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
#2he has a point and i like perfected ux too, but as a programmer im unable to achieve perfected UIs :)
anyway, there is also "good enough" and most likely 3px wont matter any more than refactoring a perfectly working class into a perfectly working class with perfect code...
Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left
#3Maybe designers should learn a little bit of CSS and git and just fix the pixels.
Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left
#4When 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to follow and it doesn't feel like anything really looks different -- until I compare the finished product with what I originally made by myself.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 Google page. Does anyone know which one? I really want to know what difference the 3px makes!
Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left
#5I read assertion after assertion and kept waiting for that 'why' from the title.
Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left
#6for the record i really dislike the sidebar of that site. ;-)
Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left
#7When 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to follow and it doesn't feel like anything really looks different -- until I compare the finished product with what I originally made by myself.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.
Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left
#8One 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.
Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left
#9Maybe designers should learn a little bit of CSS and git and just fix the pixels.
This article makes a strong case for that.
Things like "grab me before you check this in" and "we need a design fix-it day" are indicators that this problem has a high communications cost between the designers and engineers who have to implement those designs. Companies who observe symptoms like this should consider hiring a designer/engineer instead of having those two separate people. Yes, the combined person will be more expensive but they will just do the same work in a fraction of the time.
Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left
#10Wow, this is a superb article that resonates with me as much as anything I've ever read on the subject. It practices what it preaches, too. Reading it made me feel the very things it's talking about.
I sense, though, that the author's tactics for working with teams that don't share his values are half-measures. It reminds me of the large and sad literature on "organizational change" in software development, wherein people trade stories about how to cajole managers into letting them do fragments of good engineering. None of that works very well. The satisfying solution is to be part of an organization that values good engineering in the first place.
Similarly, a designer like the author would be better served by working with–I'm tempted to say better engineers, but that's my bias–engineers who feel the same way that he does about product. These exist; I'd consider myself blessed to collaborate like that.