Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces

weberdominik.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 183 posts

Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces

#31

Post by Frieren »

keyle wrote: post #17

As a designer first turned developers in the early 2000, I beg of you to learn the gestalt. Frameworks, languages, computers, come and go, but the human body doesn't change and the knowledge I have in design, I carry every day and have barely changed over the years. Sure there are new patterns now... "hamburger buttons" and swiping, but the logic remains the same. Human's don't change quickly. They discover things th…

> "hamburger buttons"

I work on a desktop PC and "hamburger buttons" frustrate me beyond reason, in the same way that many other "modern" designs. I understand that cost benefit of having just one implementation for mobile and desktop. But it is still annoying.

> Frameworks, languages, computers, come and go, but the human body doesn't change and the knowledge I have in design, I carry every day and have barely changed over the years.

This is the part that adapting interfaces for the small tactile screen of a phone and then using them on big desktop screens seems so wrong. The design is probably fantastic but it is applied to the wrong interface. The people that designed the desktop interface were good at it and should not have changed. I wish UI designers went back to desktop interfaces for big screens. But mobile has economy of scale on its side so probably it is not going to happen.

> "the design of everyday things"

Great book.

Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces

#33

Post by kitd »

I believe what OP refers to as design is largely styling. Design goes much deeper and starts from a position of close empathy with the user. As a dev working on a team that now has professional designers, the difference is night & day. UI design is the most underrated part of our industry IMO. Good design produces happy users far more often than the choice of framework or platform.

Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces

#34

Post by bigstrat2003 »

Frieren wrote: post #31
keyle wrote: post #17

As a designer first turned developers in the early 2000, I beg of you to learn the gestalt. Frameworks, languages, computers, come and go, but the human body doesn't change and the knowledge I have in design, I carry every day and have barely changed over the years. Sure there are new patterns now... "hamburger buttons" and swiping, but the logic remains the same. Human's don't change quickly. They discover things th…

> "hamburger buttons" I work on a desktop PC and "hamburger buttons" frustrate me beyond reason, in the same way that many other "modern" designs. I understand that cost benefit of having just one implementation for mobile and desktop. But it is still annoying. > Frameworks, languages, computers, come and go, but the human body doesn't change and the knowledge I have in design, I carry every day and have barely chang…

> I understand that cost benefit of having just one implementation for mobile and desktop. But it is still annoying.

Of course it's annoying. When desktop software is using mobile UI, that's the result of a deliberate choice to make the software worse (something you care very much about as it affects you) in order to save the company money (something you don't care about). It would be weird if you weren't annoyed by such blatant disrespect for their customers.

Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces

#35

Post by gyomu »

wseqyrku wrote: post #32

don't "design" user interfaces, visualize data structures and iterate to make it intuitive based on usage patterns.

Underrated comment; way too many designers still approach software design as a visual exercise similar to designing a static composition that looks beautiful in marketing materials; but software is all about data structures and what operations people are going to want to do on them.

So much software these days doesn’t let me do things like “do Z on all Xs matching Y”, instead forcing me to repeat the same slow sequence of actions over and over (swipe, tap button; wait for animation to finish. Go back, swipe, tap button; wait for animation to finish. Go back, swipe, …)

Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces

#36

Post by rishi_rt »

This article presumes that the usage scenario has been defined already (by a PM) and the designer is just creating visual representations to enact the said scenario. In that sense, the article seems to attempt to answer what should a developer do, in the absence of designer. In such situations(ideally you'd avoid them), it might be better to defer to the defaults of a framework such as Tailwind which has basic accessibility concerns addressed.

Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces

#37

Post by lioeters »

wseqyrku wrote: post #32

don't "design" user interfaces, visualize data structures and iterate to make it intuitive based on usage patterns.

I also think "good-looking" user interface is of lesser priority than "good-functioning" UI. Form follows function. I'd much rather have boring or primitively designed UI that works well and intuitively - meaning, I can find the functions I need when I need it - than a beautiful or modern/trendy interface that I have to struggle with to get work done.

So much of modern UI seems to be created by people whose focus is on "looking good" and less about actually using it daily. For example, YouTube has awkward details that make certain common actions painful, or even impossible. Like a modal window that covers up part of the screen where selection is being made, and it can't be moved or closed without losing all selections. Whoever designed it clearly had not used it enough (or at all) because it's impractical and infuriating as a user. I don't care how good it looks if I can't get it to do what I need.

Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces

#38

Post by giveita »

userbinator wrote: post #4

I honestly don't care at all about "good-looking"; I care more about "functional". Far too many apps seem to be aiming for the former instead of or at the expense of the latter.

Fast too. Do fast. It is so easy in 2025. You just dont do all the fancy shit and it'll be fast! Doesn't take genius like did 10 or 15 years ago.

Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces

#39

Post by tkzed49 »

superice wrote: post #14

Starting from 'what looks good' is putting the cart before the horse. Making a UI usable and well laid out first is key. Practical UI and Refactoring UI are great resources, as long as you read them through a lens of 'what works well?' instead of 'what looks pretty?'. The author is absolutely right in that alignment and consistency are important, but that should really be your starting point. Building a good user int…

I don't understand when people see Tailwind as anything other than a syntax for CSS.

> forget all about the relations of styling rules to eachother

This is a hot take, but the more cascading your styles are, the harder they are to read and debug. I've never been upset to find classes that just correspond 1:1 with DOM elements. And that's what Tailwind is doing.

Re: Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces

#40

Post by VerifiedReports »

ryandrake wrote: post #22
defanor wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is quite similar on the Web still: web browsers (at least Firefox) allow to set user CSS or change default colors, but some websites (the percentage would vary defending on the method used) do not play nicely with that. Likewise on Unix-like systems: most things can be covered with GTK and Qt themes, but some GUI programs would use a different GUI toolkit, and occasional developers would assume a dark-on-light the…

I’ve always firmly believed that the user should have ultimate control over the color, fonts, and overall design of the applications on his system. Not the developer. The developer should just be able to say “this is text” and the OS should respect the user’s chosen text color. The developer should be able to say “this is a window” and the system decides how it’s styled. Every new OS release and every new browser rel…

Exactly. That's what made the Windows scheme editor so great.

I never had a problem building my applications in Visual Studio to respect the system color scheme.

Post reply on HN