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> "UI, in my opinion, doesn't mean "pretty," it means "usable," which is sort of implied by U meaning "user."" In frontend land this is often the distinction b

> "UI, in my opinion, doesn't mean "pretty," it means "usable," which is sort of implied by U meaning "user."" In frontend land this is often the distinction between UI vs. UX. UX means usability, UI is the more aesthetic side of the exercise, though of course there is considerable overlap. Part of the issue - at least from my corner of the industry in mobile app dev - is that a lot of good UI designers have renamed themselves UX designers - because UX designers are in greater demand - but are poorly qualified to actually assess and design for usability. There are also more and more designers crossing over from other design disciplines - graphics designers and print designers are often transitioning to UX design and the results are not always good. To some degree they can bring fresh ideas to the table, but often it results in a lot of designs that aren't competent at a usability level. > "If a significant portion of your user-base is computer illiterate, which will often be the default, it does well to UI to the lowest common denominator." I agree with the gist of what you're saying - but I think there needs to be a bit more nuance here. We're no longer in the 90s, the userbase for most websites and apps largely are not computer illiterate. They are in fact quite technically savvy overall - the issue isn't that your users are technologically ignorant, it's that they're not skilled in your software. If you look at the modern smartphone user they have a lot of learned expectations and behaviors and they know full well how everything works. The issue comes only when you try to break the established knowledge and do your own thing - which is exactly what the blog post here is about, icons that aren't universally established and have vague meaning to non-experts (and even some experts). One of the hardest things as frontend people is retaining the first-time-user mindset. You use your own software day in and day out and become experts at it, and your designs and considerations start swimming around that - you are more inclined to build power-user features and implement power-user shortcuts, and you gradually lose the ability to assess your own product from the perspective of a new (or even old, but irregular) user. The issue isn't that people are technologically illiterate, but that they are not specialists in a very particular expert-user UI you may have designed. This is made worse when designers start openly egging competitors' UIs, so now not only are you pursuing a confusingly non-standard UI, but this non-standardness starts becoming a meme in your specific niche. The distinction is important IMO - with the exception of a few demographics (retirees?) it's actually pretty safe now to expect a reasonable amount of tech savvy from your users, but you have to recognize what you think is universal trained user behavior vs. actually widespread user behavior.

forgottenpass 11y ago
In frontend land this is often the distinction between UI vs. UX. UX means usability, UI is the more aesthetic side of the exercise, though of course there is considerable overlap I've never understood how the concept of "UI" ever evolved to not encompass usability at it's core. I was happy to cede UI territory to the designers who said they'd do it better. Even when I was insulted to my face that because I'm a programmer and liked my arcane typing based interfaces for myself, so therefore I couldn't possibly understand making usable software for others. I bit my tongue, put my head down and went back to the things I wanted to focus on anyway. In the time since, user interfaces have experienced gradual incremental improvement just like everything in computing. But rather than going for "nothing else left to take away" design (or perhaps due to a shortsighted version of it) visual clutter was just turned into mental clutter. The number of WIMP nouns and verbs the average user has to understand are higher than ever, with less consistent behavior, and overflowing with one-off slightly different implementations to remember. Rather than any grand improvements, I've only seen degenerate phenomenons for making user experience worse. My favorites being: A well-managed brand name, good aesthetics and software reputation means that when someone (eg. Apple) ships a bad interaction, users that would (rightly) blame the software first before working around it, start blaming themselves first for "not getting it". Or that products evolving quickly (such as the early years of Facebook) are bewilderingly unusable to people that don't log in often enough to keep up with the UI changes as they happen in small increments. Then after waking up from their bender the UI folks start talking loudly about UX. I thought that was the goddamn point all along! Oh, but what do I possibly know? I only have formal training in what we used to call Human-Computer Interaction, and I quite like my console shells. And shells have bad aesthetics, so they must have bad ux too. And at least the UI guys managed to get 1 of the 2, I guess I'll just go back to holding my tongue now.
dirtyaura 11y ago
No, the term "UI design" has always meant the “usability” side of the design in professional circles. The aesthetic side has been called visual design or graphic design. However, the history of the whole field has been a fight to find authority inside organisations, and words has been weapons and casualties of this battle. UI design was always about the “usability”, the “how” and “why” of the design, not the looks. For example, the first edition of Alan Cooper’s About Face (1995) had a subtitle "The Essentials of User Interface Design”. It was more or less the UI design bible back in the 90s for the practitioners. However, back then, most managers and technical people incorrectly thought that the job of UI designer was to “make this ugly thing we built pretty”. This caused a problem for UI design as a profession, and people inside the field started to use a term "Interaction Design”. It was also a better term because it highlighted the temporal part of the design exercise: the user interaction flow. This is often the hardest part to design right and the term clearly separates the interaction design from designing visual surfaces. This change was reflected in the 2nd edition of About Face (2003), the subtitle was now “The Essentials of Interaction Design”. Also, IxDA, the Interaction Design Association, was founded the same year. At the same time, there was another rising term, user experience design. It was used especially by Don Norman. While Interaction Designers tried to drive home the point that the interaction design was a separate profession than visual design, Norman took a more holistic approach. Instead of separating the fields, he actually highlighted the importance of aesthetics for the user experience, which culminated in his book Emotional Design (2005). By the late 2000s, most of the leading software organisations had already understood the importance of UI design. Also, the rise of the startup culture and smaller teams meant that more and more people in our field worked on the product-level decisions, instead of working on the nitty-gritty of technical architecture. User experience design grew to mean a more holistic take on how the user experiences the product and became more or less the umbrella term for the field.

forgottenpass 11y ago

In frontend land this is often the distinction between UI vs. UX. UX means usability, UI is the more aesthetic side of the exercise, though of course there is considerable overlap I've never understood how the concept of "UI" ever evolved to not encompass usability at it's core. I was happy to cede UI territory to the designers who said they'd do it better. Even when I was insulted to my face that because I'm a programmer and liked my arcane typing based interfaces for myself, so therefore I couldn't possibly understand making usable software for others. I bit my tongue, put my head down and went back to the things I wanted to focus on anyway. In the time since, user interfaces have experienced gradual incremental improvement just like everything in computing. But rather than going for "nothing else left to take away" design (or perhaps due to a shortsighted version of it) visual clutter was just turned into mental clutter. The number of WIMP nouns and verbs the average user has to understand are higher than ever, with less consistent behavior, and overflowing with one-off slightly different implementations to remember. Rather than any grand improvements, I've only seen degenerate phenomenons for making user experience worse. My favorites being: A well-managed brand name, good aesthetics and software reputation means that when someone (eg. Apple) ships a bad interaction, users that would (rightly) blame the software first before working around it, start blaming themselves first for "not getting it". Or that products evolving quickly (such as the early years of Facebook) are bewilderingly unusable to people that don't log in often enough to keep up with the UI changes as they happen in small increments. Then after waking up from their bender the UI folks start talking loudly about UX. I thought that was the goddamn point all along! Oh, but what do I possibly know? I only have formal training in what we used to call Human-Computer Interaction, and I quite like my console shells. And shells have bad aesthetics, so they must have bad ux too. And at least the UI guys managed to get 1 of the 2, I guess I'll just go back to holding my tongue now.

dirtyaura 11y ago

No, the term "UI design" has always meant the “usability” side of the design in professional circles. The aesthetic side has been called visual design or graphic design. However, the history of the whole field has been a fight to find authority inside organisations, and words has been weapons and casualties of this battle. UI design was always about the “usability”, the “how” and “why” of the design, not the looks. For example, the first edition of Alan Cooper’s About Face (1995) had a subtitle "The Essentials of User Interface Design”. It was more or less the UI design bible back in the 90s for the practitioners. However, back then, most managers and technical people incorrectly thought that the job of UI designer was to “make this ugly thing we built pretty”. This caused a problem for UI design as a profession, and people inside the field started to use a term "Interaction Design”. It was also a better term because it highlighted the temporal part of the design exercise: the user interaction flow. This is often the hardest part to design right and the term clearly separates the interaction design from designing visual surfaces. This change was reflected in the 2nd edition of About Face (2003), the subtitle was now “The Essentials of Interaction Design”. Also, IxDA, the Interaction Design Association, was founded the same year. At the same time, there was another rising term, user experience design. It was used especially by Don Norman. While Interaction Designers tried to drive home the point that the interaction design was a separate profession than visual design, Norman took a more holistic approach. Instead of separating the fields, he actually highlighted the importance of aesthetics for the user experience, which culminated in his book Emotional Design (2005). By the late 2000s, most of the leading software organisations had already understood the importance of UI design. Also, the rise of the startup culture and smaller teams meant that more and more people in our field worked on the product-level decisions, instead of working on the nitty-gritty of technical architecture. User experience design grew to mean a more holistic take on how the user experiences the product and became more or less the umbrella term for the field.