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

21–30 of 245 posts

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

#21

Post by AgentOrange1234 »

drBonkers wrote: post #18
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…

> Just as software developers often fall prey to "NIH" What does NIH abbreviate?

Not invented here, probably?

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

#22

Post by gdprrrr »

drBonkers wrote: post #18
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…

> Just as software developers often fall prey to "NIH" What does NIH abbreviate?

Not invented here

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

#23

Post by unsupp0rted »

drBonkers wrote: post #18
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…

> Just as software developers often fall prey to "NIH" What does NIH abbreviate?

Not invented here (I.e. if we didn’t make it then it’s either bad or bad for our use case).

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

#24

Post by csdvrx »

david422 wrote: post #16
csdvrx wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH, I'm using full screen apps without decorations, and I'm fighting with edge to forcefully remove all the scrollbars on every website automatically (I want 0 scrollbar unless I'm actively scrolling) different tastes for different people

> (I want 0 scrollbar unless I'm actively scrolling) How do you know when there is content to scroll then? You randomly scroll parts of the screen to see if they move?

> How do you know when there is content to scroll then? You randomly scroll parts of the screen to see if they move?

Sometimes, but more often I press on page down to read more content until there's no more content to read, so having scrollbar is pointless: it eats screen real estate without providing anything in return

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

#26

Post by samhuk »

moffkalast wrote: post #17
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"

It's also right there in the "common sense theory"

The line between "an advanced, niche concept" and "common sense" is very blurry. It's continuous, not discrete. What you think it common sense is probably not for a considerable proportion of other people.

Regarding the actual topic at hand though, I actually do agree with you (hence disagree with OP), since I do believe that mastering concepts like color theory and typography are indeed extremely low on the extensive priority list of things to master to create great UIs.

I've been building them, and convinced people to pay me quite handsomely for them, for quite a considerable amount of time, and never have I had to deep-dive into typography, color theory, or the like.

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

#27

Post by JusticeJuice »

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…

Design is a field where there's no clear 'correct' answer, in a vast sea of opinions. Honestly UI design is surprsingly tame compared to other areas of design (interior, architecture, typography etc). If there's a uni near you, try go to a design critique where work is presented and discussed - it's intense. Debating work is a big part of being a designer.

Strategies to deal with disagreements, frankly a big part of it is being comfortable disagreeing. If you want to get more into design, know they're going to happen, and that there's not a clear answer, and it's not personal. A good designer should know it's about the work and the idea not where or who it came from. Source: am a UI designer.

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

#30

Post by nobody9999 »

throwway120385 wrote: post #11
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…

I don't have any strategies, but I've had designers also want to add unnecessary steps to a gui-driven process. One designer kept arguing about the cognitive load of having a user simply insert their credit card into the reader to signal intent to pay. They wanted a flow where the user would touch the UI to indicate whether they wanted to tap or insert or scan a coupon. There was no reason to do it that way. I don't…

>It's not like we were inventing an entirely new system. The designer just wanted to make the work more than it was.

Which is a good reason why fixed-price contracts make more sense in this context than a time and materials contract.

How does the old saw[0] go again?

   It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When
   His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It
[0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/

Edit: Fixed formatting.

Post reply on HN