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Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer

refactoringui.com

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

#31

Post by JusticeJuice »

throwway120385 wrote: post #11
clumsysmurf wrote: post #7

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…

This could be tested with usability studies and a good user researcher. Make a prototype of the 'fast' way, and the 'lower cognitive load' way. Try it with 15 people per prototype, track metrics, and ask people about the experience afterwards. Make sure everyone on the team has an open mind and see what sticks.

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

#33

Post by BiteCode_dev »

chillbill wrote: post #2

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!

Same, I really prefer the design on the left. Easier to see things, and it makes you feel you can click on elements.

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

#34

Post by chankstein38 »

Honestly their first concrete example, with fewer borders, is something that bothers me a lot on the internet today. Cool everything looks flat and like part of everything else. That's not hard to go down through a giant list of or anything... /s

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

#35

Post by ASalazarMX »

moffkalast wrote: post #17
eviks wrote: 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"

Crossing into "visitors can't read it if they can't see it theory".

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

#36

Post by samhuk »

This could perhaps come off as excessively brutal, but it really is just my true experience in the industry - the worst UIs I have seen (both in terms of UX quality and internal code quality) have been made by that particular kind of developer has has never bothered to go a single inch outside of their little Java/C# box that they were given by their CS undergraduate course, and then, due to some reason like the company doesn't want to hire or move devs around, becomes the senior lead on some big UI piece.

The things I have seen...

Personally, I think that creating great UIs is not something that can be taught overnight. There is a certain kind of "feel for it" that I think that I have gained through my years of making them; something that I feel like cannot be taught, at least not in some "bootcamp"/"crash-course" way.

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

#38

Post by chankstein38 »

gwbas1c wrote: post #8

$100 for a book is steep, especially when it's a pdf.

A pdf that seems to contain "high quality" examples like "use fewer borders" where the example made several commenters, including myself, say "That's worse." Not sure why I'd pay $100 for a PDF anyway but I'm sure as heck not doing it when the kind of advice breeds less usable pages.

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

#39

Post by chankstein38 »

web3-is-a-scam wrote: post #32

my current rule is to ask ChatGPT to do it for me

Are you memeing or are you serious? Because I'm curious how you'd have a language model design a page for you. Just ask it for the HTML and CSS for a nice looking page?

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

#40

Post by munk-a »

chankstein38 wrote: post #34

Honestly their first concrete example, with fewer borders, is something that bothers me a lot on the internet today. Cool everything looks flat and like part of everything else. That's not hard to go down through a giant list of or anything... /s

It's also important to contrast the information density. Both the "bad" and "good" examples are quite readable but the one on the left is going to be more useful for larger lists of things.
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