6 ms·

If I could give one piece of advice for technical developers it’s that design isn’t all about the way it looks, it’s about the way it works. To expand on that,

by gdubs 6y ago

If I could give one piece of advice for technical developers it’s that design isn’t all about the way it looks, it’s about the way it works. To expand on that, it’s how the pieces fit together within your set of constraints. There’s a LOT in common with what makes code beautiful or not. You get to the essential; nothing more, nothing less. This doesn’t mean “minimalist” , per se — just be wary of ornamentation that doesn’t add value. A design can be award-winning without much “flash”. A readable font. A thoughtful, consistent, grid, that gives the content some air. Color choices based on accessibility, constrained to a palette that has some meaning for the project, etc. Don’t be afraid to learn about design! Look to resources like IDEO, who take a principled approach to design that’s not superficial. Think about the field of Architecture, where engineering and aesthetics have been combined for centuries — and where the same concerns of “essential” vs “ornamental” remain an active area of debate to this day.

clairity 6y ago
> "...that gives the content some air." lots of whitespace and "air" has become especially fashionable in the past many years. it makes design easier in some ways without necessarily pushing it forward. yes, it forces more conscientiousness of essentiality and contribution of each element (a good thing), but it's also used as an ipso facto justification to resist change and meeting needs (a bad thing). i love seeing designs that are intricate yet coherent. that seems to push boundaries more than "air". that approach seems more challenging than "cut as many elements as necessary to achieve a desired white space ratio".
- gdubs 6y ago
  Yes, great point! Even the best design principles can fall into 'trend' territory if they're not applied intentionally, to solve an actual problem. Exceptions definitely make the rule, and a site might find that extreme information density is what's called for. It really comes down to being intentional, being wary of trends for trends sake, and hammering on the constraints, and the problem one is trying to solve for the user.
- meristem 6y ago
  Can you tell me more about how more whitespace makes design easier?
  - LoSboccacc 6y ago
    it's a consequence of how people handle complexity here we call it the deer - headlight problem. why doesn't the deer dodge? because it's a novel situation, he's under pressure to understand and there's no frame of reference for instincts to take over same with non driven users (users that aren't doing a specific job) having a novel interface, they don't know which operations and options are irreversibile and so get frozen trying to understand everything the computers tells them at once and once they're overwhelmed they just get stuck giving UX air is a good catchall that both forces you to parcel only what's important for your user and help user not getting overwhelmed by options a more detailed advice would be to present branching decisions in order of commitment and only showing the relevant options at each step, but more whitespace is a good rule of thumb because it forces you into wizards without becoming a mouthful like this one, and gives you enough agency to come up with alternatives design to wizards of you can get by with other representations of the data to be manipulated
- baddox 6y ago
  I don't see how it's a justification to resist change any more than any other recommendation is inherently a justification to resist change that violates the recommendation.
- galfarragem 6y ago
  Design is more complicated than just 'give content some air'. Here[0] doing that would be a recipe to disaster. I'm a user of this tool and it really works like it is. I doubt that making it look more trandy would make it more functional. [0] https://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/assets/img-bru/mainscr.png https://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/assets/img-bru/mainscr.p...
  - murermader 6y ago
    Just because you got used to this tool, does not mean it is good UX. To me this looks really cluttered, and I would be overwhelmed, if I looked at all those options for the first time. And I don't even see a reason that all these different modes need to be visible at the same time. It also takes up alot of space. There are probably many ways to make this more user friendly, but if it works for you, thats great
    - balfirevic 6y ago
      > Just because you got used to this tool, does not mean it is good UX. To me this looks really cluttered, and I would be overwhelmed, if I looked at all those options for the first time. It is also true that looking cluttered at first sight does not mean it's not good UX.
    - wildrhythms 6y ago
      Airplane cockpit design is also "cluttered", but the people who will be using the cockpit interface (trained pilots) want that. The cockpit is designed for the pilot, and in every case design should be catered to the needs of the user. I work in UX specifically and try to oppose designing same-y interfaces at every turn. Different apps have different users with different needs. Unfortunately, this is an uphill battle as we've established some mystical need for "branded" interfaces that all look and act the same, regardless of the function or user need.
      - rusticpenn 6y ago
        Airplanes are driven by people who are trained specifically for this purpose, Software tools don't have this requirement.
systemvoltage 6y ago
I think the problem is also with non-technical people who focus on aesthetics and push technical folks to make the product bloated. Design education would help project managers, and non-tech customers who are requesting that product or feature. This is such a common problem that there is a meme about it "Can you make it pop a little more?". Providing advice to technical folks is just a small part of this problem.
- gdubs 6y ago
  When I was first starting out it was, "can we make it edgier?" The IDEO philosophy – which has really influenced a lot of Silicon Valley's best teams – is all about what you're saying. Design Thinking is really about making everyone on the team a designer. Everyone has their speciality, but the Designer's role is to bring everyone together with a process that involves everyone. This was the approach used by Apple when they first launched their Apple Stores, twenty years ago. Rather than impose a design created in a vacuum, they brought together a diverse team that included someone representing the retail employee perspective.
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    I mostly agree with your parent post and your response. I think when technical people who have excellent understanding of user needs usually produce better product/service than designers getting together in a room with post-it notes - this may be an unpopular opinion but I've seen it time and again - "Design Thinking" is largely a buzz word in all places I've worked. Also, just to nitpick - Apple has produced some of the worst products with no understanding of what the user wants - for e.g. Apple Music App. Also, Google, a recent one - Google Meet hides its mute/unmute button and in a completely undiscoverable way. Imagine driving a car where the brake pedal disappears only to appear when you hover your arm in a particular position left of the steering wheel. Now you can apply brakes. That's what they're doing with Google Meet, when I want to unmute to say something, I have to hover my mouse on the bottom of the screen and the unmute button pops up. Why isn't it always visible!? If I were leading that project, I would ask the team to scratch the entire UI and rebuild it and make sure these things don't happen again.
ryanSrich 6y ago
> "way it looks, it’s about the way it works" Dangerous to separate these. Poorly looking sites have poor experiences. Of course, aesthetics are subjective, so I'm speaking generally here. My philosophy for design is to always, without exception, strive for a good looking and functioning site. You can't have a site that works well that looks like shit. Conversely you can often find sites that look great but are absolutely unusable.
- gdubs 6y ago
  Our points are not at odds. Something 'brutalist' might be very fitting in certain contexts. In most scenarios, creating something that's 'easy on the eyes' is a very important constraint of the design. My main point is that beauty in design emerges from a graceful balancing act between all of the conflicting constraints on a project. It rarely emerges by enforcing a facade on top of something. The best Visual Designers have superb pattern-recognition skills for applying principles they've become familiar with in their education and professional work. They can quickly recognize a certain type of problem, and call on their depth of experience to apply a solution. But even the best can slip into habit of using well-worn tricks in situations where perhaps a different approach would be more fitting.
- CharlesW 6y ago
  > Poorly looking sites have poor experiences. […] You can't have a site that works well that looks like shit. There are many sites that work well even though they look like shit. Craigslist is a good example.
  - ryanSrich 6y ago
    What makes craigslist look like shit? It's boring sure, but it doesn't look like shit. Many designer portfolios I see with hideous colors and abstract out of proportion illustrations are much worse looking than craigslist.
    - CharlesW 6y ago
      > What makes craigslist look like shit? You said "poorly looking sites" can't work well. But Craigslist works fine, even though it's visual design is as homely as anything you'll find. The point is that "visual design" is not "design". If you don't like my example, surely you can think of others.
the_arun 6y ago
You mean the User Experience (UX) is more important than User Interface (UI)?
- gdubs 6y ago
  No, that's not what I mean at all. What I'm saying is that beauty in design doesn't come from slapping a facade onto something. It comes from a harmonious relationship between all the elements, adding up to something that solves the particular 'problem' of that site. UI is a specialization within UX, the way databases are a specialization within Computer Science. CS deals more broadly in the constraints of memory, time, resources, etc. Databases deal with the same things, but through a specific lens. UX deals with a set of constraints as well. The business needs, the user needs, etc. UI deals with a narrower subset of those constraints. The fonts you choose, the colors you choose, the information density – if these are intentional choices based on your particular set of constraints, you'll end up with something elegant. That elegance is what makes something feel right.
  - jbverschoor 6y ago
    Design vs Illustration. Design is technical. Illustration is creative.
  - the_arun 6y ago
    Makes sense now. Thanks for explaining!
dgb23 6y ago
I agree! You can find aesthetics, design and UX all the way down to programming languages. In fact a UI is a programming language, just a visual, and usually very constrained one (for better or worse).
crazygringo 6y ago
> design isn’t all about the way it looks, it’s about the way it works. That's a dangerous thing to say, I think. Because the way it looks is the way it works. A huge part of design is managing the prominence (and presence/absence) of various elements, so people understand what something does, and find it as effortless as possible to find and take the actions they want. Prominence is managed by relative size, weight, hue, brightness, saturation, shadow, whitespace, opacity, ornamentation, vertical ordering, horizontal ordering, and so on. All of those things are how it "looks". Presence/absence is managed by hierarchy, expand, hover, etc. All of those are also how it looks, by what's removed or shown. I think I agree with where you're coming from, especially in your last paragraph. I'm just worried that your first sentence is easily misinterpretable as "as long as all the information is on the webpage, fonts/colors/spacing are mostly irrelevant".
- CharlesW 6y ago
  > Because the way it looks is the way it works. You're thinking of visual design. That's obviously a significant part of a thing's design, but design is about so much more.
- gdubs 6y ago
  We're mostly talking about the same thing. Simply put, I'm primarily talking about the distinction between choosing something because it looks cool – and sometimes what looks cool is a very important constraint – vs having intention in one's design choices. Like you point out, things like prominence, progressive disclosure, etc. Those aren't superficial choices; they actually serve a purpose, and are a way to fit within a set of constraints. For most, yes, it will end up represented in 'how it looks', but I'm underlining the importance of 'how it got there'. (Aside: worth just highlighting for everyone that not everyone is sighted, that accessibility matters, and that not every design choice is visual.)
yutopia 6y ago
I agree with the overall point that design is about more than looks, but my impression is that design as practiced by the IDEO / Stanford d.school / design thinking crowd is a quite different beast from what’s being taught inside most architecture schools. The former tries to distill design into a largely linear, repeatable process (that can be peddled by consultants, if I’m being a bit cynical), the latter would characterize such approaches as reductionist and limiting.
- meristem 6y ago
  Consultant here! Design is taught as a holistic process. I have not seen "largely linear" in a decade. It is complex, iterative and grounded in research. At least that is my experience and how I have seen it taught. YMMV.
  - yutopia 6y ago
    Huh I admit my impressions may not reflect the current state of things.
cosmodisk 6y ago
What I particularly like about IDEO is that they hire non designers. It's very possible to have a biologist, historian,and and a designer sitting at one table trying to come up with new concepts.
denster 6y ago
What's a "non-artistic developer"? I think: 1) Design is like a muscle, you can always develop it 2) Digital experiences [1] are all around us! And they play a more pivotal role in our lives as time goes on. So, hit the gym (practice) & with time everyone can improve. [1] As the https://mintdata.com https://mintdata.com founder here, I'm highly biased -- I'm not a designer but certainly aspire to improve along this dimension.
- JaumeGreen 6y ago
  Why should we? I agree that it's trainable, but to create a good icon a first timer can spend several hours. Several hours in which they could be doing work that they have trained for. If one intents to be a sole developer then yes, they have to improve in all fields, but when one is in a team one has to let some things go, and let people better than them on that field do them.
  - seumars 6y ago
    Design isn't about drawing pictograms, so nice strawman. The type of design thinking implied in the comment is more about knowing –or at least have the faintest idea about what a visually cohesive system is and could look like. There's no such thing as a "sole developer" in software development because your code is inherently tied to function and that function tied to its design. The more you value that concept the more you "train" your understanding of modern graphic design.

by gdubs 6y ago

clairity 6y ago

> "...that gives the content some air." lots of whitespace and "air" has become especially fashionable in the past many years. it makes design easier in some ways without necessarily pushing it forward. yes, it forces more conscientiousness of essentiality and contribution of each element (a good thing), but it's also used as an ipso facto justification to resist change and meeting needs (a bad thing). i love seeing designs that are intricate yet coherent. that seems to push boundaries more than "air". that approach seems more challenging than "cut as many elements as necessary to achieve a desired white space ratio".

gdubs 6y ago
Yes, great point! Even the best design principles can fall into 'trend' territory if they're not applied intentionally, to solve an actual problem. Exceptions definitely make the rule, and a site might find that extreme information density is what's called for. It really comes down to being intentional, being wary of trends for trends sake, and hammering on the constraints, and the problem one is trying to solve for the user.
meristem 6y ago
Can you tell me more about how more whitespace makes design easier?
- LoSboccacc 6y ago
  it's a consequence of how people handle complexity here we call it the deer - headlight problem. why doesn't the deer dodge? because it's a novel situation, he's under pressure to understand and there's no frame of reference for instincts to take over same with non driven users (users that aren't doing a specific job) having a novel interface, they don't know which operations and options are irreversibile and so get frozen trying to understand everything the computers tells them at once and once they're overwhelmed they just get stuck giving UX air is a good catchall that both forces you to parcel only what's important for your user and help user not getting overwhelmed by options a more detailed advice would be to present branching decisions in order of commitment and only showing the relevant options at each step, but more whitespace is a good rule of thumb because it forces you into wizards without becoming a mouthful like this one, and gives you enough agency to come up with alternatives design to wizards of you can get by with other representations of the data to be manipulated
baddox 6y ago
I don't see how it's a justification to resist change any more than any other recommendation is inherently a justification to resist change that violates the recommendation.
galfarragem 6y ago
Design is more complicated than just 'give content some air'. Here[0] doing that would be a recipe to disaster. I'm a user of this tool and it really works like it is. I doubt that making it look more trandy would make it more functional. [0] https://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/assets/img-bru/mainscr.png https://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/assets/img-bru/mainscr.p...
- murermader 6y ago
  Just because you got used to this tool, does not mean it is good UX. To me this looks really cluttered, and I would be overwhelmed, if I looked at all those options for the first time. And I don't even see a reason that all these different modes need to be visible at the same time. It also takes up alot of space. There are probably many ways to make this more user friendly, but if it works for you, thats great
  - balfirevic 6y ago
    > Just because you got used to this tool, does not mean it is good UX. To me this looks really cluttered, and I would be overwhelmed, if I looked at all those options for the first time. It is also true that looking cluttered at first sight does not mean it's not good UX.
  - wildrhythms 6y ago
    Airplane cockpit design is also "cluttered", but the people who will be using the cockpit interface (trained pilots) want that. The cockpit is designed for the pilot, and in every case design should be catered to the needs of the user. I work in UX specifically and try to oppose designing same-y interfaces at every turn. Different apps have different users with different needs. Unfortunately, this is an uphill battle as we've established some mystical need for "branded" interfaces that all look and act the same, regardless of the function or user need.
    - rusticpenn 6y ago
      Airplanes are driven by people who are trained specifically for this purpose, Software tools don't have this requirement.

systemvoltage 6y ago

I think the problem is also with non-technical people who focus on aesthetics and push technical folks to make the product bloated. Design education would help project managers, and non-tech customers who are requesting that product or feature. This is such a common problem that there is a meme about it "Can you make it pop a little more?". Providing advice to technical folks is just a small part of this problem.

gdubs 6y ago
When I was first starting out it was, "can we make it edgier?" The IDEO philosophy – which has really influenced a lot of Silicon Valley's best teams – is all about what you're saying. Design Thinking is really about making everyone on the team a designer. Everyone has their speciality, but the Designer's role is to bring everyone together with a process that involves everyone. This was the approach used by Apple when they first launched their Apple Stores, twenty years ago. Rather than impose a design created in a vacuum, they brought together a diverse team that included someone representing the retail employee perspective.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  I mostly agree with your parent post and your response. I think when technical people who have excellent understanding of user needs usually produce better product/service than designers getting together in a room with post-it notes - this may be an unpopular opinion but I've seen it time and again - "Design Thinking" is largely a buzz word in all places I've worked. Also, just to nitpick - Apple has produced some of the worst products with no understanding of what the user wants - for e.g. Apple Music App. Also, Google, a recent one - Google Meet hides its mute/unmute button and in a completely undiscoverable way. Imagine driving a car where the brake pedal disappears only to appear when you hover your arm in a particular position left of the steering wheel. Now you can apply brakes. That's what they're doing with Google Meet, when I want to unmute to say something, I have to hover my mouse on the bottom of the screen and the unmute button pops up. Why isn't it always visible!? If I were leading that project, I would ask the team to scratch the entire UI and rebuild it and make sure these things don't happen again.

ryanSrich 6y ago

> "way it looks, it’s about the way it works" Dangerous to separate these. Poorly looking sites have poor experiences. Of course, aesthetics are subjective, so I'm speaking generally here. My philosophy for design is to always, without exception, strive for a good looking and functioning site. You can't have a site that works well that looks like shit. Conversely you can often find sites that look great but are absolutely unusable.

gdubs 6y ago
Our points are not at odds. Something 'brutalist' might be very fitting in certain contexts. In most scenarios, creating something that's 'easy on the eyes' is a very important constraint of the design. My main point is that beauty in design emerges from a graceful balancing act between all of the conflicting constraints on a project. It rarely emerges by enforcing a facade on top of something. The best Visual Designers have superb pattern-recognition skills for applying principles they've become familiar with in their education and professional work. They can quickly recognize a certain type of problem, and call on their depth of experience to apply a solution. But even the best can slip into habit of using well-worn tricks in situations where perhaps a different approach would be more fitting.
CharlesW 6y ago
> Poorly looking sites have poor experiences. […] You can't have a site that works well that looks like shit. There are many sites that work well even though they look like shit. Craigslist is a good example.
- ryanSrich 6y ago
  What makes craigslist look like shit? It's boring sure, but it doesn't look like shit. Many designer portfolios I see with hideous colors and abstract out of proportion illustrations are much worse looking than craigslist.
  - CharlesW 6y ago
    > What makes craigslist look like shit? You said "poorly looking sites" can't work well. But Craigslist works fine, even though it's visual design is as homely as anything you'll find. The point is that "visual design" is not "design". If you don't like my example, surely you can think of others.

the_arun 6y ago

You mean the User Experience (UX) is more important than User Interface (UI)?

gdubs 6y ago
No, that's not what I mean at all. What I'm saying is that beauty in design doesn't come from slapping a facade onto something. It comes from a harmonious relationship between all the elements, adding up to something that solves the particular 'problem' of that site. UI is a specialization within UX, the way databases are a specialization within Computer Science. CS deals more broadly in the constraints of memory, time, resources, etc. Databases deal with the same things, but through a specific lens. UX deals with a set of constraints as well. The business needs, the user needs, etc. UI deals with a narrower subset of those constraints. The fonts you choose, the colors you choose, the information density – if these are intentional choices based on your particular set of constraints, you'll end up with something elegant. That elegance is what makes something feel right.
- jbverschoor 6y ago
  Design vs Illustration. Design is technical. Illustration is creative.
- the_arun 6y ago
  Makes sense now. Thanks for explaining!

dgb23 6y ago

I agree! You can find aesthetics, design and UX all the way down to programming languages. In fact a UI is a programming language, just a visual, and usually very constrained one (for better or worse).

crazygringo 6y ago

> design isn’t all about the way it looks, it’s about the way it works. That's a dangerous thing to say, I think. Because the way it looks is the way it works. A huge part of design is managing the prominence (and presence/absence) of various elements, so people understand what something does, and find it as effortless as possible to find and take the actions they want. Prominence is managed by relative size, weight, hue, brightness, saturation, shadow, whitespace, opacity, ornamentation, vertical ordering, horizontal ordering, and so on. All of those things are how it "looks". Presence/absence is managed by hierarchy, expand, hover, etc. All of those are also how it looks, by what's removed or shown. I think I agree with where you're coming from, especially in your last paragraph. I'm just worried that your first sentence is easily misinterpretable as "as long as all the information is on the webpage, fonts/colors/spacing are mostly irrelevant".

CharlesW 6y ago
> Because the way it looks is the way it works. You're thinking of visual design. That's obviously a significant part of a thing's design, but design is about so much more.
gdubs 6y ago
We're mostly talking about the same thing. Simply put, I'm primarily talking about the distinction between choosing something because it looks cool – and sometimes what looks cool is a very important constraint – vs having intention in one's design choices. Like you point out, things like prominence, progressive disclosure, etc. Those aren't superficial choices; they actually serve a purpose, and are a way to fit within a set of constraints. For most, yes, it will end up represented in 'how it looks', but I'm underlining the importance of 'how it got there'. (Aside: worth just highlighting for everyone that not everyone is sighted, that accessibility matters, and that not every design choice is visual.)

yutopia 6y ago

I agree with the overall point that design is about more than looks, but my impression is that design as practiced by the IDEO / Stanford d.school / design thinking crowd is a quite different beast from what’s being taught inside most architecture schools. The former tries to distill design into a largely linear, repeatable process (that can be peddled by consultants, if I’m being a bit cynical), the latter would characterize such approaches as reductionist and limiting.

meristem 6y ago
Consultant here! Design is taught as a holistic process. I have not seen "largely linear" in a decade. It is complex, iterative and grounded in research. At least that is my experience and how I have seen it taught. YMMV.
- yutopia 6y ago
  Huh I admit my impressions may not reflect the current state of things.

cosmodisk 6y ago

What I particularly like about IDEO is that they hire non designers. It's very possible to have a biologist, historian,and and a designer sitting at one table trying to come up with new concepts.

denster 6y ago

What's a "non-artistic developer"? I think: 1) Design is like a muscle, you can always develop it 2) Digital experiences [1] are all around us! And they play a more pivotal role in our lives as time goes on. So, hit the gym (practice) & with time everyone can improve. [1] As the https://mintdata.com https://mintdata.com founder here, I'm highly biased -- I'm not a designer but certainly aspire to improve along this dimension.

JaumeGreen 6y ago
Why should we? I agree that it's trainable, but to create a good icon a first timer can spend several hours. Several hours in which they could be doing work that they have trained for. If one intents to be a sole developer then yes, they have to improve in all fields, but when one is in a team one has to let some things go, and let people better than them on that field do them.
- seumars 6y ago
  Design isn't about drawing pictograms, so nice strawman. The type of design thinking implied in the comment is more about knowing –or at least have the faintest idea about what a visually cohesive system is and could look like. There's no such thing as a "sole developer" in software development because your code is inherently tied to function and that function tied to its design. The more you value that concept the more you "train" your understanding of modern graphic design.