HN has native ads now?
Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
81–90 of 245 posts
Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
#82my current rule is to ask ChatGPT to do it for me
Are you memeing or are you serious? Because I'm curious how you'd have a language model design a page for you. Just ask it for the HTML and CSS for a nice looking page?
ChatGPT is extremely good at writing HTML and CSS, yes - if you have a basic idea about what you want it to look like the bot can do the rest, including iterate on it.
Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
#83Design 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.
Bold statement for something subjective. I think you are confusing design and art (from your own experience or misfortune). The processes of visual design have informed (or formalised) the design as a process in other fields. Artists have a style as a function. Designers (visual or not) have process. No one is great at everything. Mediocre designers are either too visual or not at all (especially the latter), in my experience. Good to great designers grasp both and have breath. Even the ones that don't have art as a function can direct, steer and brief the art of a project (or be resourceful with it.) But you can't have design without process.
Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
#84> [design courses] focus so much on high level principles like color theory and typography which, while important, never helped me make instant improvements Strange, making the very low contrast text more visible on this site is an instant improvement, and it's right there in the "color theory"
The contrast ratio for the body text is 7.57:1 (or 7.25:1 if the text is on the light grey background), which meets AAA accessibility standards (which is 7:1).
Body text isn't the issue I would think - it's various headers, downvoted and especially "dead" posts which are almost to read without selecting the text, even with perfect colour vision.
Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
#85Looking at the first example given I think this book is the one missing the mark. I genuinely have trouble when things have less borders! I don’t care about things designed to seem nice, I want them to be usable!
Indeed. In the "correct" version the search field looks almost like a highlighted item in the list. With many modern user interfaces you really need to be trained in the current conventions to see which elements you can interact with. Compare this with the typical unstyled HTML.
Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
#86Most products don't need a whole book: 1) Use a mature, well-designed GUI framework. Especially if you don't have a designer it's unlikely that novel interactions or an unusual visual design will be a key selling point for your product. 2) Find a half-dozen folks from your target user audience or proxies who are as similar as possible. Give them a task to do with your product/prototype while you watch. Let them talk…
3) don't reply to threads obviously created with the intention of promoting some costly product, promising to surpass specialized knowledge, just by spending a few bucks.
Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
#87Design 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…
For a site about UX, you'd think https://lawsofux.com would have picked a better url. O_o
evokes memories of "expertSexChange.com -- err, I mean, ExpertsExchange.com" back in the day.
Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 p…
That problem exists in both versions though - i.e. making it more "beautiful" hasn't obviously affected the usability. But I can see at least one way in which it could - if shown on a wide screen and there were a lot of entries, matching up the "Team"/"Member" signifier with the contact name would be quite challenging. The lines in the orginal version may look a little clunky but do serve a purpose.
Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
#89Design 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 anoth…
Re: Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
#90This is Design not UX also you can actually get quite far by following those 'rules' you still want to have the meta issues sorted out first before getting to the tweaks. But yes, the notion of practice over art actually does apply - you can make things better in a pedantic way.