Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer

refactoringui.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 245 posts

Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer

#161

Post by falcolas »

pedalpete wrote: post #147
falcolas wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, fuck that. Beauty matters the first time you use it, whereas functionality matters every single time. Or, in business terms, beauty has terrible ROI.

Where do you get the idea beauty has terrible ROI? Look at almost any premium product and the premium that is being paid for is in the beauty. Rarely is it in the actual quality of the product.

If you’re selling a premium produce, then beauty can be justified by the premium price. But us should never be more important than the functionality. Never.

Even a Rolls Royce is a vehicle (and a damned fine one to boot) before it’s an art piece.

Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer

#162

Post by falcolas »

albertop wrote: post #148
falcolas wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, fuck that. Beauty matters the first time you use it, whereas functionality matters every single time. Or, in business terms, beauty has terrible ROI.

Tell it to Apple.

Apple devices are functional. I’m using one right now. I’ll be able to use it for the next 2-3 years, at least.

Beautiful, not in the least. Thanks to the cameras (a functional feature) I need to have a fugly case wrapping the entire thing.

Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer

#163

Post by falcolas »

j_crick wrote: post #154
falcolas wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, fuck that. Beauty matters the first time you use it, whereas functionality matters every single time. Or, in business terms, beauty has terrible ROI.

I wish more businesses would treat beauty as a function of a product just like all other “actual” functions of it, a valid part of the whole package. I know it won’t probably happen anytime soon, because “ROI when???”, just been thinking about it a lot after reading Beauty by Sagmeister and Walsh.

How much of a premium are you, as a customer, willing to pay for the beauty? How much functionality will you give up for the shinies?

Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer

#164

Post by userbinator »

izacus wrote: post #43
clumsysmurf wrote: post #7

Often the bad designs come from the designers themselves. Just as software developers often fall prey to "NIH", many designers feel the established design systems like Material are insufficient for some reason. That is OK, if you know the rules you can break them, but often they don't know the rules either (grid system, typography, color for accessibility) and want to make "their own mark" with some new creation that…

Honestly, I'd just once like to work with a designer that has heard of words longer than 5 letters. Every. Single. Darn. Design I get completely ignores the fact that the texts inside them won't be built from nice little short words with EXACTLY the correct letter counts (especially when localized). Which results in shit UIs like one I've just seen on Android where (in my language) the button literally just says "Tap…

I've seen many cases of the opposite, where despite plenty of room, text is inexplicably truncated to leave a huge amount of whitespace instead.

Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer

#165

Post by tshaddox »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #153
albertop wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell it to Apple.

No disrespect to you or Apple, but Apple is an outlier. If everything was like Apple then it wouldn't be Apple.

Are they really an outlier, or just the best at what they're trying to do? I mean I guess you could always say that the best is an outlier since only one can be the best.

Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer

#166

Post by tshaddox »

Uehreka wrote: post #109
pazimzadeh wrote: post #49

Design is how it works, not how it looks. This article seems to mainly be talking about the "polish" of a design. There are more important principles which don't have anything to do with polish, such as not putting the Cancel button next to the Ok button. More like this: https://lawsofux.com https://asktog.com/atc/principles-of-interaction-design/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles I recommend prototyping the flow/feel…

> Design is how it works, not how it looks. After over a decade of people jumping into these discussions with this line, I’ve gotta push back: Design is also how things look, and how things look can be important. Consumers care about how things look. If we dismiss presentation and drive people towards UX stuff every time it comes up, then the people we talk to are going to end up having good ideas that no one buys be…

> > Design is how it works, not how it looks.

> I’ve gotta push back: Design is also how things look

To synthesize these two comments: How it looks is a huge part of how it works.

Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer

#167

Post by blululu »

albertop wrote: post #148
falcolas wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, fuck that. Beauty matters the first time you use it, whereas functionality matters every single time. Or, in business terms, beauty has terrible ROI.

Tell it to Apple.

In all of this it's a matter of scale. Products with 100 million users can amortize the costs over a much larger number of deployments. Even the smallest details become valuable at that point. Conversely, at a certain level of deployment, usability is not worth the time investment. Machine Learning researchers can frequently get away with a loose collection of Python scripts with a basic set of instructions that probably worked on their local setup.

Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer

#168

Post by falcolas »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #149
falcolas wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, fuck that. Beauty matters the first time you use it, whereas functionality matters every single time. Or, in business terms, beauty has terrible ROI.

This reminds me of expert systems where use is so intense that discoverability is trumped by speed of input. Old DOS/ASCII based retail systems were often optimized for speed.

The data entry speed on an old fashioned cash register, compared to a modern pos of a pos is insane.

It feels like a variation of learned helplessness, watching someone fumble with a Stripe terminal.

Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer

#169

Post by wpm »

Rodeoclash wrote: post #142
kungfufrog wrote: post #136

I must be a philistine because with the primary example used on the landing page I actually prefer the bordered version. It seems clearer/cleaner to me. Maybe it's a vestige of growing up in the 90's writing Access applications on the side for dosh when I was a teenager?

I thought the same thing. As ugly as all those "WinForms"-esque 90s applications were, they presented dense amounts of information in a usable way, provided you had time to learn the application.

And the time it took was probably shorter, since you could just poke around menus full of text that says what the damn thing does, that might open modals or dialog boxes full of buttons that do what they say on the damn button, and icons that gasp, might have had text labels indicating what they do! You could hop in and if your task was reasonably simple, just hop the menus and click on stuff and see if it was what you needed.

But no, here's a smear of low contrast grey with some tiny, grey, unlabeled hieroglyphics for buttons/icons, isn't it nice? It's so clean! So pretty! So lacking in discoverability!

Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer

#170

Post by wizofaus »

wizofaus wrote: post #84
patternMachine wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The contrast ratio for the body text is 7.57:1 (or 7.25:1 if the text is on the light grey background), which meets AAA accessibility standards (which is 7:1).

Body text isn't the issue I would think - it's various headers, downvoted and especially "dead" posts which are almost to read without selecting the text, even with perfect colour vision.

(oops, missing word 'impossible' after 'almost' there)
Post reply on HN