5 ms·

We do pillory film, literary and food critics who are caught basing their review on a publicity still of the work in question. It is not unreasonable to expect

We do pillory film, literary and food critics who are caught basing their review on a publicity still of the work in question. It is not unreasonable to expect a critic to watch/read/eat/use the film/book/food/UI in question before calling its creator a "fucking hack".

bradleyland 16y ago
I need not take a bit of a cow pie to tell you that it will taste like shit. I can tell from where I'm sitting.
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- alexgartrell 16y ago
  It's a cute metaphor, but what would you think of eating a lobster from looking at one? If you're going to be the authority on the taste of cow shit (shit tastes like shit is, of course, a tautology), you better eat some cow shit.
  - danilocampos 16y ago
    You don't need to use an application to know that a close button that is sixty pixels large, with an appearance that's completely inconsistent with the rest of the application, along with the operating system at large, and is positioned in the wrong place... is poor design. http://readthefuckinghig.tumblr.com/post/2651530636/when-you-think-this-blog-makes-you-pessimistic http://readthefuckinghig.tumblr.com/post/2651530636/when-you... Half of using a visual interface is visual. You can tell a lot about the quality of a GUI-based application by the level of effort that went into making it look correct.
    - derefr 16y ago
      Or, to ground this in actual HCI terms: from a screenshot alone, you should be able to see the affordances of a design. If you need more than the screenshot to find your way around the app, the app is badly designed in other ways (mystery-meat navigation.) Thus, it is actually the Principle of Charity that would have us evaluate the app by a screenshot.
  - bradleyland 16y ago
    Let's run with the cow shit metaphor a bit. A large component of taste is smell, and I can tell without taking a bite that the smell of cow shit would foul any pleasant flavor. Likewise with UI, a large component of its quality is visual. There is plenty we can gather about an application design just by looking at it. That isn't unfair, it's just plain observation.
    - bad_user 16y ago
      Your nose is trained by generations upon generations to recognize shit as something bad. I also know a dog perfectly happy to eat his own shit, but that would refuse to eat a Big Mac or other fast-food. It's a 12 year old Rottweiler in perfect health with beautifully looking hair without special care. So I'm not sure our nose is doing a good job :)
jarin 16y ago
I think a screenshot is probably more than adequate if you're judging an application's visual appearance.
- msbarnett 16y ago
  It's sufficient only if you conflate design and visual aesthetics. Since the blog in question hammers on apps that don't follow the Apple HIG, a document dedicated to the argument that good design is a lot more than visual aesthetics, this is an oddly contradictory position for him to attempt to occupy.
  - jbri 16y ago
    Yes, good design is more than visual aesthetics. But you seem to be saying that the aesthetics are then not important, which is completely false. If it looks terrible, it's a bad design. Period. At best, top-notch effort in other areas can drag it up to the same approximate level as pristine-looking-but-utterly-unusable designs, which are still terrible. His position would only be contradictory if he somehow claimed that something was a good design based solely on a screenshot.
    - derleth 16y ago
      > If it looks terrible, it's a bad design. Looks terrible by whose standards? If you go by my standards, all Mac stuff has 'bad design' by this rule if only because of the font rendering.
  - danilocampos 16y ago
    Have you even read the blog? The UIs in question are, for the most part, immediately recognizable as bad. It's not about artistic or aesthetic interpretation. It's about this is not how any sane or competent person would design UI.
    - msbarnett 16y ago
      There are a few that are fairly cluttered visually, but the vast majority are simply different, and I can't say, looking at them, whether or not they'd be any good in practice because I haven't used them, and I'm not so full of myself as to believe that I know everything about something based on a single picture of it. For instance, there's nothing obviously wrong with the interface of the grammar app currently at the top of the blog, but he goes off on it like it shot his dog.

bradleyland 16y ago

I need not take a bit of a cow pie to tell you that it will taste like shit. I can tell from where I'm sitting.

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alexgartrell 16y ago
It's a cute metaphor, but what would you think of eating a lobster from looking at one? If you're going to be the authority on the taste of cow shit (shit tastes like shit is, of course, a tautology), you better eat some cow shit.
- danilocampos 16y ago
  You don't need to use an application to know that a close button that is sixty pixels large, with an appearance that's completely inconsistent with the rest of the application, along with the operating system at large, and is positioned in the wrong place... is poor design. http://readthefuckinghig.tumblr.com/post/2651530636/when-you-think-this-blog-makes-you-pessimistic http://readthefuckinghig.tumblr.com/post/2651530636/when-you... Half of using a visual interface is visual. You can tell a lot about the quality of a GUI-based application by the level of effort that went into making it look correct.
  - derefr 16y ago
    Or, to ground this in actual HCI terms: from a screenshot alone, you should be able to see the affordances of a design. If you need more than the screenshot to find your way around the app, the app is badly designed in other ways (mystery-meat navigation.) Thus, it is actually the Principle of Charity that would have us evaluate the app by a screenshot.
- bradleyland 16y ago
  Let's run with the cow shit metaphor a bit. A large component of taste is smell, and I can tell without taking a bite that the smell of cow shit would foul any pleasant flavor. Likewise with UI, a large component of its quality is visual. There is plenty we can gather about an application design just by looking at it. That isn't unfair, it's just plain observation.
  - bad_user 16y ago
    Your nose is trained by generations upon generations to recognize shit as something bad. I also know a dog perfectly happy to eat his own shit, but that would refuse to eat a Big Mac or other fast-food. It's a 12 year old Rottweiler in perfect health with beautifully looking hair without special care. So I'm not sure our nose is doing a good job :)

jarin 16y ago

I think a screenshot is probably more than adequate if you're judging an application's visual appearance.

msbarnett 16y ago
It's sufficient only if you conflate design and visual aesthetics. Since the blog in question hammers on apps that don't follow the Apple HIG, a document dedicated to the argument that good design is a lot more than visual aesthetics, this is an oddly contradictory position for him to attempt to occupy.
- jbri 16y ago
  Yes, good design is more than visual aesthetics. But you seem to be saying that the aesthetics are then not important, which is completely false. If it looks terrible, it's a bad design. Period. At best, top-notch effort in other areas can drag it up to the same approximate level as pristine-looking-but-utterly-unusable designs, which are still terrible. His position would only be contradictory if he somehow claimed that something was a good design based solely on a screenshot.
  - derleth 16y ago
    > If it looks terrible, it's a bad design. Looks terrible by whose standards? If you go by my standards, all Mac stuff has 'bad design' by this rule if only because of the font rendering.
- danilocampos 16y ago
  Have you even read the blog? The UIs in question are, for the most part, immediately recognizable as bad. It's not about artistic or aesthetic interpretation. It's about this is not how any sane or competent person would design UI.
  - msbarnett 16y ago
    There are a few that are fairly cluttered visually, but the vast majority are simply different, and I can't say, looking at them, whether or not they'd be any good in practice because I haven't used them, and I'm not so full of myself as to believe that I know everything about something based on a single picture of it. For instance, there's nothing obviously wrong with the interface of the grammar app currently at the top of the blog, but he goes off on it like it shot his dog.