Seeing as this is just an ad does anyone have a link to the free chapters at least?
Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
171–180 of 245 posts
Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd also note that despite Jakob Nielsen's prominence nobody designs like he suggests. We should be open to the idea that beauty and delight may be more important than usability or features.
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.
Feel free to tease apart beauty and functionality to a roomful of engineers. I'm always up for the debate because everyone has their own perspective and it's usually interesting.
Everything has terrible ROI if you don't understand the "I" and aren't tracking the "R".
Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
For a site about UX, you'd think https://lawsofux.com would have picked a better url. O_o
evokes memories of "expertSexChange.com -- err, I mean, ExpertsExchange.com" back in the day.
ESC/EE eventually moved to a new domain with a hyphen. I wonder if Pen Island ever did?
Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
#174Often 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 always tell ppl to test their designs with German content. Usually the longest words, generally speaking, which breaks a very high % of "first passes" on designs.
Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
> many designers feel the established design systems like Material are insufficient for some reason Because Material is awful? In their original iteration they had to do a study with 600 people to find out that text inputs should look like text inputs https://medium.com/google-design/the-evolution-of-material-d... Their latest abomination has almost nothing aligned optically: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/16436…
On that note: you can't even imagine how bad Material UI is https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1645797661684170754?s=... and https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1643613144143519744?s=...
Yo I thought those tweets might be from a few years ago and "they must have resolved those by now"... no, the tweets are literally from TODAY and SIX DAYS AGO. What the hell?! Sad times...
Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
#176I'm not taking any design advice from someone who puts horizontal scrollbars in their sales pitch website.
Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
#177If you want to design high quality UIs, read this book (Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines)[0] and ingest the concepts it explains. Even though it's not 100% applicable to a brand new software product, it may as well be -- most of the principles are totally applicable, and if you grasp the concepts from this book you will hopefully understand how to design a clearly-understandable user interface.
[0] https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/573097 (click "PDF")
Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They're the best at what they aim to do. Again, if everyone did it or they were less unique then it would be less exceptional.
The point is, it's hard and rare to get into such a position. Yes, eventually there will be a new Apple, but not yet. So anyone *today* looking to perform well should probably be more practical.
Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
These are two separate questions.
> How much of a premium are you, as a customer, willing to pay for the beauty?
Depends on the category of goods, but if I can afford it then I will probably choose something aesthetically pleasing to me most of the time. I can easily get by with an ugly screwdriver if it works well, but I would not like wearing bad-looking shoes.
Generally if I use something often, be it tools, clothes, guitars, utensils and whatnot, I try to find something appealing to my eye. Some people seemingly don’t care much about that, but it just so happens that I do. Paying a premium for the beauty relieves me from being very irritated about something I might not like.
Also, in my opinion, aesthetics, ergonomics and beauty sometimes all are side products of working hard on one of them. Beauty in tools and architecture and interfaces is not to be discarded since it makes our life more pleasing and tolerable. We could live in the holes in the ground, you know, if pure application of things to their intended purpose was all that mattered to us.
> How much functionality will you give up for the shinies?
I’m not sure something has to be given up at all, that’s the point.
Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
#180Design 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…
Form and function. The intersection is the qualitative property of subjective taste, an intelligence quality of designers who must balance engineering with art.