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Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces

weberdominik.com

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Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces

#121

Post by enraged_camel »

>> It takes an immense amount of effort to implement the functionality of a component library and make sure all components work well together, from a design (colors, sizes, etc.) and behavior (animations, states like disabled, etc.) perspective.

>> It’s best to build on top of a good component library, and not develop your own.

This, so much this. Suffering greatly at work right now because my predecessor decided to go with ShadCN as opposed to using a full-blown, fully-featured component library. Their reasoning: it's better to have "lego blocks" with which we can build our own components because that would give us full control.

Yeah, no. In 99% of cases, you ain't gonna need that level of granularity. Just take something that exists and tweak it until it looks the way you want.

Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces

#122

Post by skydhash »

2d8a875f-39a2-4 wrote: post #94

>> ...summarize these rules into one sentence, it’d be: >> Prefer global UI consistency over local optimizations. I weep for our field, because this should be true beyond the confines of each app. Instead even on the desktop we have hoards of local "optimisations" - one in each bloated Electron POS. There's a place for novelty UI - entertainment. Productivity should have no place for it.

I think the only place left for consistency are Emacs, TUI (but 256 colors and 24 bit enthusiasts are encroaching that), desktop environments like GNOME and KDE.

The most sensible approach is one by mpv. Ship the core logic of your app in a bundle/library. And everyone can build the environment specific UI for that.

Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces

#123

Post by skydhash »

KronisLV wrote: post #89

> Now I’m in a different camp. I use the components the library provides as much as possible, even if they don’t fit perfectly, even if I’d like to have something different. This makes the UI consistent across all pages and elements. I've seen a lot of developers feel like they have to write their own components as much as necessary and the results are very, very often underwhelming, especially when they have a bunch…

That's what I do today for small apps. Grab bulma and add just a sprinkle of CSS on top, mostly page specific spacing. Bootstrap, Foundation,... would just work as well.

Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces

#124

Post by eviks »

lsaferite wrote: post #120
eviks wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or if there is another way Of course there is a much better way for all your troubles! Window move: hold a modifier and click&drag anywhere in the window area instead of wasting time precision hunting the titlebar. Window resize: same, use a big 30%-window-width area close to the border instead of hunting for those few pixels of an actual resizable border Horizontal scroll (though strange, Win 11 explorer has horiz…

Your suggestions highlight what I hate about the new Android gestures interface. You have to know those patterns in advance and remember them. They aren't visually apparent like scroll bars, drag handles, titles bars, and window frames. I am quite versed in keyboard shortcuts, but keeping *all* of them in my head gets a bit much sometimes. When I forget one, rediscovering it is a serious PITA. The rediscovery (or ini…

Oh, sure, those are indeed major fails in all of the OSes - no guides and no easy way to find anything about fundamental operations (it should be easier than googling).

But these are separate issues. For example, even with the scrollbars there can be a change between two behaviors: click on the empty bar jumps to that % or jumps by 1 page. And one can be a click and another a Shift-Click - where in the OS would you discover that??? And the scrollbar width - can only find a registry hack to restore that from some tech article/blog post/ etc, nothing in that waste of the Win 11 Settings app.

Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces

#126

Post by whitepoplar »

keyle wrote: post #17

As a designer first turned developers in the early 2000, I beg of you to learn the gestalt. Frameworks, languages, computers, come and go, but the human body doesn't change and the knowledge I have in design, I carry every day and have barely changed over the years. Sure there are new patterns now... "hamburger buttons" and swiping, but the logic remains the same. Human's don't change quickly. They discover things th…

Can you recommend some good books on how to learn these things?

Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces

#127

Post by eviks »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #69
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I understand that cost benefit of having just one implementation for mobile and desktop. But it is still annoying. Of course it's annoying. When desktop software is using mobile UI, that's the result of a deliberate choice to make the software worse (something you care very much about as it affects you) in order to save the company money (something you don't care about). It would be weird if you weren't annoyed by…

> blatant disrespect Let's stop pretending that "companies" could just do things better at no extra cost. I prefer a desktop UI on a desktop, but I also prefer paying less for software I use, and halving the UI development costs to enable that is a pretty sensible tradeoff.

Yes they can (tm)!

Consider the latest UI disaster - Apple with liquid glass making stuff worse in the most fundamental way - decreasing readability. Doing worse was extra cost, so yeah, in many cases companies can just do things better by not wasting the design money and spending part of it on actual design improvements. No need to bring up the myth of the huge 50% savings when using a single menu everywhere, there is no way it costs that much (neither does having different padding values per platform)!

Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces

#128

Post by 64d032fe »

keyle wrote: post #17

As a designer first turned developers in the early 2000, I beg of you to learn the gestalt. Frameworks, languages, computers, come and go, but the human body doesn't change and the knowledge I have in design, I carry every day and have barely changed over the years. Sure there are new patterns now... "hamburger buttons" and swiping, but the logic remains the same. Human's don't change quickly. They discover things th…

"This system is about achieving the best possible design with the least amount of effort. There’s no need to know about the psychological impact of colors, which fonts are best for which purpose, golden ratios, etc."

Translation: I don't need to know why I am doing anything but hey, it looks okay to my eye, and I didn't spend a lot of effort on it. Now I have more time to write a blog post about it that mostly advertises my app.

Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces

#129

Post by KolibriFly »

keyle wrote: post #17

As a designer first turned developers in the early 2000, I beg of you to learn the gestalt. Frameworks, languages, computers, come and go, but the human body doesn't change and the knowledge I have in design, I carry every day and have barely changed over the years. Sure there are new patterns now... "hamburger buttons" and swiping, but the logic remains the same. Human's don't change quickly. They discover things th…

Might be time for me to finally re-read The Design of Everyday Things

Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces

#130

Post by KolibriFly »

VerifiedReports wrote: post #5

Saw a lot of words here. Not a lot of examples. "Dark mode was one of the most requested features for Lighthouse. I refrained a long time from adding it because it adds additional work to every UI task." This reveals a lot about the regression in OSes. Way back in the early '90s, Windows provided a color-scheme editor. Users could set up any color scheme they liked, and all properly-written apps would inherit it and…

Feels like we traded decades of OS-level consistency for a bunch of isolated design fiefdoms
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