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GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

patricia.no

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Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#51

Post by WillAdams »

mpweiher wrote: post #47
bob1029 wrote: post #25

A tight iteration loop is the only solution I've seen for building high quality UI/UX. Embrace that it's going to be terrible the first few times and plan for this. We could save on cost per iteration by avoiding the layout and styling pass until the very end. These interfaces are about communicating information. Plain text and basic form submissions work just as well as anything else when you're still trying to desi…

It is also my experience that this is the way to go, and it also matches my theoretical view aka prejudices. It seems to me that one of the things making this approach difficult is that we lack (design) tools that support iteration between design and development. Modern tools make going from design to development easier, but it is still largely a one-way street. And one that's been made worse by recent trends towards…

For a long while now, what seems to me a reasonably simple project (re-creating the UI of a drawing program and making it straight-forward to re-create program state with annotations/highlighting) has been stalled because I can't find a design tool which works better than just placing the screen grabs in a vector drawing program and annotating by hand....

I'm about at the point where I'm going to just code everything up in METAPOST....

Makes me wish for Display PostScript again....

Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#52

Post by catmanjan »

bob1029 wrote: post #25

A tight iteration loop is the only solution I've seen for building high quality UI/UX. Embrace that it's going to be terrible the first few times and plan for this. We could save on cost per iteration by avoiding the layout and styling pass until the very end. These interfaces are about communicating information. Plain text and basic form submissions work just as well as anything else when you're still trying to desi…

Very interested to hear about a high quality UI as I have never encountered one

Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#53

Post by throwaway2037 »

hoseyor wrote: post #50
throwaway2037 wrote: post #17

This part is genius: > I have made GUIs many, many times and my best case scenario goes something like: > 1. A design has been made, everyone loves it. Detailed drawings have been made. > 2. The devs are told to Make It > 3. The devs Make It, exactly to spec > 4. Everyone looks at it and everyone hates it > 5. So many meetings. So much stress. This Is Terrible! What To Do? > 6. A new design is made. So much better! D…

I think this is a partial solution, but I have to point out that relegating that function of translator and tester to a “fresh grad”. That is ideally the exact role of a Product Manager today, the very go-between and translator with vision that can manage customer/client expectations while also adequately communicate technical concepts and both communicate initial tex task breakdowns and also run interference for dev…

The difference? Fresh grads are much cheaper than experienced PMs. I always say: Don't hire PMs; hire better devs (who, when necessary, can wear the hat of a PM). To be clear: My example is specifically talking about internal software development, and I have seen this strategy work at multiple companies. Creating an external product for B2B or B2C is very different.

Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#54

Post by mbreese »

bonki wrote: post #2

I have only skimmed the text but regarding GUIs specifically the list in the end is spot on. With that being said, I firmly believe that all software (given that one is not already deeply familiar with the domain) is/can/should be written three times to end up with a good product: 1. Minimal prototype. You throw something together fast to see it can be done, taking shortcuts and leaving out features which you know yo…

I agree completely with the idea of building something 3 times. As I get older, I tend to compress things more into 2 iterations, but that just because I like to think I’m getting better at coding, so step two is less pressing.

I think of the three iterations in these terms:

1) You don’t know what you’re doing. So this iteration is all about figuring out the problem space.

2) You know that you’re doing, but you don’t know how to do it. This iteration is about figuring out the way to engineer/design the program.

3) You’ve figured out both what you’re doing and how to do it. So now, just build it.

Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#55

Post by XorNot »

catmanjan wrote: post #52
bob1029 wrote: post #25

A tight iteration loop is the only solution I've seen for building high quality UI/UX. Embrace that it's going to be terrible the first few times and plan for this. We could save on cost per iteration by avoiding the layout and styling pass until the very end. These interfaces are about communicating information. Plain text and basic form submissions work just as well as anything else when you're still trying to desi…

Very interested to hear about a high quality UI as I have never encountered one

I would argue Windows Forms somewhere between 3.1 and 95 more or less nailed it.

It's boring, but it's clear.

Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#56

Post by XorNot »

brazzy wrote: post #43
selfhoster11 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because "UX" designers need to build according to actual usability engineering guidelines, not just built what "looks good". The 1995-2005 feels like it was the golden decade of this sort of thing.

The whole damn point of calling it "UX" instead of "UI" is to stress that "looks good" is not actually the important part.

I'd argue that this failed though because UX really just means "design for maximum engagement".

Which means "keep the time between them using the UX and opening their wallet to a minimum" because that's the only place businesses care.

No one is building a delightful UX for running IR spectrometers.

Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#57

Post by badsectoracula »

brazzy wrote: post #43
selfhoster11 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because "UX" designers need to build according to actual usability engineering guidelines, not just built what "looks good". The 1995-2005 feels like it was the golden decade of this sort of thing.

The whole damn point of calling it "UX" instead of "UI" is to stress that "looks good" is not actually the important part.

And yet, at least in my personal experience, it is only since i started hearing the term UX that i felt UIs started going downhill :-P

Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#58

Post by bandrami »

anilakar wrote: post #29
altacc wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I refer to it as "designed by programmers". It's so prevalent that the Silicon Valley TV show used this as one of it's story lines. When I worked for a consultancy in early internet days I also often repeated "the customer doesn't know what they want until they see what they don't want". People weren't used to web GUIs and there weren't the common patterns we see today, so it wasn't until they had a half working vers…

Conversely, I've seen way too many designed-by-designers GUIs and UX flows that can be best characterized as a glittery, polished turd. They sure look nice in Figma but often only have one well-specified happy path from which the end user will surely deviate. Managers will easily greenlight broken designs because they can only see the visuals, not the complete picture. If you find a talented designer, they are valued…

The "one happy path" idea is what you want, though. Non-technical users use software through rote muscle memory (it's why in 25 years as a sysadmin I've had thousands of "there was an error message" reports and precisely 0 of those people actually read the error message to report it to me: not in the happy path means user simply shuts down).

The problem becomes that people try to make software too complicated to have one happy path. This is the road to perdition.

Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#59

Post by mrkeen »

lukaslalinsky wrote: post #18

This was very hard to read and I wasn't even sure what is the conclusion. One thing I didn't understand, how does one disagree with agile dev processes, which are mostly built on top of the fact that many things, especially UX, you can't know in advance, so you have to build something small, get feedback, then either scrap it or improve it. The process described here sounds exactly like someone spending weeks if not…

> so it's kind of obvious it needs to be fully re-done so many times.

But it hasn't really caught on in the management layer. Sure, they use all the right Agile buzzwords, but they still put features A, B and C into the plan, and ask questions like "when will B be finished?"

"Finished?". Nah - we're the stewards of 14 bugs-as-a-service. We won't so much "finish B" as much as we'll transition to becoming the stewards of 15 bugs-as-a-service.

Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#60

Post by amelius »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #17

This part is genius: > I have made GUIs many, many times and my best case scenario goes something like: > 1. A design has been made, everyone loves it. Detailed drawings have been made. > 2. The devs are told to Make It > 3. The devs Make It, exactly to spec > 4. Everyone looks at it and everyone hates it > 5. So many meetings. So much stress. This Is Terrible! What To Do? > 6. A new design is made. So much better! D…

The main thing that pisses off devs is changing requirements. Unless the devs get a free pass the rebuild everything from scratch.
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