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How developers and tech founders can turn their ideas into UI design

simonmccade.com

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Re: How developers and tech founders can turn their ideas into UI design

#11

Post by pushtheenvelope »

krm01 wrote: post #3

As a creative Director at UI/UX design firm http://fairpixels.pro - I’d like to highly recommend founders to build their first version on intuition. The best way to design a solid UI & UX is not from scratch, rather from a foundational prototype or v1 that’s being used by actual users. We found that the best products we helped design (where the design significantly helped the business move forward) was where the foun…

thanks, this was a very helpful comment.

As an engineer-founder trying to build a first prototype app, i've been conscious about not diving into building too fast, trying to get some of the design right upfront. This has meant doing user-interviews to understand people's problems in the area i'm working on, and doing some paper prototypes.

I was debating what is the best form to get the next round of feedback: wireframe the whole flow in balsamiq, or a bare-bones working prototype with ReactNative. For the former, i'd have to learn the tool. The latter i somewhat know.

Re: How developers and tech founders can turn their ideas into UI design

#12

Post by massivecali »

tannerc wrote: post #4

This is a surprisingly good article. As a product designer of 10+ years (having worked at Facebook, Atlassian, and now Lyft), I would recommend anyone outside of the design field to read this. It provides a much crisper picture of what modern designers workflow looks like than other resources. Typically when these types of guidance are shared they're littered with more harmful advice than good. For example: "Look at…

"Look at what other apps are doing and copy it!" Agree that most of the time this is horrible direction, but I've also experienced the opposite: "We need something like X, but do Y." Where Y is reinventing the wheel for what should be a standard interface element (ie it's the best implementation on the market and ours would only be worse/confusing if we didn't try to do the same).

Re: How developers and tech founders can turn their ideas into UI design

#13

Post by tannerc »

massivecali wrote: post #12
tannerc wrote: post #4

This is a surprisingly good article. As a product designer of 10+ years (having worked at Facebook, Atlassian, and now Lyft), I would recommend anyone outside of the design field to read this. It provides a much crisper picture of what modern designers workflow looks like than other resources. Typically when these types of guidance are shared they're littered with more harmful advice than good. For example: "Look at…

"Look at what other apps are doing and copy it!" Agree that most of the time this is horrible direction, but I've also experienced the opposite: "We need something like X, but do Y." Where Y is reinventing the wheel for what should be a standard interface element (ie it's the best implementation on the market and ours would only be worse/confusing if we didn't try to do the same).

Utilizing existing patterns can be good for sure, especially if they're platform standards from the likes of Material or Apple's HIG.

But what makes leveraging those existing designs so effective isn't simply seeing and copying them (that'll do in a pinch, but ultimately may lead to misuse).

What makes standard patterns from platform sources so effective is that you don't have to wonder whether they'll meet your needs or not: they're already standard, customers will understand them, and if you're so inclined you can look behind them to better understand their rationale via material.io for example.

But, again, without understanding what you're copying you're likely to run into small problems. Such as: when should you use a modal dialog over a sheet? When should a button be hollow vs. filled? When to use radio buttons vs. checkboxes? Should a transition animate from the bottom, left, or right of the screen (and how do those each help the user orient themselves in the experience)?

Re: How developers and tech founders can turn their ideas into UI design

#14

Post by saagarjha »

dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #7

The article doesn’t mention that as a startup it makes sense to minimize novel, homegrown UI as much as possible. Unless, of course, that’s central to your product or is the product. In Pony [0]—an email service that delivers once a day—for example, I tried making the UI as familiar as possible, perhaps at risk of not making it exciting enough. I forget who said it—maybe it was the Eameses, maybe it was the Modernist…

> it makes sense to minimize novel, homegrown UI as much as possible

I believe this is true in most cases. Don't reimplement controls, unless you really know what you are doing, because you're probably going to do it wrong and break usability or accessibility or generally annoy people.

Re: How developers and tech founders can turn their ideas into UI design

#15

Post by saagarjha »

veryworried wrote: post #6

I would encourage developers to first build out their applications as a CLI. Then add just enough UI for the masses. But still release your CLI version. Ordering food or managing stocks on the command line is fantastic!

Or, as an extension of this, implement your core logic as a library that you can call from your {iOS, Android, etc.} app. If you're only targeting one platform, this makes it easy for you to add another one in the future.

Re: How developers and tech founders can turn their ideas into UI design

#16

Post by maxxxxx »

tannerc wrote: post #4

This is a surprisingly good article. As a product designer of 10+ years (having worked at Facebook, Atlassian, and now Lyft), I would recommend anyone outside of the design field to read this. It provides a much crisper picture of what modern designers workflow looks like than other resources. Typically when these types of guidance are shared they're littered with more harmful advice than good. For example: "Look at…

"Look at what other apps are doing and copy it!" doesn't work but "Look at what other apps are doing, understand it and see what you can copy or adapt" works really well.

Re: How developers and tech founders can turn their ideas into UI design

#17

Post by amelius »

tannerc wrote: post #4

This is a surprisingly good article. As a product designer of 10+ years (having worked at Facebook, Atlassian, and now Lyft), I would recommend anyone outside of the design field to read this. It provides a much crisper picture of what modern designers workflow looks like than other resources. Typically when these types of guidance are shared they're littered with more harmful advice than good. For example: "Look at…

> "Look at what other apps are doing and copy it!"

This is a bit ironic as the advertised tools provide templates which make all apps look and behave more or less the same.

Re: How developers and tech founders can turn their ideas into UI design

#18

Post by tannerc »

maxxxxx wrote: post #16
tannerc wrote: post #4

This is a surprisingly good article. As a product designer of 10+ years (having worked at Facebook, Atlassian, and now Lyft), I would recommend anyone outside of the design field to read this. It provides a much crisper picture of what modern designers workflow looks like than other resources. Typically when these types of guidance are shared they're littered with more harmful advice than good. For example: "Look at…

"Look at what other apps are doing and copy it!" doesn't work but "Look at what other apps are doing, understand it and see what you can copy or adapt" works really well.

Yes!

Re: How developers and tech founders can turn their ideas into UI design

#19

Post by KerryJones »

It seems like the most upvoted comments are coming from designers -- which feels problematic. It seems like the author has done a great job to capture a UX/UI designer's flow, but that doesn't mean it translates well for developers.

As a developer who has done this for many years, this is marginally helpful. I'm glad to know it, but I'll tell you that on my side projects I will not be nearly this extensive until later on, and likely pay for a designer for a few hundred before doing all this myself.

Re: How developers and tech founders can turn their ideas into UI design

#20

Post by tannerc »

amelius wrote: post #17
tannerc wrote: post #4

This is a surprisingly good article. As a product designer of 10+ years (having worked at Facebook, Atlassian, and now Lyft), I would recommend anyone outside of the design field to read this. It provides a much crisper picture of what modern designers workflow looks like than other resources. Typically when these types of guidance are shared they're littered with more harmful advice than good. For example: "Look at…

> "Look at what other apps are doing and copy it!" This is a bit ironic as the advertised tools provide templates which make all apps look and behave more or less the same.

You might find this article helpful: https://uxdesign.cc/ever-wonder-why-the-most-popular-apps-ar...
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