Why you should move that button 3px to the left • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by Wintamute » Mon, Feb 17, 2014, 12:59 AM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #118

Wintamute wrote: post #117

Hmm. I can say with certainty that the great designers I've worked with have never had to make requests like this. They understand the idea that all sites should be built out of reusable components, and the visual relationships between those components should flow across the whole site. The CSS is robust and working site wide, the code is simple and beautiful and the design/UX is great, everyone is working efficientl…

I really doubt you have worked with designers at all, let along great ones. Any designer, junior or senior, that I've worked with, won't ignore the small stuff, and the better designers are more likely to be perfectionists. > Usually these sorts of requests come from mediocre designers who feel professionally threatened by a rapidly evolving scene and then feel the need to create a sort fake value for their role by i…

You've missed my point, and resorted to ad hominem. Way to go. I'm not saying that the little things aren't important, its great to be a perfectionist and I think sites are absolutely built out of details by designers and developers working in respectful partnership. But my point is that the design details that should be obsessed over come way before the traditional pixel pushing session at the end of the job. Things like consistent, simple and really robust visual relationships between components and typography across devices and viewport sizes. In my experience this is where good designers spend their energies - and if its done well pixel pushing should not be required.

I just responded to the point you were making in a polite manner, without calling you immature or calling your professional experience into question. Now do you fancy having a go?

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

#122

Post by hrktb » Mon, Feb 17, 2014, 1:00 AM UTC

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…

Just for the record, in environments where devs have to get their changes validated in a way or another (i.e. get it past the test team, release to prod etc.), they will get a resounding NO, if they try to change some code just for the sake of it (even if it's called "refactoring") or things they can't argue to be valuable (depending on where you are, fixing a minor bug might not be a good enough reason for changes).

There's no double standards, basically anyone has to justify spending other people's time.

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

#123

Post by TheZenPsycho » Mon, Feb 17, 2014, 1:11 AM UTC

ww520 wrote: post #101

Chris_Newton wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

So a developer is permitted to make arbitrary changes to the design at his whim with no justification, because he/she is doing the actual work. Because design is not actual work? But the designer, with years of experience, research, university studies and so on, cannot request to reverse that arbitrary change?

I mean, it's division of roles. does the developer want to be a designer too? Does the developer want to justify their choice of algorithms to the designer?

Doesn't this seem one sided to expect the designer to justify every choice, but the developer answers to no-one?

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

#124

Post by seanmcdirmid » Mon, Feb 17, 2014, 1:13 AM UTC

Wintamute wrote: post #121

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really doubt you have worked with designers at all, let along great ones. Any designer, junior or senior, that I've worked with, won't ignore the small stuff, and the better designers are more likely to be perfectionists. > Usually these sorts of requests come from mediocre designers who feel professionally threatened by a rapidly evolving scene and then feel the need to create a sort fake value for their role by i…

You've missed my point, and resorted to ad hominem. Way to go. I'm not saying that the little things aren't important, its great to be a perfectionist and I think sites are absolutely built out of details by designers and developers working in respectful partnership. But my point is that the design details that should be obsessed over come way before the traditional pixel pushing session at the end of the job. Things…

I did not call you immature, I called your comment immature. You made your point with an ad hominem on a whole profession of designers who care about pixel alignments, and so I seriously doubt you have significant experience working with designers.

> But my point is that the design details that should be obsessed over come way before the traditional pixel pushing session at the end of the job. Things like consistent, simple and really robust visual relationships between components and typography across devices and viewport sizes. In my experience this is where good designers spend their energies - and if its done well pixel pushing should not be required.

Pixel pushing is ALWAYS required at some point; it is unavoidable given our current technology. A designer cannot magically come up with a generic responsive design because developers just can't make that happen (through no fault of their own). Take for example icon design: it is well known that vector graphics are quite limited and bitmap icons must be generated and manually red lined for various resolutions. That is work the designer (or production specialist) does. Similarly, size-independent layouts are also a pipe dream, not because the designer is incapable, but the frameworks are! Hence, we are stuck optimizing layouts and pixel alignments for multiple sizes manually.

tl;dr "consistent, simple and really robust visual relationships between components and typography across devices and viewport sizes" is very often not workable in the real world for any non-trivial design.

Hackernews is surprisingly quite anti-designer in posting sentiment.

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

#125

Post by kaishiro » Mon, Feb 17, 2014, 1:13 AM UTC

varunsharma13 wrote: post #40

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…

I guess the 3px was more a rhetoric to drive home the more important point that design (UX and UI) matter. As has already been pointed out by someone in the this discussion, if a designer is asking you to more "3px", it is to align that element with other stuff on that page. The larger point that it lends credibility to your product is mostly overlooked. I have seen in my consulting experience that taking care of sma…

Personally (I don't speak for all devs, although some people on HN certainly seem to think they do...), the issue I have is that I rarely receive a response as clear cut as the one you propose.

"if a designer is asking you to more "3px", it is to align that element with other stuff on that page."

If they want elements aligned, or snapped to a grid, or whatever - sure, there is justification there. It's when I'm handed design changes with no justification that I get riled.

But yeah, at the end of the day engineers and designers really need to have a few more beers together.

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

#126

Post by Houshalter » Mon, Feb 17, 2014, 1:14 AM UTC

Well this is overkill, but if you really care about the optimal design, I wonder if you could optimize them with something like a genetic algorithm or some kind of machine learning. Google did this to find the optimal shade of blue for their logo. There is even a site designed entirely like this: http://www.metamorphosite.com/about

IMO it really isn't worth the time though.

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

#127

Post by TheZenPsycho » Mon, Feb 17, 2014, 1:20 AM UTC

10feet wrote: post #91

Chris_Newton wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? You are right, they often have good reason, and can make the case by explaining that. Of course, they often to not have a…

Isn't it unreasonable to expect that every design decision be based on logic? Human beings have two brain hemispheres. TWO WHOLE BRAIN HEMISPHERES. a right lobe and a left lobe. The right lobe is JUST AS BIG and complicated as the left lobe, in which our logic and reasoning abilities are based.

But in our culture, especially in development culture, for some reason any decision based on a process in the right hemisphere is valued far less. We call it "subjective" even though it isn't. It's the same processes that every human brain does in much the same way. This is why optical illusions can work. They work much the same way for every person, and the reasons they work are not based on logic. They're based on physical, biological processes in our visual processing systems. It's not a "logical" or "rational" process. It's a visual process.

But if a designer says that spacing is going to cause a problem, it's not valuable input because there is no "logical" reason behind it. That's not logical!

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

#128

Post by kaishiro » Mon, Feb 17, 2014, 1:21 AM UTC

exizt88 wrote: post #58

ricardobeat wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> moving a button 3px to the left shouldn't be a problem for any self-respecting developer That's exactly the kind of thinking that developers abhore. Imagine that the whole interface is built on top of a planned framework that follows strict rules and conventions. This button is following the exact spacing and dimensions implemented in the framework, nevertheless the designer's static mockup is different for some re…

> Now, moving this specific button 3px to the left could be as easy as a `margin-left: -3px` or some other simple line of code, but that is a hack/code smell that will be met with contempt from everyone who looks at it in the future Yep, that's a compromise. But if it makes the product better overall, it must be done. If the designer says so, I believe them -- and if I say that a designer's request would lead to a si…

There's no point in arguing about this without context, since it's really all about the context. That is to say - depending on the framework/code base/whatever you're working in, just "do[ing] position: relative; left: 3px;" for a specific page element could actually be quite a chore. Not just now, but for the next guy as well.

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

#129

Post by robotys » Mon, Feb 17, 2014, 1:24 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #92

Prove it. Measure it. Demonstrate with data that moving that button 3px to the left will increase sales by X% or customer retention by Y% or whatever our business metrics are. There's a difference between "obsessing over the details" and "tweaking for tweaking's sake". Make sure you're really doing the former and that the particular details you're obsessing over matter measurably.

This comment win.

What frustrate developers/engineers are their code changes need to pass the test immediately. The consequences is immediate. Compare it to design consequences, it seems like an eternity, especially if the design changes never have any test/measure to get passed.

Designer can blame developers when dev cant code their design which is so delightful the sales will improve. But developers cannot blame designer when the sales does not come through from the changes. Sales manager do.

There is test for design and it was called 'split testing'. Unfortunately it is marketers/sales job to come up with the test, not designers.

By these rules, designers should be in sales team instead of product team!

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

#130

Post by kaishiro » Mon, Feb 17, 2014, 1:24 AM UTC

exizt88 wrote: post #86

reefoctopus wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Furthermore, moving the button 3 px to the left might take a ridiculous number of man hours, and it's demoralizing work. Most coders are making smart trade offs and balancing a number of things to maximize productivity. How much is that 3 pixels really worth? Why don't you try again, and think of a way to design the interface that doesn't require that 3px move?

> How much is that 3 pixels really worth? It's the developer's responisbility to estimate how much work a particular task requires. If it's too much work for too little benefit, no sane manager/designer would insist on that 3px move.

I'm uncomfortable with the sheer number of insane managers within our industry.