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Why you should move that button 3px to the left

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Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#101

Post by ww520 »

Chris_Newton wrote: post #68
sxp wrote: post #33

So why should you move that button? The article doesn't actually answer the question. If a UX designer just says "move the button by 3px because it looks nicer", then there is a good chance that someone higher up the hierarchy will say move the button by 4px because that looks better. And since neither of them are able to actually justify their reasons beyond some vapid and subjective claim of making the product "mor…

And since neither of them are able to actually justify their reasons beyond some vapid and subjective claim of making the product "more delightful" Do you appreciate the irony that you just wrote a whole post about making decisions objectively, in which you have essentially dismissed designers as ignorants who just make arbitrary decisions according to their personal whimsy, based on a series of unsubstantiated claim…

> I wonder how you’d feel if you as a developer were told that every line of code you wanted to change — even those with obvious bugs — could not be touched unless you had previously demonstrated why you expect a measurable benefit to the satisfaction of the business development staff, and that your commit access was going to be revoked and every change would have to be made by bizdev after someone who didn’t know anything about programming decided whether it was justified.

The difference being that the developer makings his own changes as he sees the problem, not asking someone else to make the changes, whereas the designer just asks someone else to make an arbitrary change. If the developer is asking someone else to make a few lines of changes, he better gives a good justification.

Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#102

Post by jessedhillon »

Chris_Newton wrote: post #85
sxp wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you think a designer would have no justification for a change beyond “it looks nice”? What would you assume designers don’t understand issues like pixel alignment or designing for multiple devices? Why would you think designers would be raising these issues based on Photoshop mock-ups? Experience. I've had arbitrary requests made based on Photoshop mocks. I've pushed back against them after showing that the…

It sounds like your real problem has nothing to do with a “design version” or an “engineering version” of anything. You’ve just worked with some people who were in a design role but didn’t know how to do it. That’s unfortunate, but I don’t think it invalidates the original premise of the article that paying attention to seemingly minor design details matters more than a lot of non-designers tend to acknowledge.

I have yet to see a proposed application design or cosmetic change whose justification does not ultimately rely on "this guy's taste is better than that guy's" -- yes designers do sometimes bring out some justifications which are expressed with objective sensibilities but to me they always seem to be rationalizations, in the same way that evolutionary psych seems to be. That is, first see a behavior or a look that seems appealing, then figure out which design principles are making it seem better. I think the best designers temper their taste and predilections with judicious application of statistical methods such as split-testing.

I don't find anything objectionable about this, as long as the designer actually owns the design and has the fortitude and clout within the organization to defend their changes. Design seems to me an art in many respects, so some decisions will come down to a matter of taste in the end. Like any successful artist, the designer then will need the persistence to defend their vision against the meddling of bike-shedders.

I also think @sxp's characterization of the objectivity of engineering decisions leaves too much out. Engineering debates rarely come down to foosort() v. barsort(), where one obviously performs better. More often, they come down to questions like "should we be passing this argument first or last?", "what should these methods be named?", "can this code be extracted into its own module?" -- in other words, how to design the code.

Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#103

Post by seanmcdirmid »

dchichkov wrote: post #51
radley wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arrrrrrrrgh. Engineers. If I were to say "I had a design bug" and leave it at that, they'd do it. Even better, if I were to say "I resolved some design flow lag" they'd even smile. Engineers can't stand lag (and that's exactly what the fix is about). As for PS mocks - stuff is entirely different on the screen. And the 3px difference could have been a dev mistake and the designer is correcting them. Anyways, designers…

Here's another one. Engineers also can't stand broken flow . If you'd ask me "hey, can you move that button by 3px?", that's pretty much equivalent to asking me - "hey, can I waste some of your time?". But if it actually fixes lag or broken flow, this is significant. And any good engineer will be happy to help that fixed.

Where I work, pixel alignments and gaps are generally explicitly indicated in the design spec. If the code is not following the spec, its definitely the code's fault. If the spec is found to be wrong after implementation, then first fix the spec then ask for the code to be synced.

There is a whole class of people who are good at red lining and doing design QA; in a larger company, it might not even be the designer, but the design QA engineer, submitting the bug report.

Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#104

Post by seanmcdirmid »

grownseed wrote: post #76
seivan wrote: post #34

This article pisses me off something immensely. How about you learn to fucking code your own design? 'Yet we’re at the mercy of our teams. We can design beautiful, intricate, delightful details — but we can’t build, test, and deploy them all.' No shit, so how about you stop being one of those lazy-ass photoshop goons who play fucking color-the-button on dribble all day long and actually learn to code your own fucking…

Tone aside, I can't help but agree. My previous job (web shop) hired supposedly "rockstar" designers on several occasions, and the results were frustrating, time-consuming and in the end, largely worthless. What did not help was that those people had "print design" backgrounds, my bosses loved the rendered (hard) designs, and not having any design or development knowledge themselves, these sorts of ludicrous standard…

Why do you assume all designers are even working on HTML/CSS apps? When you get down to mobile, do you expect them to be able to code in C++/ObjectiveC/Java?

A good designer will understand the limitations of the platform they are designing for. My wife designs for S40 feature phones with plenty of limitations. There is plenty of back and forth between development and design to ensure that the design works with the limitations of the software and hardware (though devs often push back too soon).

Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#105

Post by gutnor »

Chris_Newton wrote: post #68
sxp wrote: post #33

So why should you move that button? The article doesn't actually answer the question. If a UX designer just says "move the button by 3px because it looks nicer", then there is a good chance that someone higher up the hierarchy will say move the button by 4px because that looks better. And since neither of them are able to actually justify their reasons beyond some vapid and subjective claim of making the product "mor…

And since neither of them are able to actually justify their reasons beyond some vapid and subjective claim of making the product "more delightful" Do you appreciate the irony that you just wrote a whole post about making decisions objectively, in which you have essentially dismissed designers as ignorants who just make arbitrary decisions according to their personal whimsy, based on a series of unsubstantiated claim…

Engineer/Dev will come to me on a regular basis to "use framework X", that code is module Y is shit because and there is a more optimal version of the algorithm. Most of the time, there is not objective reason other than "I have used that before and I liked it", "micro-benchmark say so, but I have not looked in this case if there is any interest for us".

Client want our application to produce an incorrect file, having forgotten that some bloke in their department is correcting by hand all the incorrect file of the old application.

Manager want you to do a daily timesheet to properly track client billing despite the fact that your team is working full time for a single client.

Client/Manager/Other Developer regularly ask for rubbish reason all the time, why would the Designer be any different ? They may have a good reason this time, just spend 2 min to explain them.

Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#106

Post by seanmcdirmid »

dubcanada wrote: post #81
seivan wrote: post #34

This article pisses me off something immensely. How about you learn to fucking code your own design? 'Yet we’re at the mercy of our teams. We can design beautiful, intricate, delightful details — but we can’t build, test, and deploy them all.' No shit, so how about you stop being one of those lazy-ass photoshop goons who play fucking color-the-button on dribble all day long and actually learn to code your own fucking…

Ignoring the really really harsh and overly rude tone. I wonder what the difference would be if this was posted on a designer version of hackernews. The problem with your comment is you assume everyone can dabble in everything. When you work at a big co you are hired generally to do one thing, and that's it. Designers don't touch code. Developers don't touch designs. So while Sue may be able to do CSS, JS, Cocoa but…

Designers often don't even have time to touch code, even if they could. When your organization has more trouble hiring designers than devs, you need your designers doing design 120% of the time.

Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#107

Post by Theodores »

exizt88 wrote: post #62
seivan wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think the engineers platform specific knowledge will have any impact what so ever? And where do you draw the line between engineering and designing? An engineer can design their design as they go along and iterate on it. Recently I've been doing my iOS design through SCSS and it helps having sizes, gradients and colors as variables, fonts as mixins and the ability to change them at runtime. Does that count…

The problem of engineers designing UIs is the topic of one of my favorite books: http://www.amazon.com/The-Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/0672... The problem is that engineers are not very good at UI design. Both from UX and aesthetic standpoints designers are capable of making a better product. A good designer will give a consistently better result than a good engineer in terms of usability, UX, aesthetics and modula…

Cats aren't very good at catching sticks an dogs aren't very good at catching mice. Therefore you can't have the dogs trying to do what a cat can do....

Except design is different. As a developer, once you have worked with some PSD efforts a few times and then worked with real dynamic content then worked with a real client to get the thing to actually convert sales, then worked with the client stats you have got a good grasp of when something is right on the design front. Plus you can open the css and do something about it. Or you can open up some stuff on the server side or put in some hack with javascript to get the usability to what it should be.

Designers are completely out of the loop after go live, they have done their 'lorem ipsum' stuff. Proficiency at UX comes from delivering the deliverables, testing, testing and testing. Listening to the client and the customers. It does not come from a few static designs.

I have never heard of a designer wanting access to the css to make that 3px change. They are welcome to it. They would make my day if they wanted to do that stuff. They do design for the web and the css is really over to them if they want to do it. The problem is that they would have to learn what a border is, what a margin is and what padding is. It is not difficult stuff.

The whole point of CSS is that the presentation is a separate thing to the content. Any developer would be happy to churn out the content blocks and sensible markup and hand it over to one of these PSD experts for them to get exactly to their 3px requirements. But in the real world it does not happen. Developers can dive in and fix something at silly o clock on a Sunday, but would anyone ever call a designer at such times even if it was a UX issue that was the problem?

Obviously there are some fantastic designers out there - allegedly - but, in general, designers don't do the hard stuff or even bother to work with live content. Far too many of them produce static nonsense in PSD format - a trade that should have been pronounced dead the nanosecond the iphone came out. They also perpetuate this myth that all developers are totally retarded when it comes to anything to do with aesthetics. Yet it is the developers that implement design, learning along the way. Rarely if ever is it the other way around, and, should a designer dare to do that they will get clumped in as a 'front end developer' and have some retarded PSDs foisted on them by some manager that thinks only designers can have any input whatsoever regarding UX/UI design.

How often do you think a developer tests something? A given page can be tested 100's of times. Along the way 'this checkbox might not be needed' or 'this dialogue box makes no sense' or 'this process is tedious' gets discovered. The guys with their PSDs just do not have that insight.

Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#109

Post by Pxtl »

crazygringo wrote: post #30

This is a fantastic article. To people below who say the designer should make the change him or helself -- as a front-end developer, I say a million times, NO NO NO. Does the designer know how to use git and commit properly? Do they know on what branch? Understand the deployment schedule? Perform browser testing? Are they part of code reviews? Do they understand whether that rule is used by just that component, or ju…

> Does the designer know how to use git and commit properly? Do they know on what branch? Understand the deployment schedule? Perform browser testing? Are they part of code reviews? Do they understand whether that rule is used by just that component, or just that page, or if it will affect code elsewhere?

If he doesn't, find one who does. A web-designer who doesn't understand code is like a fashion designer who can't sew.

Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#110

Post by mirchibajji »

samatman wrote: post #93
grownseed wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tone aside, I can't help but agree. My previous job (web shop) hired supposedly "rockstar" designers on several occasions, and the results were frustrating, time-consuming and in the end, largely worthless. What did not help was that those people had "print design" backgrounds, my bosses loved the rendered (hard) designs, and not having any design or development knowledge themselves, these sorts of ludicrous standard…

Where architecture is concerned this is normally true, but the exceptions are interesting/illustrative. When Frank Gehry was designing the Guggenheim Bilbao, he took stiff cloth and folded it into the final shape. Actually, y'know, making the building was someone else's problem.

This is the equivalent of implementing the design in Flash :)
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