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Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer

refactoringui.com

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

#181

Post by pazimzadeh »

gregbander wrote: post #122
Uehreka wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 like most words has a definition that’s generic so it can be applied as needed. There is no immutable rule when to use it. The cone of shame my dog has right now “looks cool”; very sleek and streamline for a disposable thing, the designer surely was paid a premium, but the fasteners mechanics were poorly designed; vet tech said even she struggles with them and she puts them on dogs all week. Design is how it l…

"We talk about design often. At some point during any human lifetime, they will use the word design, and that's a big deal. Aside from 'the' and the 'a' and the 'an' in various languages, design is the fourth most popular word used. Before design was constructed we had the Mesopotamian era, and we all know how that was." -Reggie Watts, 2011

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABm7DuBwJd8

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

#182

Post by sizzle »

threatofrain wrote: post #115
Uehreka wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

This is the first time I’ve seen someone on HN argue against usability in favor of aesthetics the form vs function design debate.

There is so much to say on the topic, books have been written arguing at length even. I would never argue for worse UX if I had a choice, there should be a baseline “good” visual design, but poor UX can and will sink your product in most metrics that matter in the business world.

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

#183

Post by jbigelow76 »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #150
pedalpete wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In B2C aesthetics are important. In B2B it's usually ease and speed of operation that's more important

In B2B it's usually ease and speed of operation that's more important

SAP (everything), Workday (HR), Service Now (help desk), Archer (compliance), SailPoint (compliance), and other applications that have been inflicted on my miserable existence over the last 25 years of corporate IT; all B2B enterprise applications that I guarantee did not consider either speed or ease of use to be remotely important.

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

#184

Post by marcosdumay »

illiarian wrote: post #74
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…

> 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…

Well, this one is non-obvious:

> Label text should be placed within the bounds of the text field box

And I'm perfectly fine with Google spending unreasonable amounts of their money so I can learn lightly-valuable facts like this... As long as people don't mass adopt their findings before they get repeated.

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

#185

Post by Razengan »

falcolas wrote: post #131
threatofrain wrote: post #115

Earlier 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.

> Or, in business terms, beauty has terrible ROI.

Must be a complete and unfortunate coincidence then, that the richest tech company on the frickin planet rose to that prominence through "beauty", at least as their critics still like to call out.

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

#187

Post by Razengan »

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…

> the button literally just says "Tap to..."

*taps button*

*Satan appears and claims my soul along with all my firstborns*

It's good to have a little mystery and excitement in life!

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

#188

Post by waldothedog »

tmtvl wrote: post #116
waldothedog wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would “immediately” signify the ability to be clicked? And to whom would this sign have such a meaning?

Styling to make it look like a button which is jutting out would signify the option for interaction to anyone who's ever seen a device with physical buttons, like a keyboard, smartphone, television, remote control,...

Doesn’t this discount the nature of the medium?

The option for interaction is inherent. Everything on a screen can be clicked.

The language, iconography, and visual treatment combine to differentiate certain items and establish an expectation in the event of a click.

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

#189

Post by somat »

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…

Conversely, A lot of time something looks good "because" it works well.

I had one old structural engineer spend a great deal of time trying to convince me that beautiful bridges were stronger than than ugly bridges. because our ideas of beauty are so tied to what works well. I am not entirely convinced, I have seen the sins some of these so called designers do in the name of "looking good" but I do see his point.

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

#190

Post by kyleyeats »

chankstein38 wrote: post #93
kyleyeats wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote an app that does this, and yeah, basically. In my experience it's really hard to get it to to stop writing CSS.

That's definitely a struggle I've had with GPT overall haha "Please just stop I don't need 4 paragraphs on that I wanted a sentence"

It's weird what works. Eventually I asked it for just the body element in its response which categorically fixed the problem. I wish we could presence-penalty single tokens so it wasn't all so abstract.

My results if you're curious: http://camarkup.com

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