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UI design for software developers. Part 1, Colors

amortizedcost.net

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Re: UI design for software developers. Part 1, Colors

#51

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

Biganon wrote: post #41
monkin wrote: post #5

Tip No. 1. - Don’t make UI design courses for developers if you don’t have a solid experience in it.

This reads like a harsh criticism; arguments would be welcome as to why you feel this way

The site has eccentric paragraph/element spacing and uncontrolled use of white space.

Serif fonts are fashionable but a questionable choice for legibility. (HN is much more legible.)

The header image is unnecessarily huge.

There's a login box, but you won't spot it unless you're paying attention. Why would you want to log in anyway?

Overall, the design looks knocked-together in a hurry with no real understanding of either good layout or UX.

The app itself has poor layout spacing and - ironically - the colour choices and combinations are unusual and not what you would expect from an experienced UI designer.

To be clear, this isn't being picky for the sake of it. I would honestly be surprised if a majority of experienced UI professionals were enthusiastic about the current design of either the site or the app.

Re: UI design for software developers. Part 1, Colors

#52

Post by mch82 »

Jerard_Victor wrote: post #20
inquirerofsorts wrote: post #2

UX advice for UI designers giving advice to software developers: Get a free cert from https://letsencrypt.org/ so my basic half-assed digital defenses don't block your site. I'm not clicking through until you do sorry. Good luck with the multipart series.

sorry for that, will add SSL as soon as possible

Thanks for taking the time to share a write up on something you learned & put it on your own domain instead of Medium or something like that.

Yeah, ssl probably matters & other people will prefer a different “step 1”, but it’s cool to see people share their lessons learned & process. And it’s smart to make use of the byproducts of your work.

Many designers use a “mood board” early in their process to establish the target feel of their project. Your explanation of wanting to choose a color that felt “futuristic and brave” reminded me of that approach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mood_board

Re: UI design for software developers. Part 1, Colors

#53

Post by V-2 »

habosa wrote: post #44

I'm no design expert but this advice is really thin and not that useful. Trust me that using a color palette generator is not the One True Way! Also there's no advice on how to pick a base color, just "pick one". Second this author is basing the advice on this app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.amortizedc... Again I am not an expert and I don't mean to be rude, but that's not a very nice looking a…

Perhaps the fonts and alignment are deliberately off so that they can be improved in subsequent parts of the cycle. I'm not exactly blown away by the palette either, though.

Wording is sloppy, too ("into an email attachments"?).

Re: UI design for software developers. Part 1, Colors

#54

Post by edoceo »

userbinator wrote: post #50

Not surprising to see no mention of "let the system (and by extension, the user) choose the UI colours if at all possible". It wasn't long ago that you'd set your preferences for colours, fonts, etc. in one place and every application would automatically use them and be consistent. Perfect for colourblind and those who have trouble seeing smaller fonts. UI design has gone backwards.

:( system colors were deprecated in CSS3. Really handy for LOB apps

Re: UI design for software developers. Part 1, Colors

#55

Post by edoceo »

coldpie wrote: post #35
EricE wrote: post #29

One of the best discussions of color - especially from an accessibility standpoint is from the US Digital Web Design System: https://designsystem.digital.gov/design-tokens/color/overvie... It has one of the best discussions of contrast I have seen; very timely given the trends for low contrast design that seem prevalent combined with my now over 40 eyes (darn those kids!)

> very timely given the trends for low contrast design that seem prevalent combined with my now over 40 eyes I'm a decade younger than you and I still bristle every time I see someone disparage black-on-white. #000 on #FFF looks fine, guys, and it looks way, way better than the #BBB on #CCC that you're about to publish. You're overthinking it.

bg: #fafafa; fg: #101010

Black and white, but take the edge of a little.

Re: UI design for software developers. Part 1, Colors

#56

Post by edoceo »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #12
inquirerofsorts wrote: post #2

UX advice for UI designers giving advice to software developers: Get a free cert from https://letsencrypt.org/ so my basic half-assed digital defenses don't block your site. I'm not clicking through until you do sorry. Good luck with the multipart series.

Or let the free tier of Cloudflare do that.

Yea, everyone move to this central platform. That way we can complain later when things are too centralized.

Re: UI design for software developers. Part 1, Colors

#57

Post by preommr »

KineticLensman wrote: post #3

If you are reading this, Jerard, please please please consider the accessibility impact of colour, specifically on colour blind people. You should test your app's proposed colour with an accessibility-checking tool. You should also avoid using certain colours to distinguish between different things.

These metric help for writing a report for the boss.

But really, these tools should not be a factor for UI design. They're much better for things like data visualization where you're working wit a lot more colors in a tight space.

If somebody is relying on slight variations in hue to differentiate between background and font color, they've already fucked up.

FWIW, I recommend using the squint test as a really rough metric, try and see if you can use something through your eyelashes as you're squinting.

Re: UI design for software developers. Part 1, Colors

#58

Post by whatshisface »

edoceo wrote: post #54
userbinator wrote: post #50

Not surprising to see no mention of "let the system (and by extension, the user) choose the UI colours if at all possible". It wasn't long ago that you'd set your preferences for colours, fonts, etc. in one place and every application would automatically use them and be consistent. Perfect for colourblind and those who have trouble seeing smaller fonts. UI design has gone backwards.

:( system colors were deprecated in CSS3. Really handy for LOB apps

If my design blog can't be read in an ultrathin font colored #aaaaaa against my #bbbbbb background it's not worth reading.

Re: UI design for software developers. Part 1, Colors

#59

Post by sjm-lbm »

capableweb wrote: post #18
inquirerofsorts wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of the box LE make it hard to actually achieve that most basic of calendar fails.

As far as I know, Let's Encrypt themselves do nothing to prevent you from hitting the expiry date with your certificates, but then I'm not sure what you mean with "Out of the box Let's Encrypt". Usually you run Let's Encrypt with something like EFF's certbot, and then you certainly get lots of help to have up-to-date certificates, as long as you installed it in a way so it automatically runs (via cron or whatever you…

I get emails from LE when my certs are about to expire. I'm honestly not sure how they do it (based on the email address, I'm guessing that they pulled the email they are using from WHOIS), but it's not something I went out of the way to set up.

I really like it, because it lets me know when I need to go in and kick certbot.

Re: UI design for software developers. Part 1, Colors

#60

Post by detaro »

sjm-lbm wrote: post #59
capableweb wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know, Let's Encrypt themselves do nothing to prevent you from hitting the expiry date with your certificates, but then I'm not sure what you mean with "Out of the box Let's Encrypt". Usually you run Let's Encrypt with something like EFF's certbot, and then you certainly get lots of help to have up-to-date certificates, as long as you installed it in a way so it automatically runs (via cron or whatever you…

I get emails from LE when my certs are about to expire. I'm honestly not sure how they do it (based on the email address, I'm guessing that they pulled the email they are using from WHOIS), but it's not something I went out of the way to set up. I really like it, because it lets me know when I need to go in and kick certbot.

You likely gave certbot the email address when you set it up first, and it registers it with LE.
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