281–290 of 354 posts
I like to work with designers who, like me, have worked on interfaces for nuclear power plants, air traffic control systems, and stock trading systems. Others, IMHO, need not apply.
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> Instead of making it large and distinct they will make it small and light colored when it's in fact the only valuable thing on the screen. But modern web design is the contrary. Large big webfonts, distinct ones for headlines and text as beautiful as possible. Yes, sometimes the text is then made grey and oftentimes this is just bad design, but I don't think the texture comaprision is accurate. Here for example, in…
> Large big webfonts This can be aggravating too, just because I'm on a desktop doesn't mean I have 19" monitors and the browser maximized.
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> Designers are ruining software in general. I agree with you. But what I find hilarious about it is that in the 90s, there was a meme that software engineers cannot do usability very well, and you need specialized designers. I think it all comes down to humility. Think about and respect the user. Do usability studies and follow their results, like Microsoft used to do in 90s. Don't let your notions of aesthetics ove…
> But what I find hilarious about it is that in the 90s, there was a meme that software engineers cannot do usability very well, and you need specialized designers. I think what's changed is that engineers do not work in a vacuum anymore. You can follow Apple's or Google's UI well-known guidelines with a little branding and your app will be fine. Of course, that requires humility as well.
To be clear though ux designers are often better than non-ux people but people confuse "designers" with ux designers.
Today, it is not a requirement of designers to build something usable. A lot of designers don't even build something interactive, just a Photoshop design that has to look good.
The necessity of good ux on a site is as apparent to somebody that doesn't know ux as the necessity of a test suite is to someone who has never programmed.
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Everything you say might be right, but there is something extra to jonstokes' comment: ametures and nerds often produce more functional sites than real designers. The mechanism here is that whatever esthetic and psychological principles are in play, an interface must also present the needed info and functionality. Craigslist and HN do that in a more-or-less bullshit free way. UX designers can get caught up in other c…
I find that once you're trying to hide info or functionality it's because you don't know the users workflow. Understanding workflow is the key to usability, at least with LOB apps, trying to cram everyone's needs into a single table or building UI's that are essentially skins over database tables make for some awful UI's.
... which, after you learn how to use them, often work much faster than the alternatives.
There are anecdotes a-plenty here like our local (tiny) bank who held out replacing their terminal based with their Windows version because in tests the keyboard based, archaic, every-on-one-screen application was far more productive than the new one and this particular application is only to be used by seniors in this bank who, because of the size, are not replaced / added very often. The Windows version, although not even that well designed, has been created to be faster to learn for new employees and the screens have been designed to be aesthetically pleasing and therefor sparsely layed out over many more pages.
The old staff hates it, the new staff (not very many) is just used to this kind of easy to learn, nothing to master kind of thing.
They don't have to be exclusive though; what happened to the 'expert mode' in apps/applications? That button you ram if you are an expert and suddenly 100 screens are packed into one, keyboard navigation is switched on and I can do my work much faster than clicking HUGE easy to learn, text heavy buttons?
In a throw-away society, all this interaction design makes sense; no-one is at a job long enough to really get into software and you don't get through the trial period if you don't learn using it fast enough. In that regard you need big empty pages with videos explaining what everything does and a boned out interaction process that has been carefully thought out.
I think we need that if the budget is there, but I think we need the expert mode as well and that, as far as I have seen in my life time, (interaction) designers are not very good at packing dense nor is it needed; if you are an 'expert', you'll cope (or don't care in some cases) about the (interaction) design.
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So gnome devs treat their users like morons. Their users leave to use KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, etc, and find the desktop environment satisfactory. I think this says more about the devs than it does the desktop environment, unless the fact that GNOME used to ship with Ubuntu skewed things.
Dunno about KDE, they seem to be following in Gnome's footsteps these days. As for XFCE and Cinnamon, they have limited options as more and more Gnome assumptions gets baked into GTK (vanishing scrollbars anyone?). Our best bet may be XLQT, but they were lacking in manpower.
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You're right. And I am one of the people criticizing ribbon, because I think menus and toolbars have different purposes that shouldn't be conflated (menu is for all possible UI actions with no possibility for user to customize, while toolbar is for most common UI actions and other interactive elements with possibility to customize). With ribbons, the possibility of customization is gone. But to the point, I think the…
Why can't you customize ribbons? Anyway, I don't understand your distinction there, since every part of software can be customized however you like. Most users don't customize, and don't have any need to if the the software was properly designed for their use-case.
Two reasons. First, you don't want to, just like you don't want to customize main menu. There should to be a place that has every option, which you cannot unintentionally mess up.
Second, ribbons are very carefully designed for looks, and it makes them hard to customize. I think it could be done, it's just not trivial.
So, for example, in MS Office, they don't bother with customization. If you want to look at how customizable software looked like in the past, look at for instance AMI Pro. You could redefine keyboard shortcuts and toolbars any way you liked.
And we are not even talking about software like Emacs, which can be customized very deeply.
I think some users would customize, it's very paternalistic to think that they wouldn't, and it would make them more productive. But it's just not in the fashion right now.
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I doubt there are many designers working on OSS who don't also use it. I' even doubt the premise that there are terrible open source UIs created by designers. The vast majority of OSS GUI apps were probably styled by programmers, and I think they proved quite well over last 20 years that they chose well when not becoming designers. The problem with design is also that it doesn't work very well in the "bazaar" style o…
GNOME employs professional designers and produces consistently the worst designs in open source: kill features left and right in the name of "simplicity" then add excessive padding to what's left all in service of achieving that "ugly but useless" state that everyone loves.
However, I don't think users care that much about consistency, unfortunately (even though I think it's important aspect of design). Look at web, every website is different and it's considered a good thing by designers. There is no consistency on web and yet desktop apps struggle to compete.
Subjective though it may be, there are a lot of people who find black-on-white unpleasant to look at. I greatly prefer sites that don't use it, regardless of what they do with font and size. This could just be a case of conflicting preferences, but I don't think it has to be. Clear contrasts are achievable without insisting on #000/#FFF web design. - The most obvious improvement is simply keeping an eye on contrast.…
Designers are ruining software in general. iTunes, the iOS music app, and Google Maps are just a few pieces of software that started out relatively usable (if not exactly stable in the case of iTunes), and have been iterated and stylized to the point where I routinely get enraged by them. At least Google Maps has walked back that terrible accordion thing that literally drove me crazy. I basically think design is like…
I have worried about this a lot, but basically now try to get inspiration and take example from webs that I consider highly readable. I also developed a set of internal rules; for instance, my maximum "black" is #333 (#333333) and my minimum "white" is #eee (#EEEEEE). Anything going further than these to the middle should have a real reason and not just because it's prettier . Edit: #333 over a #eee (worst-case scena…