161–170 of 183 posts
E.g. making a bad looking Qt App takes a lot of effort. If you use the things everyone else is using, the same frameworks, the same layouts and standard components, then users will be immediately familiar and know how your interface works. No, you aren't special, no you do not need to reinvent UX with your SaaS product.
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He did - "the design of everyday things" is a book that has been around for decades and is still the best introduction to these. The book doesn't cover computers at all. Though I warn you, I read it 30 years ago and I still cannot enter a kitchen without cursing how bad the stove is.
From reading the original comment, it is not apparent that "the design of everyday things" refers to a book with that title. When I read the comment the first time, I didn't understand it. Communicating through writing is hard. Just as designing something that can be easily understood is hard.
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…
Most of the world consists of dark objects against a light field. Written letters made with a pen were dark on light for a couple of thousand years. Your scheme is the inverse one.
You can find PDF versions of the old Apple HIG online; I just found a GitHub repo that has them:
https://github.com/gingerbeardman/apple-human-interface-guid...
It was a design movement, with zealots and influencers.
Was comparable to Jeffrey Zeldman's "Design with Web Standards".
The books go into reasons for the design decisions they made.
As such, it's still worth reading, more concrete than Norman's "Design of Everyday Things".
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…
Most of the world consists of dark objects against a light field. Written letters made with a pen were dark on light for a couple of thousand years. Your scheme is the inverse one.
Computer makers and users referred to black text on a white background as inverse video. The Atari 8-bits even had a key to toggle between normal and inverse characters when typing (the Atari-logo key). It's even described in the manual: https://www.atarimania.com/documents/atari-800-computer-owne... To quote the manual: "Inverse video is text being shown in dark letters against a light background."
Then came the "desktop publishing" craze and some attempts to make video screens an analogy for a piece of paper. This fails because paper does not EMIT light. Nor is reading black text off the surface of a glaring light bulb all day a good way to work. Useful for previewing printed output? OK. For all work on a computer? Not so much.
And yet, perhaps in an effort to be "different" from character-based systems, GUIs migrated to inverse color schemes as their default (except for Apple's, which was always inverse and offered no color-scheme management... and still doesn't). Throughout all of this and into the current day, applications that focus on art, photography, and video & visual effects have implemented a so-called "dark" UI. That's not coincidence.
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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I love "The Design Of Everyday Things", the book doesn't talk much about computer UI, yet the 7 design principles it introduces allow to make much more informed design decisions, where design is not just the matter of taste and aesthetic, but of achieving well-specified goals. For example, if the user has no way to figure out what a button in the UI does, and needs to click the button to check it, and even then can't…
Norman doors are still the bane of me.
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Most of the world consists of dark objects against a light field. Written letters made with a pen were dark on light for a couple of thousand years. Your scheme is the inverse one.
No, it isn't. You need to go back and look at the history of modern computers, especially personal ones. The standard color scheme was light text on a dark background. Many used white text on a dark-blue background, because it was deemed the most legible. Even after Windows dominated, Word had a checkbox in its settings labeled simply, "Blue background, white text." That setting existed well into the 2000s, and it ma…
> white text on a dark-blue background, because it was deemed the most legible.
Was that really the reason, though? Where did they get that idea? I see variety in the 8-bit computers. Many booted into white or green on black, such as the Commodore PET, but the Commodore Vic-20 was blue on white. The ZX81 was black on white, the Amstrad CPC (Color Personal Computer) was green on blue.
I remember that green-screen word processors were sold as reducing eye strain, when really the reason was that green and amber phosphors were cheaper. That's incidental to the inverse video question, but it throws some doubt on the idea that it was more legible. There may have been some technical motivation.
What are you talking about in the final sentence? Photoshop, for instance, didn't have a dark UI, and as you observe, desktop publishing imitated paper, and art programs would fit into that.
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…
The problem with designers is I have to google words like "gestalt" and perform some sort of sacred incantation to "learn" it, all while forcing my eyes to roll back forward. Who can afford to think like this though? FAANGS? Every designer I've worked with loosely knows some design theory that is impossible to question beyond a quick "hmm maybe a few more pixels on the padding?" and is largely a pixel pusher due to p…
> I can't name a single well-designed app off the top of my head
Which wouldn't be a surprise to anybody who actually cares about good design. Precisely because a really well designed product should just help you do whatever is it needed to help you do, and be all most invisible in doing it. It just worked however you expected it to so well you barely even give it a passing thought. It was unobtrusive. It was as little design as possible. I was not trying to wow you by the fact it's one of the million good-looking apps you've seen.
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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 d…