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Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer

refactoringui.com

11–20 of 245 posts

Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer

#11

Often the bad designs come from the designers themselves. Just as software developers often fall prey to "NIH", many designers feel the established design systems like Material are insufficient for some reason. That is OK, if you know the rules you can break them, but often they don't know the rules either (grid system, typography, color for accessibility) and want to make "their own mark" with some new creation that…

I don't have any strategies, but I've had designers also want to add unnecessary steps to a gui-driven process. One designer kept arguing about the cognitive load of having a user simply insert their credit card into the reader to signal intent to pay. They wanted a flow where the user would touch the UI to indicate whether they wanted to tap or insert or scan a coupon. There was no reason to do it that way. I don't want to get into the specifics but it's a flow everyone uses every day without thinking and we were adding a new input device. It's not like we were inventing an entirely new system. The designer just wanted to make the work more than it was.

Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer

#13
> [design courses] focus so much on high level principles like color theory and typography which, while important, never helped me make instant improvements

Strange, making the very low contrast text more visible on this site is an instant improvement, and it's right there in the "color theory"

Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer

#14

Looking at the first example given I think this book is the one missing the mark. I genuinely have trouble when things have less borders! I don’t care about things designed to seem nice, I want them to be usable!

I get where you're coming from, but I don't think they are saying to never use borders, but instead use them intentionally. They explain better than "Use less borders" below:

> Borders are a great way to distinguish two elements from one another, but using too many of them can make your design feel busy and cluttered

The example screenshot on the page shows a use case where they want to highlight a single row from a table, and using less borders is great for that. However, if they were trying to increase readability of the table overall, they may choose to keep the borders in place for contrast.

Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer

#16
post #10

Looking at the first example given I think this book is the one missing the mark. I genuinely have trouble when things have less borders! I don’t care about things designed to seem nice, I want them to be usable!

OTOH, I'm using full screen apps without decorations, and I'm fighting with edge to forcefully remove all the scrollbars on every website automatically (I want 0 scrollbar unless I'm actively scrolling) different tastes for different people

> (I want 0 scrollbar unless I'm actively scrolling)

How do you know when there is content to scroll then? You randomly scroll parts of the screen to see if they move?

Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer

#17
post #13

> [design courses] focus so much on high level principles like color theory and typography which, while important, never helped me make instant improvements Strange, making the very low contrast text more visible on this site is an instant improvement, and it's right there in the "color theory"

It's also right there in the "common sense theory"

Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer

#18

Often the bad designs come from the designers themselves. Just as software developers often fall prey to "NIH", many designers feel the established design systems like Material are insufficient for some reason. That is OK, if you know the rules you can break them, but often they don't know the rules either (grid system, typography, color for accessibility) and want to make "their own mark" with some new creation that…

> Just as software developers often fall prey to "NIH"

What does NIH abbreviate?

Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer

#19

Often the bad designs come from the designers themselves. Just as software developers often fall prey to "NIH", many designers feel the established design systems like Material are insufficient for some reason. That is OK, if you know the rules you can break them, but often they don't know the rules either (grid system, typography, color for accessibility) and want to make "their own mark" with some new creation that…

I think you deal with bad designers the same way you deal with bad developers.

Try not to hire them in the first place, fire them if you can, and if you're stuck with them try to make sure they are occupied with tasks that will not cause too much overall damage.

Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer

#20

Often the bad designs come from the designers themselves. Just as software developers often fall prey to "NIH", many designers feel the established design systems like Material are insufficient for some reason. That is OK, if you know the rules you can break them, but often they don't know the rules either (grid system, typography, color for accessibility) and want to make "their own mark" with some new creation that…

The solution is to hire better designers, unfortunately. Savvy/wise/experienced ones know when to follow the rules, and when to break them.

Edit: That might not seem like the most helpful advice, and I'm sorry you have to deal with this – but it's the most effective, without having to write an entire book.

This book was written for industrial designers by an industrial designer, but I did find a lot of useful advice in here for designers on understanding the business mind, deferring to clients, embracing constraints and requirements, etc.

https://www.amazon.com/Designers-Are-Wankers-Neville-Brody/d...

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