4 ms·

My experience is a lot of money gets burnt making designs match some on-brand design that looks awesome in mockups but is worse for the user than just using the

My experience is a lot of money gets burnt making designs match some on-brand design that looks awesome in mockups but is worse for the user than just using the platform default GUI widgets with maybe some light color theming. Worse if they decide to customize widget behavior too (guaranteed to be worse than default—may look cool but there will be jank, broken state, and more) or do any special snowflake navigation crap when some normal and platform appropriate pattern would do. This adds cost and worsens UX. It has less to do with making the app look attractive from the user’s perspective than with designer ego and satisfying the brand-over-all-other-concerns product owner types. Usually there’s little discussion of features that will be missed so the widgets can work worse, but design flair should, properly, be part of the discussion of what your velocity may look like. [edit] I suspect some of the motivation for designers here is a combo of selling designs to clients or product owners, who are easily flattered that they need this kind of thing, and their version of résumé-driven-development—that is, highly-custom trendy screenshots probably “pop” a lot better in a portfolio than a better-functioning app that looks more ordinary.

cyberferret 7y ago
> that is, highly-custom trendy screenshots probably “pop” a lot better in a portfolio than a better-functioning app that looks more ordinary. I think you hit the nail on the head here. The designers that have worked on my site seem to be focused on screens that they can add to their Dribble portfolio rather than getting the job done in an efficient way for my users.
- shantly 7y ago
  I know we’ve been busy declaring victory over all those old-timer print designers who’d transitioned to web & software, and hailing the rise of the “digital native” designer for like the whole past decade or so, but to me it looks like they’re all trying to make posters rather than software.
rlpb 7y ago
On the other hand, ignore the last fashions in UI design at your peril. Users will consider your website or app "dated" and adoption will suffer.
- shantly 7y ago
  Basically irrelevant on platforms other than the web—no iOS user will think you app is dated because it looks like the apps Apple makes, ditto Windows, Android, and so on—and even there I’ve seen this repeated as folk-wisdom but have never seen anyone back it up with data, nor go a step farther and find out exactly how trendy and how expensive a GUI needs to be for a given audience not to bounce (it seems, surely, this would not be constant) Meanwhile lots of successful sites don’t follow design trends the way every designer and startup seem to want to, and others do spend a lot of money fucking up their UI but not in a trendy or attractive way, particularly, and are successful nonetheless. I suspect “minimum viable design” is much cheaper and more straightforward than a lot of what’s being treated as necessary to attract users, and has less to do with following trends or cute animations or whatever than simply appearing to have been updated some time later than 2005.

cyberferret 7y ago

> that is, highly-custom trendy screenshots probably “pop” a lot better in a portfolio than a better-functioning app that looks more ordinary. I think you hit the nail on the head here. The designers that have worked on my site seem to be focused on screens that they can add to their Dribble portfolio rather than getting the job done in an efficient way for my users.

shantly 7y ago
I know we’ve been busy declaring victory over all those old-timer print designers who’d transitioned to web & software, and hailing the rise of the “digital native” designer for like the whole past decade or so, but to me it looks like they’re all trying to make posters rather than software.

rlpb 7y ago

On the other hand, ignore the last fashions in UI design at your peril. Users will consider your website or app "dated" and adoption will suffer.

shantly 7y ago
Basically irrelevant on platforms other than the web—no iOS user will think you app is dated because it looks like the apps Apple makes, ditto Windows, Android, and so on—and even there I’ve seen this repeated as folk-wisdom but have never seen anyone back it up with data, nor go a step farther and find out exactly how trendy and how expensive a GUI needs to be for a given audience not to bounce (it seems, surely, this would not be constant) Meanwhile lots of successful sites don’t follow design trends the way every designer and startup seem to want to, and others do spend a lot of money fucking up their UI but not in a trendy or attractive way, particularly, and are successful nonetheless. I suspect “minimum viable design” is much cheaper and more straightforward than a lot of what’s being treated as necessary to attract users, and has less to do with following trends or cute animations or whatever than simply appearing to have been updated some time later than 2005.