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USWDS: The United States Web Design System

designsystem.digital.gov

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Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#111

Post by kjeetgill »

knowuh wrote: post #81
darekkay wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Especially the contrast/magic number discussion. From a developer perspective, working with color palettes with defined "magic numbers" is really great. I have written a blog post [1] around this topic and wrote a tool [2] to calculate/ensure accessible magic numbers for color palettes. [1] https://darekkay.com/blog/accessible-color-palette/ [2] https://github.com/darekkay/a11y-contrast

I can't tell you how much I love that your first example of contrast failure is HN. > Our favorite orange website isn't leading by example, either. Some comments are almost unreadable

It's worth pointing out that HNs 's heavily downvoted posts are intentionally hard to read. Thats hardly a gotcha. Now whether they should be is a whole different question.

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#112

Post by devoutsalsa »

tablespoon wrote: post #41
EricE wrote: post #18

Anyone with any part in designing user interfaces seriously needs to commit their section on color to heart: https://designsystem.digital.gov/design-tokens/color/overvie... Especially the contrast/magic number discussion. It's crazy how many user interfaces these days blur design elements to where you can't tell were controls are. The recent trend to eliminate window title bars is particularly infuriating, but button…

> Especially the contrast/magic number discussion. It's crazy how many user interfaces these days blur design elements to where you can't tell were controls are. The recent trend to eliminate window title bars is particularly infuriating, but buttons that don't look like buttons because they blend into the background are another pet peeve - or have light gray on dark gray. Ugh! Contrast serves a purpose! Modern UX de…

We’re in an era of S(uper)UX.

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#113

Post by osigurdson »

tablespoon wrote: post #41
EricE wrote: post #18

Anyone with any part in designing user interfaces seriously needs to commit their section on color to heart: https://designsystem.digital.gov/design-tokens/color/overvie... Especially the contrast/magic number discussion. It's crazy how many user interfaces these days blur design elements to where you can't tell were controls are. The recent trend to eliminate window title bars is particularly infuriating, but button…

> Especially the contrast/magic number discussion. It's crazy how many user interfaces these days blur design elements to where you can't tell were controls are. The recent trend to eliminate window title bars is particularly infuriating, but buttons that don't look like buttons because they blend into the background are another pet peeve - or have light gray on dark gray. Ugh! Contrast serves a purpose! Modern UX de…

I'm not a web designer but I personally don't have any issue with "modern" UI design. It looks clean to me and I don't have any trouble distinguishing things. Just a data point.

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#114

Post by iratewizard »

osigurdson wrote: post #113
tablespoon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Especially the contrast/magic number discussion. It's crazy how many user interfaces these days blur design elements to where you can't tell were controls are. The recent trend to eliminate window title bars is particularly infuriating, but buttons that don't look like buttons because they blend into the background are another pet peeve - or have light gray on dark gray. Ugh! Contrast serves a purpose! Modern UX de…

I'm not a web designer but I personally don't have any issue with "modern" UI design. It looks clean to me and I don't have any trouble distinguishing things. Just a data point.

I've been doing software engineering for about 16 years now and 10 of them have been specializing in design, UI and UX. Modern UI principles are good. A stark improvement from the days when hapless engineers were in charge of design because nobody considered it. There are always bad trends and bad apples, but they stick out a lot more now. Mostly because they're contrasted so sharply with good design everywhere.

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#115

Post by IgorPartola »

tablespoon wrote: post #41
EricE wrote: post #18

Anyone with any part in designing user interfaces seriously needs to commit their section on color to heart: https://designsystem.digital.gov/design-tokens/color/overvie... Especially the contrast/magic number discussion. It's crazy how many user interfaces these days blur design elements to where you can't tell were controls are. The recent trend to eliminate window title bars is particularly infuriating, but button…

> Especially the contrast/magic number discussion. It's crazy how many user interfaces these days blur design elements to where you can't tell were controls are. The recent trend to eliminate window title bars is particularly infuriating, but buttons that don't look like buttons because they blend into the background are another pet peeve - or have light gray on dark gray. Ugh! Contrast serves a purpose! Modern UX de…

Honestly this all sounds very old fart “they don’t build them like they used to” and “back in my day”. That isn’t to say I disagree with the sentiment entirely. But:

A hidden button doesn’t clutter up what the user interacts with so long as the user knows how to find the button. I like clever interfaces after I figure them out. I don’t like them before because they make me feel stupid. But as soon as they make me feel smart after I figure them out, I suddenly enjoy them so long as they meet the second goal: make me productive. Take Snapchat for example. It has a really clever UX where you tap on your face and it will bring up filters. I honestly don’t know if there is a dedicated button for this somewhere. I certainly felt dumb right up to the point where someone showed this feature to me and and then it felt very neat.

So maybe when the pendulum swings from clutter-free to discoverable again we could find some compromise between 1000 buttons on the screen that all do something and no visible buttons and figure out clever AND discoverable interfaces.

And before yet another startup with their idea for a UI walk through GUI pops up, no those things aren’t the answer. They suck and I would prefer they didn’t exist. If your UI needs it, you designed a bad UI.

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#116

Post by swyx »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #66
sodality2 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In this case to a proper government domain... aha, I bet there's some policy against pointing .gov.uk hostnames to a third-party platform? Some guidance that might be relevant: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/use-your-govuk-domain-name?step-...

Doesn't seem to rule out using a .gov.uk domain name for something hosted on netlify. I agree it looks cheesy and makes me wonder if it's really official government documetnation, without a .gov.uk hostname (and SSL cert, naturally).

former netlify employee here. all sites on netlify have a netlify subdomain, that doesnt go away when you add a custom domain. its just useful for deploy previews and stuff, content is basically the same. nothing untoward here

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#119

Post by howenterprisey »

XorNot wrote: post #89
alephnan wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I studied computer science and have been software engineer for almost a decade. Before college I came from a design background. I also went back to design school after I already became a senior engineer. One thing I've noticed is that art students have looked into pivoting into UI/UX design because it pays. There are skills and intuition that transfer, such as designing for visual hierarchy. In fact, there are even s…

I actually really hate material design in general. It's "okay" on Android, and that's the only place it works. The Material web design layout never feels good in the browser - it's floaty. Interactions don't ever feel "solid" - basically the experience is always like using a buggy webapp where you're thinking you need to open the dev panel to see if it's erroring silently. Try using any of Google's setting panels or…

I absolutely get what you mean when you say "floaty". I use the word "plastic" for that, as in cheap plastic.
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