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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

#201

Post by illiarian »

marcosdumay wrote: post #184
illiarian wrote: post #74

Earlier 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…

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.

This one, I think, is them just not willing to admit their mistake. I wouldn't be surprised if the experiment went like this: "Here are the inputs with only underline. In one of them the label is inside the input". In this case sure, users will better understand it's an input if the label is inside.

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

#202

Post by esafak »

petilon wrote: post #112
doctor_eval wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs said, "In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service." Design is not just one thing or another. It happens at each layer. From decidin…

> Design is not just one thing or another. It happens at each layer. I think we are in agreement. "How it works" is design. "How it looks" is also design. Sometimes, but not usually, one person may be able to do both types of design.

UX vs UI

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

#203

Post by illiarian »

esafak wrote: post #202
petilon wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Design is not just one thing or another. It happens at each layer. I think we are in agreement. "How it works" is design. "How it looks" is also design. Sometimes, but not usually, one person may be able to do both types of design.

UX vs UI

I wish that whoever made this "distinction" never made it. Because now people just blindly repeat this, and it makes no sense.

UI (user interface) is a part of UX (user *experience).

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

#204

Post by esafak »

illiarian wrote: post #203
esafak wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UX vs UI

I wish that whoever made this "distinction" never made it. Because now people just blindly repeat this, and it makes no sense . UI (user interface) is a part of UX (user *experience).

UX often involves research and customer interaction. UI is more straight up visual design, informed by the UX research. The same person might not do both. Do you think they should?

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

#205

Post by illiarian »

esafak wrote: post #204
illiarian wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish that whoever made this "distinction" never made it. Because now people just blindly repeat this, and it makes no sense . UI (user interface) is a part of UX (user *experience).

UX often involves research and customer interaction. UI is more straight up visual design, informed by the UX research. The same person might not do both. Do you think they should?

Yes. Yes, they should. A person who does UI and doesn't have first-hand experience on what customers want and do is not a UI designer. That person is a dribbble illustrator.

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

#206

Post by pixelfarmer »

layer8 wrote: post #64
patternMachine wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I can tell you that it still looks rather low-contrast and makes it harder to read for me.

This is also in part because of human perception, i.e. it wouldn't be as bad if the rest of the page had the same level of gray for the text. Because it is not the case the darker parts suck your focus in. If you want people to actually read your text, that is a pretty stupid move and just shows how serious you can take all that spam on this page.

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

#207

Post by pixelfarmer »

samhuk wrote: post #26
moffkalast wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 extensiv…

Well, color theory is a vast topic, especially when it comes to color reproduction and so on, but for UI design this is of lesser concern. However, basic stuff like the color wheel, complementary colors, perception of colors in terms of perceived contrast, "signaling" colors, knowledge of optical illusions etc. is pretty much 101 knowledge of anyone who wants to create really good designs. There are many traps you can fall into if you ignore this kind of knowledge. This goes even further with the entire field of cognitive psychology dealing with such things.

Typography also plays parts in human facing design, like being able to discern I and l and other such things. You may get by without all that, but I have seen too many cases of broken stuff, and that website from the OP is a big mess, pretty much counterexample of what I call "good design".

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

#208

Post by TuringTest »

tshaddox wrote: post #166
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 is how it works, not how it looks. > I’ve gotta push back: Design is also how things look To synthesize these two comments: How it looks is a huge part of how it works.

There's even a name for that effect: Emotional Design

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_Design

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

#209

Post by TuringTest »

illiarian wrote: post #78
petilon wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> No, it is not. Yes, it is. If it's about how it looks, then it's illustration, not design. > how it looks and how it works are usually two different job functions. Again, no. If you skip functionality in your design, you will end up with an unusable product.

But if you skip the looks in your design, you'll end up with a product that works worse. It may not look rational, but then humans do not have a 100% rational behaviour.

https://lawsofux.com/aesthetic-usability-effect/

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