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LiftKit – UI where "everything derives from the golden ratio"

chainlift.io

101–110 of 160 posts

Re: LiftKit – UI where "everything derives from the golden ratio"

#101
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your criticism of design dogma - it drives me nuts too - people saying something bad is good because it follows the rules . But since I'm also responsible for the Android icon shape-change you talked about, let me waffle for a bit in case it helps provide a perspective on the other side of that decision: I agree with that the non-uniform icons are easier to find, and that uniform shapes make it harder (I…

Thank you for sharing, this was very insightful. Do you have another example of something like this that your team had to deal with that was not as easy, but "looked easier" for the users?

Replacing the Android home buttons with the swipe up gesture. It was demonstrably a very clear usability and efficiency loss, but most people strongly preferred it.

Before we had that latter data I actually argued against attempting it - I figured having a clear usability win vs iPhone would be an area we could capitalize on, and didn't believe we'd be able to execute the swipe system well in the time we had (I'd rather be behind and robust than leading edge and flaky), but doing it was definitely the right call - felt pretty sheepish about that one for a few years. The eng and ux teams that pulled it off were next level.

Re: LiftKit – UI where "everything derives from the golden ratio"

#102
> In LiftKit, everything derives from the golden ratio, from margins to font size to border radius and beyond. Everything renders in perfect proportion to everything else, creating a unique sense of harmony you can’t get anywhere else.

Not sure if this is irony or not.

Re: LiftKit – UI where "everything derives from the golden ratio"

#103

> In LiftKit, everything derives from the golden ratio, from margins to font size to border radius and beyond. Everything renders in perfect proportion to everything else, creating a unique sense of harmony you can’t get anywhere else. Not sure if this is irony or not.

I’m not sure, the moment I opened the page there was something unusually satisfying about the buttons (that had bothered me about shadcn), so I guess there is some method to the madness.

Re: LiftKit – UI where "everything derives from the golden ratio"

#104
post #16

Here's a tip: any time you've got before/after screen grabs, don't do this thing where you've got to drag a line to switch between the two, don't have a fade, don't have a sliding transition, or anything like that. Just have it display one, then have a single button that you click to have it immediately display the other. Then when you click the button again, it goes back to displaying the first one again. Click, cli…

I agree, the x-axis labels are not helpful! Thankfully, the first example is “buttons with corrected icon spacing”, and the image on the right looks much better than the one on the left (a bigger difference in quality than in the other two examples), which is visible when the slider is on the left. Suggestion to devs: put the label “material-style” in the lower left of its image and “liftkit” in the lower right of it…

> the first example is “buttons with corrected icon spacing”, and the image on the right looks much better than the one on the left

For me the better image appears on the left.

The left image has the icon in the centre of the radius and the right image has it in a random place.

Re: LiftKit – UI where "everything derives from the golden ratio"

#105
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your criticism of design dogma - it drives me nuts too - people saying something bad is good because it follows the rules . But since I'm also responsible for the Android icon shape-change you talked about, let me waffle for a bit in case it helps provide a perspective on the other side of that decision: I agree with that the non-uniform icons are easier to find, and that uniform shapes make it harder (I…

Thank you for sharing, this was very insightful. Do you have another example of something like this that your team had to deal with that was not as easy, but "looked easier" for the users?

There's loads of this in the UX space. To overly simplify, people's brains use expected ideas about what things are like, in order to interact with the world. We build models as to what things are like, and then things that look like what we expect, we over-weight to stating as things that we understand.

So when people are presented with something which is visually appealing, we think it's easy to use, even when it isn't. And people will then default to blaming themselves, not the pretty, elegant thing, because clearly the pretty elegant thing isn't the issue.

We call this the aesthetic-usability effect. Perception of the expected experience, and attribution of the actual experience, is more important part than the actual experience.

It's one of the many ways in which engineers, economists and analysts (in my experience) tend to run in to issues. They want people to behave rationally, based on their KPIs, not as people actually experience and interact with the world.

There's all sorts of research that then comes off this, like people enjoying wine they've been told is more expensive, over wine they've been told is cheaper, and the physiological response as measured with an MRI confirms their reported divergence in experience, despite that the wines are the same, as one quick example.

Low contextuality evaluations (my term for where you ask someone to state things about something where they lack enough experience with enough breadth and depth to answer reliably) are always wonky. People can't comment on wine, because they don't know enough about wine, so they seek other clues to tell them about what they're experiencing. Similarly, people don't know about things that are new to them (by default) or that look different to what they expect, so their experience is always reported as being worse than it probably actually is, because their brain doesn't like expending energy learning about something new. They'd rather something they understood. It's where contextualisation and mimicry come in really useful from a design of experience standpoint.

Re: LiftKit – UI where "everything derives from the golden ratio"

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for sharing, this was very insightful. Do you have another example of something like this that your team had to deal with that was not as easy, but "looked easier" for the users?

Replacing the Android home buttons with the swipe up gesture. It was demonstrably a very clear usability and efficiency loss, but most people strongly preferred it. Before we had that latter data I actually argued against attempting it - I figured having a clear usability win vs iPhone would be an area we could capitalize on, and didn't believe we'd be able to execute the swipe system well in the time we had (I'd rat…

People's actual measured experience, vs people's experience of the experience, are rarely the same things, when they have prior knowledge of one thing, and low knowledge of the alternative. They prefer the thing they know, even when it's worse.

Re: LiftKit – UI where "everything derives from the golden ratio"

#109
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I've already ported in all the radix primitives. I actually found out about Base literally the exact day I finished it. Then I saw shadcn just upgraded to Base. So it looks like shad once again proves the gary oak in the completely one-sided rivalry that lives entirely in my own head. except instead of Ash I'm like youngster joey with a copilot subscription

> So it looks like shad once again proves the gary oak Shad did this way late AFTER everyone said Radix was unmaintained though. Quite a few of the original Radix devs moved to work on Base.

[deleted]

Re: LiftKit – UI where "everything derives from the golden ratio"

#110
post #70

When we designed Chrome, since minimalism was our thing and screens used to be small, A LOT of time was spent on the total vertical space - thin titlebar, slightly bigger tabstrip, and a large toolbar. Lots of discussion, lots of questions Telling people the height ratios between them followed the golden ratio was a very convenient way to shortcut the bikeshedding and get to "aha, very nice" The trick was it didn't f…

My favorite genre of graphic design is when you take a logo and work backwards to show the "very deeply thought about" construction, completely made up after the fact. The golden ratio is useful in that with a bit of fiddling you can fit pretty much anything to it. This is like catnip for "spiritual" types.
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