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Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
71–80 of 245 posts
Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
#72Often the bad designs come from the designers themselves. Just as software developers often fall prey to "NIH", many designers feel the established design systems like Material are insufficient for some reason. That is OK, if you know the rules you can break them, but often they don't know the rules either (grid system, typography, color for accessibility) and want to make "their own mark" with some new creation that…
Honestly, I'd just once like to work with a designer that has heard of words longer than 5 letters. Every. Single. Darn. Design I get completely ignores the fact that the texts inside them won't be built from nice little short words with EXACTLY the correct letter counts (especially when localized). Which results in shit UIs like one I've just seen on Android where (in my language) the button literally just says "Tap…
When I was a tester first thing I’d do was fill every text box with Ws just to see what ran over. Good to remember as a dev now.
Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
#73As other commenters have noted, surely the goal should be to make usable designs, of which looking beautiful is a small part?
Even worse, too much “beauty” can end up being distracting, and thereby reduce usability. Good UI is like good film music — you don’t notice that it’s even there.
Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
#74Often the bad designs come from the designers themselves. Just as software developers often fall prey to "NIH", many designers feel the established design systems like Material are insufficient for some reason. That is OK, if you know the rules you can break them, but often they don't know the rules either (grid system, typography, color for accessibility) and want to make "their own mark" with some new creation that…
> many designers feel the established design systems like Material are insufficient for some reason
Because Material is awful?
In their original iteration they had to do a study with 600 people to find out that text inputs should look like text inputs https://medium.com/google-design/the-evolution-of-material-d...
Their latest abomination has almost nothing aligned optically: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1643607965935476737 When there are 5 elements, they follow 5 different guidelines: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1643682248959328258
> That is OK, if you know the rules you can break them, but often they don't know the rules either
And that's the problem with what I call "dribbble-raised designers" ("designers" of Material UI included): they work for the designs to look nice in static screenshots on presentation pages without much scrutiny, and that's it.
Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
#75One of the rare moments I simply don't understand how something gets upvoted that much on HN.
Edit: this is like "get rich by just following this". It's not wrong, but so much facepalm-inducing, and it's just 100 bucks. Sorry, but: WTF?
In my mind there is a bot army upvoting this article at work right now.
Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
#76Often the bad designs come from the designers themselves. Just as software developers often fall prey to "NIH", many designers feel the established design systems like Material are insufficient for some reason. That is OK, if you know the rules you can break them, but often they don't know the rules either (grid system, typography, color for accessibility) and want to make "their own mark" with some new creation that…
> not know what to do with empty space
every PM everywhere. They simply cannot leave good enough alone.
Eventually every site A/B tests its way until it becomes Reddit mobile site. No one asked for carousels but sites continue to use them. We are getting inundated with popups today. I don't want to say it's as bad as 1990s flash ad popups. But it's getting damn close now. Bullshit cookie popups. "This site is better on our mobile app" crap popups. Google sign in popup bullshit.[1]
I would say anti-UX and anti-accessibility is very much the point of many sites. "Dark patterns" help conversion and the bottom line. Every site you visit is engaged in psychological warfare with you.
[1] https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/174978821/stop-th...
Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
#77Design is how it works, not how it looks. This article seems to mainly be talking about the "polish" of a design. There are more important principles which don't have anything to do with polish, such as not putting the Cancel button next to the Ok button. More like this: https://lawsofux.com https://asktog.com/atc/principles-of-interaction-design/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles I recommend prototyping the flow/feel…
Odd, when I first clicked that second link it opened a page that was virtually unreadable on a mobile device (Android Chrome) - the text literally curved off the left hand edge of the screen. Which made the first sentence "The following principles are fundamental to the design and implementation of effective interfaces[...]for[...]mobile devices..." suggest there was little point reading on. But on reloading in another tab it was basically fine (though I'd argue still not optimal).
Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
#78Design is how it works, not how it looks. This article seems to mainly be talking about the "polish" of a design. There are more important principles which don't have anything to do with polish, such as not putting the Cancel button next to the Ok button. More like this: https://lawsofux.com https://asktog.com/atc/principles-of-interaction-design/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles I recommend prototyping the flow/feel…
> Design is how it works, not how it looks. No, it is not. If you're Steve Jobs then yes, but otherwise how it looks and how it works are usually two different job functions. People who are good at visual design are not usually knowledgeable enough to do functional design, and people who are good at functional design are not necessarily good at visual design.
> No, it is not.
Yes, it is. If it's about how it looks, then it's illustration, not design.
> how it looks and how it works are usually two different job functions.
Again, no. If you skip functionality in your design, you will end up with an unusable product.
Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
#79Honestly their first concrete example, with fewer borders, is something that bothers me a lot on the internet today. Cool everything looks flat and like part of everything else. That's not hard to go down through a giant list of or anything... /s
The goal was beautiful design, not good usability. You gotta admit that it looks good, and eye candy is usually extremely effective for user retention, even if the alternative handles better, technically.
> You gotta admit that it looks good
I don't have to, and I'm not going to because it looks like crap. Why is "Cancel" just a word instead of a button? And while "Invite" is marginally better, a rounded rectangle is not much of a button either and doesn't immediately signify "oh, I can click this".
I know some people prefer flat and featureless design (and there are jokes we could make about that), but that is very personal and tastes can vary widely.
Though in the interests of fairness I will admit that there are people who do feel that kind of thing looks good.
Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
#80$100 for a book is steep, especially when it's a pdf.
A pdf that seems to contain "high quality" examples like "use fewer borders" where the example made several commenters, including myself, say "That's worse." Not sure why I'd pay $100 for a PDF anyway but I'm sure as heck not doing it when the kind of advice breeds less usable pages.
It's really hard to take the HN guidelines here at face value. It's hard to suppress the thought that this has been upvoted by a SEO-bot army.