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The Dribbblisation of Design

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Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#41

Post by jib »

The weather app example at the start annoys me. I want a weather app for data, not decision making. I want to consume a couple of data points easily, for various needs. 7 of those 8 apps do that.

Rain amount (bike or bus today?) Wind amount (can I bodyboard today? Rain coat or umbrella?) Temperature (gloves for the wetsuit? Jacket when biking?) Sun amount (can I do a cliff walk this weekend or will the trail be muddy?)

Etc... I don't want an umbrella app, a surf app, a walk app, a bike app... I just want some data that I will use in a multitude of ways.

Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#42

Post by Kapura »

This sort of flash-over-substance internet feedback loop has cropped up in a number of different arenas. Five years back or so I was on the staff of a website that was created primarily to promote Halo multiplayer maps, to receive feedback, and to feature the talented creators in the community.

A great deal of excellent maps went through the site, but I became increasingly upset over what I saw as a shift towards presentation-over-substance with the original posts. If you wanted people to play a map, it soon became all but required to have a massive original post, with screenshots and "action shots" and flashy headers to catch people's attention. The focus became more on these OPs than the maps themselves. There was a movement towards standardising the process to reduce the flashy bloat, but it was unable to affect the changes I perceived as necessary, so I ended up leaving the community.

How can issues like these be fixed? Can they be fixed, or is it just a bug in the human code that superficial beauty halo effects everything else out of consideration? Perhaps communities of a certain size eventually reduce to a certain lowest common denominator appeal. I'm not certain.

Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#43

Post by jschwartzi »

Kapura wrote: post #42

This sort of flash-over-substance internet feedback loop has cropped up in a number of different arenas. Five years back or so I was on the staff of a website that was created primarily to promote Halo multiplayer maps, to receive feedback, and to feature the talented creators in the community. A great deal of excellent maps went through the site, but I became increasingly upset over what I saw as a shift towards pre…

PG had the same worries about HN.

http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

In general, as long as the community continues to value substance and the principle of the most charitable interpretation, it will survive. When we start seeing memes and catfights, that's a sign the community is dying.

Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#45

Post by rrrx3 »

cousin_it wrote: post #20
dunkelheit wrote: post #4

My main grievance with modern designs is low information density. Fonts are getting bigger and lots of whitespace is added between blocks. This works great for articles (as an example, medium articles look gorgeous and are a joy to read) but just about anything else is less usable when fewer bits of actual information are on the screen. Ironically, one can also speak of UX-isation of design. I would define it as misg…

Yeah, that's a big problem. I've worked with many UX people over the years, implementing their strongly held ideas and watching the metrics of user behavior afterward. My reluctant and painful conclusion is that they don't really understand users, it's all self deception. Though they do have good visual design skills. Maybe the UX designer's job should include more statistics and analysis? It's not enough to draw moc…

If the UX people you've been working with haven't been doing post-implementation statistics and analytical measurement leading to refinement, then they are not UX people. They are visual or interaction designers playing at being UX people.

Unfortunately, the hard truth of it is that most "UX people" are in environments where the post-implementation cycle is ignored. For as many companies out there that claim to embrace the "UX process," I'd say that well over 80% of them don't actually embrace it beyond feature release.

Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#46

Post by woah »

corinrules wrote: post #25
dunkelheit wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The various weather app screens are used to make the point - that the "take your umbrella" app is somehow superior to others. I disagree with that.

Superior only for a specific group of people. People who want a tiny chunk of binary info. A niche market, but one that exists. You are claiming a universal inferiority. Deriving a universal principle from your own singular experience. That inability to recognise the existence of other viewpoints, and other markets, is why you need a designer's empathy.

It's an amazingly common thing with developers in general and especially on here. Kind of a narrow focus on some superficially logical "best solution" along with complete dismissal of anything else based on arbitrary metrics they came up with.

Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#47

Post by rrrx3 »

My 2 cents, as a former visual designer, now senior UX designer - Dribbble is a place where lots of pretty baubles are on display, where flash is valued over process, and where it's very hard to get a sense of anything other than the showcased designer's visual acumen.

When I'm interviewing a designer, I don't take it as a positive or negative that they have a dribbble account. If they're interviewing for a position that is primarily visual design, I will peruse their stuff there just to get a sense of their style and capability, but not as a final deterministic factor on their hireability.

Dribbble was never really meant to be a place where people showcased their process, just a place where they could throw out a quick snippet to get reactions. Visual designers find that extremely helpful. If you're not versed in the ideas of typography, color theory, moodboarding, concepting, or any of the other methodologies and tools in a visual designer's wheelhouse, then looking from the outside in at Dribbble can make it seem like a world filled with trite, inefficient, fantastical non-reality.

You're not alone in this. Even I, as a former visual designer, have to tell myself that when I go clicking through Dribbble. It's not a place to showcase fully-polished, finished products - it's not a product marketing site. It's not a place to showcase the messy process of product design - it's not a portfolio site. It's a place where people can toss out ideas and get feedback on the micro-points of it. The colors, they typography, the alignment. Start to expect anything more and the model of the entire site falls apart.

For better or worse, Dribbble is not built to scale as a place for the critique of the entire design process. I think that's where this article gets it wrong. There are plenty of things to critique the site for - the lack of real meaningful engagement, for example, or the highly exclusive invite-only nature, for another - but fundamentally the OPs of this article are projecting thoughts and ideas about what they think/want Dribble to be vs what it actually is.

TL; DR: Dribbble is a place to showcase digital visual art and design artifacts, not a meaningful UX or UI portfolio catalogue.

Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#48

Post by d23 »

vonklaus wrote: post #37

The Mediumization of Writing More and more people want to have an opinion and they use medium to share it with the world. This is killing my narrow view of content creation because I am able to asess every single users motivation. With such clarity, I have determined they are, like me, all experienced professionals with 10 years experience putting their best work forward. Have you seen the comments section? People wh…

If you have to type it's probably not good satire.

After only a few paragraphs in, it became obvious that you've set up a one-paragraph strawman. His point is that the process of design is being traded and mistaken for making things look pretty. Seems like a reasonable argument.

Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#49

Post by rchaud »

I don't know about this. I think it's wholly possible that people derive inspiration and perspective from Dribbble, Behance and similar sites, and use that inspiration to attempt to solve actual business problems in UI/UX, the specifics of which are never posted to Dribbble, either due to NDAs or more likely, because it would be incredibly boring for the average Dribbble user to look at.

I don't believe Dribbble has portrayed itself as a site to showcase business case studies. A lot of the time, it's simply a repository of design samples or off-work personal projects. And I'll admit, after a long day of looking at dull wireframes, it's simply a relief to look at a fun UI mockup animation, even if it might not work in a real-life production app.

Re: The Dribbblisation of Design

#50

Post by hussong »

rrrx3 wrote: post #45
cousin_it wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's a big problem. I've worked with many UX people over the years, implementing their strongly held ideas and watching the metrics of user behavior afterward. My reluctant and painful conclusion is that they don't really understand users, it's all self deception. Though they do have good visual design skills. Maybe the UX designer's job should include more statistics and analysis? It's not enough to draw moc…

If the UX people you've been working with haven't been doing post-implementation statistics and analytical measurement leading to refinement, then they are not UX people. They are visual or interaction designers playing at being UX people. Unfortunately, the hard truth of it is that most "UX people" are in environments where the post-implementation cycle is ignored. For as many companies out there that claim to embra…

I think one of the reasons here is that a lot of UX people don't work on products, they work on projects. And once you've handed in your deliverables, you move on to the next project and never ever look back.
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