations.

When a lot of design decisions are taken by a bunch of people, from management, engineering and marketing, including a designer would simply mean having one more person to compromise with. Companies working this way tend to have designers focus more on making the product look good, thus this dribbblisation of design. On the other side, engineering has historically been expected to deal with design when building products, and nowadays a lot of engineers have learnt how to design on the field. This reinforces the view that designers are only useful to make things look good. Lastly, the tools we use in design are really easy to use, anyone with a couple hours to spare should be able to create some stuff with most of the available tools. With that, it makes deciders think that the only difference will be a matter of taste.

A lot of designers can actually do more than that, the basis of their job is usually to question things with the perspective of the user: "Does it make sense to do this? Is it really useful to have that amount of customisation? How much information do we need to see?" Most of the time the solutions are stupidly obvious, or they're chosen based of how complicated it makes the system, or how costly it can be, and that's where experts add a lot of value.

All in all, if all you need is to make stuff look good, sure a dribbble designer is probably a good fit, just don't expect them to automagically make the product usable. If you want someone to work on your experience, you should probably have your designer work on the problem instead of having them "upgrade" your solution.

Just like how the engineering field is, the design field is really diverse with people doing different things, differently.

(Wow, that was a long rant, sorry about that.)

Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#22

Post by dunkelheit »

paulojreis wrote: post #16
dunkelheit wrote: post #4

My main grievance with modern designs is low information density. Fonts are getting bigger and lots of whitespace is added between blocks. This works great for articles (as an example, medium articles look gorgeous and are a joy to read) but just about anything else is less usable when fewer bits of actual information are on the screen. Ironically, one can also speak of UX-isation of design. I would define it as misg…

> Ironically, one can also speak of UX-isation of design. I would define it as misguided thinking that the designer knows my problems better than myself. It's not that the UX guy knows it better than yourself, but he strives to be able understand it and then to state it more clearly, in an actionable manner. I don't know the call-center operator problems better than he does, but I was able to identify the pain-points…

Ok, I think we all agree that UX design when done properly leads to a better product ;) Maybe the problem is that the field as a whole became more mainstream in the recent years and thus more susceptible to Sturgeon's law. Hence the negative experiences that I am talking about.

Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#24

Post by dunkelheit »

prawn wrote: post #15
dunkelheit wrote: post #4

My main grievance with modern designs is low information density. Fonts are getting bigger and lots of whitespace is added between blocks. This works great for articles (as an example, medium articles look gorgeous and are a joy to read) but just about anything else is less usable when fewer bits of actual information are on the screen. Ironically, one can also speak of UX-isation of design. I would define it as misg…

There are already countless weather apps, so people look to differentiate with variants that play on simplicity (rain being one example) or particular angles (one delivers weather with a humorous bent). App developers will create whatever they think might stick. Further, if there were not merit in simplicity, such apps wouldn't be successful.

The various weather app screens are used to make the point - that the "take your umbrella" app is somehow superior to others. I disagree with that.

Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#25

Post by corinrules »

dunkelheit wrote: post #24
prawn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are already countless weather apps, so people look to differentiate with variants that play on simplicity (rain being one example) or particular angles (one delivers weather with a humorous bent). App developers will create whatever they think might stick. Further, if there were not merit in simplicity, such apps wouldn't be successful.

The various weather app screens are used to make the point - that the "take your umbrella" app is somehow superior to others. I disagree with that.

Superior only for a specific group of people. People who want a tiny chunk of binary info. A niche market, but one that exists.

You are claiming a universal inferiority. Deriving a universal principle from your own singular experience.

That inability to recognise the existence of other viewpoints, and other markets, is why you need a designer's empathy.

Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#26

Post by corinrules »

petewailes wrote: post #7
dunkelheit wrote: post #4

My main grievance with modern designs is low information density. Fonts are getting bigger and lots of whitespace is added between blocks. This works great for articles (as an example, medium articles look gorgeous and are a joy to read) but just about anything else is less usable when fewer bits of actual information are on the screen. Ironically, one can also speak of UX-isation of design. I would define it as misg…

This is exactly the point. Your problem isn't the fonts or spacing, but the focus on prettiness to the detriment of usefulness. There is always a balance between the two. There's room between the pain that is design without consideration of the information and the user, and information accessibility with no consideration for visual aesthetic.

"Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information."

Edward R. Tufte

Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#27

Post by corinrules »

tmlee wrote: post #18
dunkelheit wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proposing fundamental product changes takes solid grasp of what is called "product architecture" in the article, i.e. precise understanding of the concepts involved and the intricacies of their interaction. That means becoming a domain expert, knowing how to work with analytics and maybe even having a basic understanding of backend architecture. Most of the designers I have worked with (admittedly a very small sample…

I would agree. It gets difficult sometimes to implement a design from a beautiful looking mockup. Mainly because the design does not take into account most of the software use-cases. Then we go back to the drawing board again. Which is sort of why I think designer who can implement design (in HTML/CSS/JS or iOS/Android) is ideal, as they are much more likely to have that sort of "product architecture" thought process…

Specialisation vs generalisation though...

Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#28

Post by rjknight »

paulojreis wrote: post #13
petewailes wrote: post #3

Potentially contentious viewpoints ahead... I don't think these are the roles of a designer. But to explain why, I need to unpack some context first. I've spent most of my career at the interface between marketing, programming and design. Marketers are increasingly having similar discussions about how they need to be more involved in everything to make sure a good job is done. Things that would traditionally be seen…

> I think the problem is that it's just very hard now to set a boundary on where one thing ends and another begins. Application architecture is in the realms of development, answering problems defined by product people, made beautiful and usable by designers. I think you have a misconception here. A designer is not a decorator. Making it usable (and beautiful , as you call it) is way below conceiving the product, in…

There's a whiff of the 'no true Scotsman' fallacy about this though. The OP was suggesting that some designers are focusing on the decorative aspects of design because that's what looks good on a Dribbble profile. Given that 'making pretty designs' is a learnable skill and that at least some companies will hire people based on that skill, you're going to find a non-negligible number of people employed as designers whose primary skill is in making things that look good, rather than things that work well.

The other problem is that even if a designer is conceiving the product holistically, if that design is communicated in the form of PNGs or PDFs, it's unlikely that their vision is going to be understood correctly. In a collaborative environment, everyone needs to be part of the design process, because many aspects of good design require an understanding of the thought process that leads to the product as an outcome. The idea of the designer as a visionary who conceives the product and then hands off designs for other people to build is a seductive one, but it very rarely works.

Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#29

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

paulojreis wrote: post #13
petewailes wrote: post #3

Potentially contentious viewpoints ahead... I don't think these are the roles of a designer. But to explain why, I need to unpack some context first. I've spent most of my career at the interface between marketing, programming and design. Marketers are increasingly having similar discussions about how they need to be more involved in everything to make sure a good job is done. Things that would traditionally be seen…

> I think the problem is that it's just very hard now to set a boundary on where one thing ends and another begins. Application architecture is in the realms of development, answering problems defined by product people, made beautiful and usable by designers. I think you have a misconception here. A designer is not a decorator. Making it usable (and beautiful , as you call it) is way below conceiving the product, in…

No, I think in many projects designers are decorators - which leaves no one in charge of the user experience from the point of view of the user.

In the same way that a full-stack Linux expert isn't going to understand how someone without 5+ years of command line experience approaches a computer, a trained designer with an experienced eye is always going to struggle to point themselves in the place of a naive user.

Good UI needs to be tested for design assumptions and for user taskflow. The testing needs to be repeated every time changes are made. For any business with a web site that sells to customers, this is at least as important as unit tests in code.

IME designers aren't often interested in this. Some are, but many simply don't get it. And even if they are, there's pressure to see UX as a machine for driving conversions (hence the same Bootstrap template with the same social proof and the same calls to action everywhere), and not so much as a way to make the customer experience more positive.

The proof is that many sites are broken in some fundamental way. I was on a logistics site yesterday trying to organise a redelivery, and the site simply didn't do what I needed. The graphics were pretty, but it obviously hadn't been tested properly, and many elements were broken.

Yesterday's example was unusually bad, but similar issues aren't unusual.

Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#30

Post by evolve2k »

fleevy wrote: post #8
tatx wrote: post #6

Look at it from the other side. If a designer were to suggest some of the more fundamental changes to how your product should work, would you genuinely listen to their opinions and suggestions, or are these critical decisions being taken by someone higher up in management? Designers are often pushed into the rear end of the process in every sort of consumer product development (including software development). It is…

In my experience, designers are clueless obstructionists. They take months to mull over trivialities, then finally come up with an obvious solution that anybody could have seen from the start. Maybe I just got some bad designers though.

Being a professional coder who is now studying design one thing I've discovered is that most people underestimate the scope of good design and seem to want to narrow the designer just down the prett visuals, discounting anything unseen (eg process).

Another difficulty is that much good design is obvious in hindsight, think iPad but the act of whittling away what is unimportant is a key part of the job.

Or yeah maybe you've just dealt with poor designers.

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