11–20 of 164 posts
My front end UIs are limited to bootstrap - it works :) - but if one/two/three button[s] are not aligned the same as all the others - I will focus on that rather than the data. My train of thought is gone.
Part of me empathizes and sees the similarity. Another part of me wants to point out that there is nothing stopping the designer from fixing this themselves. Learn your medium.
I expected the first answer - especially from Google ventures - to be "show them through data / testing the power of getting the details right".
Marissa Meyer's infamous "we once tested 41 shades of blue"(1) was the nexus of Google's design culture in the 2000's, has this changed?
(1) http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/business/01marissa.html?_r...
When I used to work with my designer friend, he would tell me to do things like that: increase this padding by 5px, lighten the color by a little, slightly decrease the border-radius, etc. One by one like that, I find it hard to follow and it doesn't feel like anything really looks different -- until I compare the finished product with what I originally made by myself. Anyway, slightly OT: the screenshot looks like a…
Did you show your designer friend what happened when someone presses ctrl +? Or uses a different browser or loads their own fonts or etc etc etc? Designers have caused real harm to the WWW. They're clearly not the worst thing about WWW but they're pretty bad.
That being said, when a designer says things like "move this button 3px to the left" they usually mean things like "move this button so its right edge aligns with the right edge of the content below, which got shifted because we added padding-right." So the original request gets implemented as what he _wants_ rather than what he asked for.
When I used to work with my designer friend, he would tell me to do things like that: increase this padding by 5px, lighten the color by a little, slightly decrease the border-radius, etc. One by one like that, I find it hard to follow and it doesn't feel like anything really looks different -- until I compare the finished product with what I originally made by myself. Anyway, slightly OT: the screenshot looks like a…
Did you show your designer friend what happened when someone presses ctrl +? Or uses a different browser or loads their own fonts or etc etc etc? Designers have caused real harm to the WWW. They're clearly not the worst thing about WWW but they're pretty bad.
>As designers, we are held responsible for the overall quality of the experience. Yet we’re at the mercy of our teams Part of me empathizes and sees the similarity. Another part of me wants to point out that there is nothing stopping the designer from fixing this themselves. Learn your medium.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you show your designer friend what happened when someone presses ctrl +? Or uses a different browser or loads their own fonts or etc etc etc? Designers have caused real harm to the WWW. They're clearly not the worst thing about WWW but they're pretty bad.
No, but I just checked a few of the sites we made and none break from ctrl+ (regarding this: I've never seen a non-tech person, i.e. 99% of traffic for the sites, use shortcuts in the first place); they also look consistent between _modern_ browsers; and how often do people load their own fonts? Is the designer responsible that a site becomes unusable under Wingdings? (Sorry for the strawman.) That being said, when a…
Rather than apologize for making a strawman, how about we not make one in the first place? Nobody's talking about dingbat fonts from the 90s - GP is talking about usability today.
> No, but I just checked a few of the sites we made and none break from ctrl+
I'm glad your team has thought ahead, but I can assure you that many have not.
I can't count the number of sites that I've seen that would be completely unusable for people reliant solely on mobile devices (used as primary computing devices in the developing world), for people who rely on screen readers (blind and otherwise disabled people exist too!) - I could go on and on.
The common rebuttal I hear to this is that "the average user doesn't care about this", and the website isn't designed for "edge cases", which always makes me cringe. The wheelchair ramp at your storefront may not be used by your "average" customer, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't have one, even if the law didn't require you to[0].
Amusingly, in many cases, the sites that are the best-suited for a range of devices (desktops, tablets, phones) and clients[1] are the ones that look like they stepped out of the late 1990s.
[0] http://www.adawheelchairramps.com/modular_ramps/ada_modular_...
[1] Take a minute and check if your site works in Lynx. If not, there's a very good chance your site is inaccessible to visually impaired people (yes, Lynx and similar browsers are still used by people with disabilities today!).
One big perception is that if the UI is not quite right (or worse), the code is also not quite right (or worse). Since the UI is seen and code is unseen, it becomes the visible representation of overall quality. So even if the code is tight and elegant underneath a sloppy UI, it will be perceived at the quality of the UI.
When I used to work with my designer friend, he would tell me to do things like that: increase this padding by 5px, lighten the color by a little, slightly decrease the border-radius, etc. One by one like that, I find it hard to follow and it doesn't feel like anything really looks different -- until I compare the finished product with what I originally made by myself. Anyway, slightly OT: the screenshot looks like a…
Did you show your designer friend what happened when someone presses ctrl +? Or uses a different browser or loads their own fonts or etc etc etc? Designers have caused real harm to the WWW. They're clearly not the worst thing about WWW but they're pretty bad.
Why would either of those things be a problem? Attention to detail is attention to detail at any scale.
It’s true that at scales smaller than anyone would normally notice there can be a difference between a clean optical alignment and a “perfect” mathematical one. This is a challenge that folks like font designers and artists working on icons often have to face. If you zoom in dramatically (say 5x or 10x, not 120%), these details would probably look slightly off.
However, at the kind of scale we’re using for examples here, zooming in will only exaggerate careless flaws like having things misaligned by a pixel or using the same border-radius for nested elements where concentricity of the rounded corners was intended. A well designed page will continue to look clean and tidy at larger scales, and it won’t mysteriously break just because someone zoomed or had different font preferences.