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Why you should move that button 3px to the left

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Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#71

Post by ricardobeat »

Chris_Newton wrote: post #68
sxp wrote: post #33

So why should you move that button? The article doesn't actually answer the question. If a UX designer just says "move the button by 3px because it looks nicer", then there is a good chance that someone higher up the hierarchy will say move the button by 4px because that looks better. And since neither of them are able to actually justify their reasons beyond some vapid and subjective claim of making the product "mor…

And since neither of them are able to actually justify their reasons beyond some vapid and subjective claim of making the product "more delightful" Do you appreciate the irony that you just wrote a whole post about making decisions objectively, in which you have essentially dismissed designers as ignorants who just make arbitrary decisions according to their personal whimsy, based on a series of unsubstantiated claim…

That last paragraph is a fairly accurate description of work at decadent BigCos.

Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#72

Post by sekasi »

Honestly, I can't believe some of the responses here. 'Fix it yourself'. 'Fixing bugs is more important' and a number of other black and white missing-the-point dravel.

Let me help. Here are a few pieces of irrefutable truths:

- Any developer who doesn't see, or care, about attention to visual details is a bad member of the team.

- priorities. Of course big bugs are more important. Why would you even mention that.

- Good designers have their set of priorities. A good developer understands that, and doesn't say mind numbing things like 'don't waste my time'.

- Will all visual enhancements increase conversion rates? No. Does that mean you're free to be sloppy? No.

- At the end of the day, the balance between perfect code and perfect visual design is up to the product owner. Discussion about what's more important is pointless. It all matters.

Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#73

Post by goldenkey »

seivan wrote: post #35
crazygringo wrote: post #30

This is a fantastic article. To people below who say the designer should make the change him or helself -- as a front-end developer, I say a million times, NO NO NO. Does the designer know how to use git and commit properly? Do they know on what branch? Understand the deployment schedule? Perform browser testing? Are they part of code reviews? Do they understand whether that rule is used by just that component, or ju…

'I'm having a tougher and tougher time appreciating these photoshop cowboys. ' Give me a break. That's the default these days. I've yet to met iOS developers or front-end engineers who can't design. We don't need these photoshop goons anymore.

Having to explain to your project manager that their Photoshop cowboy is out of touch, and turning PSDs into code is more work than simply designing things yourself is a virtue I've never goated. I hate Photoshop cowboys

Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#74

Post by reefoctopus »

ricardobeat wrote: post #54
exizt88 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really wrong, and the arrogant tone doesn't help a bit. The truth is that a designer who spends 100% of his time doing design will definitely be better at design than a designer who spends 50% time designing and 50% time developing. These are two very different skill sets (even though their fundamentals may be closer). Anyway, a good designer's decision to move something 3px to the left should be respected (b…

> moving a button 3px to the left shouldn't be a problem for any self-respecting developer That's exactly the kind of thinking that developers abhore. Imagine that the whole interface is built on top of a planned framework that follows strict rules and conventions. This button is following the exact spacing and dimensions implemented in the framework, nevertheless the designer's static mockup is different for some re…

Furthermore, moving the button 3 px to the left might take a ridiculous number of man hours, and it's demoralizing work. Most coders are making smart trade offs and balancing a number of things to maximize productivity. How much is that 3 pixels really worth? Why don't you try again, and think of a way to design the interface that doesn't require that 3px move?

Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#75

Post by goldenkey »

malandrew wrote: post #21

Or you, the designer, could learn a little CSS and git and submit a pull request with the micro-optimizations you want changed. Every time you request changes instead of making them yourself, you are taking away from the time they can spend delivering improvements in their area of expertise, executable code.

Photoshop cowboy is a one-man band on the run

Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#76

Post by grownseed »

seivan wrote: post #34

This article pisses me off something immensely. How about you learn to fucking code your own design? 'Yet we’re at the mercy of our teams. We can design beautiful, intricate, delightful details — but we can’t build, test, and deploy them all.' No shit, so how about you stop being one of those lazy-ass photoshop goons who play fucking color-the-button on dribble all day long and actually learn to code your own fucking…

Tone aside, I can't help but agree. My previous job (web shop) hired supposedly "rockstar" designers on several occasions, and the results were frustrating, time-consuming and in the end, largely worthless.

What did not help was that those people had "print design" backgrounds, my bosses loved the rendered (hard) designs, and not having any design or development knowledge themselves, these sorts of ludicrous standards were somehow becoming the norm.

So we ended up spending as much time trying to render some goddamn rounded corner with a gradient for all browsers than we did implementing actual functionality, generally causing us to cut corners all around (no pun intended)...

In my opinion, a good designer should know the limitations of the tools according to context and resources. As far as I know, you never hear of car designers asking the engineers to somehow find enough space for the engine, or an architect telling you that the plumber will have to somehow figure out where to put the pipes in his 36.3cm thick walls.

This is 2014 and I don't think there's a place for single-skill design queens any longer. As a developer I have to learn a new language pretty much every 6 months, and generally speaking new technologies far more often. So surely, the argument that "true" designers should not have to learn CSS (or related) is moot and let's be honest, arrogant.

To me, it's very much like the idea that politics or philosophy by themselves are vacuous. The world isn't waiting for your design like it's a god-send, you're making the design because you were asked to, by real people with real needs, all of whom, designer included, have to put food on the table.

Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#77

Post by sxp »

Chris_Newton wrote: post #68
sxp wrote: post #33

So why should you move that button? The article doesn't actually answer the question. If a UX designer just says "move the button by 3px because it looks nicer", then there is a good chance that someone higher up the hierarchy will say move the button by 4px because that looks better. And since neither of them are able to actually justify their reasons beyond some vapid and subjective claim of making the product "mor…

And since neither of them are able to actually justify their reasons beyond some vapid and subjective claim of making the product "more delightful" Do you appreciate the irony that you just wrote a whole post about making decisions objectively, in which you have essentially dismissed designers as ignorants who just make arbitrary decisions according to their personal whimsy, based on a series of unsubstantiated claim…

Why would you think a designer would have no justification for a change beyond “it looks nice”? What would you assume designers don’t understand issues like pixel alignment or designing for multiple devices? Why would you think designers would be raising these issues based on Photoshop mock-ups?

Experience. I've had arbitrary requests made based on Photoshop mocks. I've pushed back against them after showing that the proposed design looks blurry on devices with a low dpi. Or showing that the UI breaks down in edges cases where the text field contains more text than what is shown in the mocks which results in unwanted wrapping. These are issues that can only be understood by someone who knows the implementation details and constraints of the underlying OS that does the final work of rendering the UI rather than relying on the constraints of Photoshop.

Do you understand that there is actual research underpinning a lot of design theory, demonstrating both how humans respond to different design choices and the fact that those choices can directly and sometimes dramatically affect metrics you care about like conversion and retention rates?

Yes. And good UX designers know this research which is why they can quickly justify their choices.

Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#78

Post by Chris_Newton »

kybernetikos wrote: post #67
Chris_Newton wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...engineers who feel the same way that he does about product. These exist... Unless my personal experience has been wildly unrepresentative, software developers tend as a group to be almost obsessive about getting fine details right. We’re the guys who worry about whether our design will be as easy as possible to maintain in the face of arbitrary future requirements or whether using some clever data structure would…

To the developer, every decision is a trade off, a tension between the demands of the now (features and time) and the demands of the future (elegance, maintainability). Designers are not in a good position to appreciate the trade offs. It's very easy for a designer to think 'this infelicity decreases delight, and fixing it involves just moving this thing to there'. This is probably an excellent spot of a real design…

Never use the word 'just' when talking to developers, frequently apparently simple things have huge ramifications

Sometimes that is true, and that is so whether you’re talking about changing a design or changing the underlying implementation, and whether you are talking about web design/development or software development more generally.

Having said that, if a designer can’t request and a developer can’t implement trivial changes that really are as simple as shifting something by 3px, most of the times that means at least one of the following is true:

1. The person who implemented the previous version wasn’t very good.

2. The person who implemented the previous version was pressured to take short cuts in order to hit time/money targets and produced work that wasn’t very good.

3. There is some more general problem with the development process that means a designer requesting a trivial change and a developer then making it are expensive when they shouldn’t be.

Obviously there could be exceptions where that 3px change has much wider implications for the overall layout, but I don’t think those cases are really what any of us are talking about here.

Re: Why you should move that button 3px to the left

#79

Post by tobico »

I think this is often a problem of dividing responsibilities.

In order to turn a design into correct CSS, the size and position of each element needs to be measured precisely. If the Photoshop-using designer can't or won't do this themselves, and send through clearly specified requirements, it falls to devs who probably aren't Photoshop experts, don't know what the designer was thinking, and might not even have Photoshop.

A nice side effect of having clear requirements is that everyone in the team can easily refer back to them to spot design bugs, not just the designer.

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