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UI Design Dos and Don'ts

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Re: UI Design Dos and Don'ts

#111

Post by Washuu »

mikro2nd wrote: post #70
Washuu wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OS 10.9 and iOS 7 have taken contrast and thrown it out the window. They are both following current designer trends of less contrast overall while claiming better readability. The low contrast trend started around 2011 to 2012 with web sites. It typically takes Apple one year to catch up with the trends on their operating system releases. Both their recent releases result in more eye strain for me looking for a way t…

Do you suppose that this might be related to the oft-discussed-on-HN ageism that the Silicon Valley-based industry is accused of? Low contrast may be pleasing to twenty-something year old eyes, but unreadable to fifty-something year old eyes, and, if I consider my own attitudes and thinking at a younger age, I would almost certainly not have been considering how UI design choices would impact people with less-than op…

It could have a minor bit to do with relative age of the designers, but I would assume it is more do with current designer trends. Personally, I do not wear glasses and have considerably good vision as well I even go to the extent of using good monitors with IPS panels that are properly calibrated. Even then there are issues with font contrast in OS 10.9 and iOS 7 where they decide to use a white font with a very light drop shadow.

I have always made sure to design with disabilities in mind.(Section 508 government work.) There was a previous designer I worked with a couple years ago that came from the Silicon Valley area that would require a weekly reminder that low contrast designs would not be acceptable.

Re: UI Design Dos and Don'ts

#112

Post by kagamine »

__z wrote: post #105
TuringTest wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There will always be some who misinterpret the rules. Right, though the problem is when the misinterpretation takes on a life of its own and it's propagated as a good practice, as it happened with light grey and its purported benefits to dyslexic readers. This practice is too widespread to be left unadressed without correction. As for e-readers, the newer models of the Kindle and other competitors have darker text…

I, too, have problems reading many websites that insist on using light grey. Perhaps off black would be better to read but the misuse of grey text has a real world effect on people who are older and/or people with bad eyesight. Off black and grey aren't the same thing. I am baffled by designers coming in and discounting the people who say "this is hard to read for me" with "no it isn't." For me, I open up firebug and…

> why are all books published with black text?

One of the web's greatest problems has been defining itself in relation to printed media. From use of font types, colour and page layout, margins and line spacing, the web is not on printed paper. Why do you think the two are the same?

I am not disputing that there is a lot of bad design out there, one of my personal peeves is tiny text. I've seen real UX people use a 9pt font because it looks good on their screen, but is impossible to read on anything else and when you don't hold your face 4 inches from the glass.

I've said this before and I'll say it again, one of the problems with UX is the number of "experts" who are self-taught. It's like web-design/development circa 2001, everyone was claiming to be a "web-dev" but in practice hardly any could do more than basic html & tables. UX, imo, is like that now.

Re: UI Design Dos and Don'ts

#113

Post by kagamine »

coldpie wrote: post #102
kagamine wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feeling a bit confrontational today are we? Call it what you will, but this is "generally accepted" which means exactly what it says. You seem to have confused "this user's opinion" with "what the textbooks say". Still, I'm open to hear about all the UX books you have read.

You don't need to read a textbook to see users complain about it, or to know that I go out of my way to fix low-contrast webpages to make them easier to read. Poke around elsewhere in this thread. Check out http://contrastrebellion.com/ >.

That's the same link I debunked earlier in this thread. Just because someone made a website about something does not make it a real thing. I know there are a lot of sites that do text wrongly, not just colour, but size and font too, but they don't all need a movement.

Re: UI Design Dos and Don'ts

#114

Post by __z »

kagamine wrote: post #112
__z wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, too, have problems reading many websites that insist on using light grey. Perhaps off black would be better to read but the misuse of grey text has a real world effect on people who are older and/or people with bad eyesight. Off black and grey aren't the same thing. I am baffled by designers coming in and discounting the people who say "this is hard to read for me" with "no it isn't." For me, I open up firebug and…

> why are all books published with black text? One of the web's greatest problems has been defining itself in relation to printed media. From use of font types, colour and page layout, margins and line spacing, the web is not on printed paper. Why do you think the two are the same? I am not disputing that there is a lot of bad design out there, one of my personal peeves is tiny text. I've seen real UX people use a 9p…

>Why do you think the two are the same?

I do not. I was asking a question that if we have become enlightened because of digital media why hasn't some of those best practices translated back to traditional media? Maybe they have, I don't know, I can't recall noticing. If off-black is done well it isn't noticed because it doesn't look jarring anyways so perhaps we are all reading off black books. Not really sure. It was just an inquiry.

Re: UI Design Dos and Don'ts

#115

Post by arrrg »

jamesdelaneyie wrote: post #23
on_and_off wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the stupidly bad design decisions I have seen come from somebody high in the hierarchy (product manager, CEO or founder) demanding a change, even if both designers and developers rally on how awful it would be. I have not yet found a solution to this problem.

would A/B testing, in some capacity, the decision in some form or another, help with this?

Think of the eternal vastness of configuration spaces (even in domains as restricted as, say, static HTML/CSS pages) and then you know why AB testing is not a solution to everything. (Multivariate testing, too. It’s just slightly more elegant in some respects, but suffers from the same basic deficits and additionally has its own issues.)

Time is limited and traffic is limited. You simply cannot test everything, in fact, the amount of variants you can actually test during, say, a year may be shockingly low compared to the amount of variants possible (at least if you are not Google – but most aren’t).

Without a strong sense of direction and discerning eyes and hands that provide plausible variants to test, AB testing can be quite useless. AB testing is a great tool to verify hypotheses (and those may well be competing hypotheses), but I really question its usefulness as a creative tool.

If you can plausibly only do a couple of AB tests a year (the possibility of running an AB test being a function of traffic and time) you better not waste that opportunity on button colors or some similar nonsense.

Sure, evolution through natural selection produced some awesome designs and is basically a completely blind process based purely on testing of different variants with only slight and random differences with no involvement of any designer at all (sound familiar?) – but it also took billions of years. Most designers just don’t have that kind of time …

To more directly answer your question, AB tests can certainly be used to defend against bad hypotheses. If there is a culture of testing and new designs have to be battle tested then that’s less of an opportunity for someone in a position of power to screw things up by fiat. However, that’s also a tremendous waste of time and efficiency if bad designs that could be sieved out quickly by simple heuristics have to also first be tested, which is just a slow process and a wasted opportunity to test something better.

Maybe think of AB testing as a last line of defense, but be careful, AB tests can be paralyzing. (Or rather, first AB tests paralyze everything, then the boss is annoyed by how slow everything is going and changes everything by fiat and immediately without any testing at all. From one extreme to the other …)

Re: UI Design Dos and Don'ts

#116

Post by exodust »

sandofsky wrote: post #104
exodust wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose this article is about iOS apps, so I should stay away. Nobody is "shipping" anything on the web. I've never understood the use of the word, even for apps. Something that is shipped cannot be touched or modified after release. This isn't the case on the internet. For the normal operation of a website, needing to make only one image per product item is obviously more economical for whoever is making the conte…

> Nobody is "shipping" anything on the web. I've never understood the use of the word, even for apps. Something that is shipped cannot be touched or modified after release. This isn't the case on the internet. At minimum, expect one week of review time before you can release an app on the App Store. As far as web apps, every line of code that makes it to production has consequences. If you make a catastrophic mistake…

> "Users feel something is off"

Do they? Because an image is 1.5x and not 2x on their phone? Mate, that's nonsense.

Just do a comparison yourself and you'll see. I did, checked and confirmed with the client (jewellery designer where the image quality was important) and they were happy. On my iPad3 the 1.5 product images (at 1200 pixels wide presented half width of screen) were MORE than adequate and very sharp on the iPad. No "blurriness" at all. There is no way in the world you'd be able to tell the images were not 2x when the screen is viewed at normal distance.

> "Are you writing this from 1992?"

I'm writing this from the real world. In your utopia it seems everyone has unlimited bandwidth on their mobiles to download 1600px images for every product listed, and can see the difference with their bionic vision. I prefer to keep site weight down and enjoy the increased performance as a result.

Disagreeing is fine, but your argument amounts to "the site will look amateur hmmkay", and I'm telling you now that the "amateur look" comes from poor UX or clunky design and performance, not whether an image is 1.5x vs 2x.

Using a CDN for assets is good, but not always an option/need for a small business website with minimal traffic (such as a jewellery designer's e-store) and keeps the dev costs and complexity down if everything can be handled on the one platform. But I don't disagree with you about using a CDN, it's just that a CDN doesn't suddenly make the frontend more responsive or snappy. Those images still need loading in the browser no matter where they come from.

I convince my clients to spend a little bit more on their web host account, to get a bit more CPU performance and memory so that uploading images and so on runs smoothly. Works for me, works for them. Whether it works for anyone else is not my problem! I'm just sharing my approach. Ignore or disagree, it's all good.

Good luck. Remember to do things because they work in practice, not because Apple or Google or some random person on HN said to do it that way.

Re: UI Design Dos and Don'ts

#117

Post by [deleted] »

exodust wrote: post #116
sandofsky wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody is "shipping" anything on the web. I've never understood the use of the word, even for apps. Something that is shipped cannot be touched or modified after release. This isn't the case on the internet. At minimum, expect one week of review time before you can release an app on the App Store. As far as web apps, every line of code that makes it to production has consequences. If you make a catastrophic mistake…

> "Users feel something is off" Do they? Because an image is 1.5x and not 2x on their phone? Mate, that's nonsense. Just do a comparison yourself and you'll see. I did, checked and confirmed with the client (jewellery designer where the image quality was important) and they were happy. On my iPad3 the 1.5 product images (at 1200 pixels wide presented half width of screen) were MORE than adequate and very sharp on the…

[deleted]

Re: UI Design Dos and Don'ts

#118

Post by on_and_off »

jamesdelaneyie wrote: post #23
on_and_off wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the stupidly bad design decisions I have seen come from somebody high in the hierarchy (product manager, CEO or founder) demanding a change, even if both designers and developers rally on how awful it would be. I have not yet found a solution to this problem.

would A/B testing, in some capacity, the decision in some form or another, help with this?

I don't think so. It would certainly help in some specific cases and some ideas are certainly worth testing out. However : -A/B testing can only answer some very specific questions. Good UX is not just measured by engagement. -some of these decisions are just bad practices that are widely recognized : for example we were asked to add modal popups pretty much everywhere. -we are severely shorthanded and implementing these changes and the A/B tests can be a very significant time investment. Especially when they are abandoned before going live for the reasons given by everyone but the person in charge.

Re: UI Design Dos and Don'ts

#119

Post by on_and_off »

vogt wrote: post #11
on_and_off wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the stupidly bad design decisions I have seen come from somebody high in the hierarchy (product manager, CEO or founder) demanding a change, even if both designers and developers rally on how awful it would be. I have not yet found a solution to this problem.

The book Articulating Design Decisions (O'Reilly) deals specifically with this. It's always an uphill battle, and the book's overall lesson is "empathize as much as possible", but it's a great read. It has definitely helped me in dealing with more difficult management types who don't understand the design or technical side of product building.

Thanks, I have added it to my reading list.

Re: UI Design Dos and Don'ts

#120

Post by moschel »

on_and_off wrote: post #119
vogt wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The book Articulating Design Decisions (O'Reilly) deals specifically with this. It's always an uphill battle, and the book's overall lesson is "empathize as much as possible", but it's a great read. It has definitely helped me in dealing with more difficult management types who don't understand the design or technical side of product building.

Thanks, I have added it to my reading list.

Great read. Tom is a master when it comes to clear communication.
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