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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

#191

Post by xboxnolifes »

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.

Alternatively, functionally doesn't matter if you miss a sale due to someone not liking the design. The first time someone uses/sees something is the most important time for them to like it.

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

#192

Post by plaguepilled »

A lot of the examples on their front page I flat out disagree with, both because I hate the aesthetics, and because it represents user experience issues that I or my peers have frequently run up against.

For example, borders: I would argue the "more borders" example has it the wrong way around. For users with poor "computer familiarity" (e.g. elderly) the difference in tone isn't always as obvious as it might be to others as their eyesight is already poor. The use of borders then allows a clearer division of shapes without having to commit to a fully high-contrast solution.

(also the no borders version looks very silly, but that's just my taste)

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

#193

Post by paulryanrogers »

jbigelow76 wrote: post #183
paulryanrogers wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your pain only proves my point. You know it is supposed to be better, regardless of how it looks. There are outliers who neglect the end users, usually because they are too big or well connected to be replaced.

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

#194

Post by samsolomon »

petilon wrote: post #66
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. No, it is not. If you're Steve Jobs then yes, but otherwise how it looks and how it works are usually two different job functions. People who are good at visual design are not usually knowledgeable enough to do functional design, and people who are good at functional design are not necessarily good at visual design.

Any product designer is expected to be knowledgeable about both visuals and ux. There are huge benefits to having people on the product team that can research, assess and design solutions.

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

#195

Post by eviks »

patternMachine wrote: post #58
eviks wrote: post #13

> [design courses] focus so much on high level principles like color theory and typography which, while important, never helped me make instant improvements Strange, making the very low contrast text more visible on this site is an instant improvement, and it's right there in the "color theory"

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).

Why would I care about that standard? I have my own eyes, I also see a lot of other examples of text that don't race to the standard bottom

Also, you've miss the elephant at the top of the page

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

#196

Post by jamsauceismad »

In my experience, the worst designers I've ever worked with are the ones who tend to be more artsy and care more about aesthetics than functionality/usability.

Usable is wikipedia, old reddit, etc. Modern design generally sucks as everything is not information dense and involves a ton of navigation to find what you want to do.

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

#197

Post by yawnxyz »

d--b wrote: post #186

For those who missed it back in the day (this is from 2018): the guys who wrote this later created the Tailwind css library. The book/website is one of the major reason why Tailwind was so successful.

right, this book is really old now.... this book came out in 2018, so shouldn't there be a 2018 tag?

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

#198

Post by jbigelow76 »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #193
jbigelow76 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your pain only proves my point. You know it is supposed to be better, regardless of how it looks. There are outliers who neglect the end users, usually because they are too big or well connected to be replaced.

I don't know if it actually does, maybe in theory, we would assume these companies would be incentivized to optimize for speed and experience but you can't use "the exception that proves the rule" when the majority would fall into the exception category. There have been countless diatribes about how in B2B the purchaser is not the user, so speed, user experience, and functionality are all at best second order priorities. The apps I name checked above all probably provide the base level required amount of functionality that covers the needs of a lot of large privately held and all publicly held US companies, they are looking for the corp equivalent of Wal-Mart shoppers not Nordstrom shoppers (this dove tails into penny wise/pound foolish quarterly earning mindset, corporate America is dumb AF.)

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

#199

Post by sapling-ginger »

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…

> When there are 5 elements, they follow 5 different guidelines:

Pixel-perfect alignment is not a hard rule. It's only for a list of homogenous items would they need to be aligned perfectly.

But when the elements are heterogenous, as the screenshot in your link refers to, the human brain does weird thing to what we see, and alignment has to be adjusted for it to "look right".

This is particularly well-known in font design, with things like variable ascender height, cap height, and kerning.

https://fonts.google.com/knowledge/glossary/cap_height

>Note that due to optical illusion, round and pointed capitals (for instance the O and A) will extend a little above the cap height to make them appear as tall as the flat-topped capitals.

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

#200

Post by [deleted] »

asoneth wrote: post #53

Most products don't need a whole book: 1) Use a mature, well-designed GUI framework. Especially if you don't have a designer it's unlikely that novel interactions or an unusual visual design will be a key selling point for your product. 2) Find a half-dozen folks from your target user audience or proxies who are as similar as possible. Give them a task to do with your product/prototype while you watch. Let them talk…

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