5 ms·

I don't see why I should care about the opinion of designers when they're the ones responsible for such anti-features as vanishing scrollbars and hamburger menu

• BurningFrog 6y ago
  To be fair, we engineers also have plenty of UI war crimes to answer for :)
  • kbutler 6y ago
    But do we claim to be the experts, authorities, and judges of UI design? Well, ok, sometimes we do, but...yeah.
    • tingol 6y ago
      The smarter ones usually iterate based on user input.
      • a1369209993 6y ago
        To be fair, the smarter designers do too, but you don't hear about them because good design doesn't shove itself in your proverbial or literal face.
      • notatoad 6y ago
        and some of the designs that you don't personally like were undoubtedly the result of iterating based on user input - what actually tests well with users is very often not what the sort of people who post on hacker news would assume is the best design.
        • IggleSniggle 6y ago
          Yeah, just to add: and some designs come out of relentless targeting the impact of the bottom line at the expense of aesthetic or "pleasurable to use", some designs come out of snake-oil sales-people, etc etc. Different populations, different needs/wants/desires/cultural expectations. This is what focused advertising is all about. You can create one interface and say "everyone must use and learn to love this one," and that can work well. You can also gain immediate appeal by creating "one interface for each population of potential users" and relentlessly target your designs for each of those populations. I don't think we've fully recognized it in software engineering circles, but I think a lot of what are producing today is really about creating different experiences for different populations when the core capabilities have been there, available for free or on extremely cheap computing platforms, for anyone to use, for decades. I imagine that's fundamentally what the job of most software engineers is today: find the design that best matches the needs of the customer, and build a workflow for their needs.
  • Kaze404 6y ago
    Not just UI crimes either. I know of at least one that lost a company a couple hundred thousand due to clever engineering.
• yowlingcat 6y ago
  There's no need to care about their opinions, but what's being talked about here is not opinion. They're basic principles of color theory that have remain unchanged for centuries if not millennia. They became principles because they work. What do you think is more likely to be incorrect -- the millennia old principles, or your unsubstantiated, untrained opinion? I agree with your chagrin for vanishing scrollbars and hamburger menus, by the way. There ought to be a good term for designers who do the opposite of what good design does (which is make things which are usable).
• baddox 6y ago
  You’re asking why you should care about opinions that are different than your opinions?
• gnulinux 6y ago
  What's wrong with vanishing scrollbar? I prefer them this way. The first thing my emacs config file does is to hide scrollbar.
  • ryukafalz 6y ago
    Mine too, but I’m already familiar enough with Emacs that I don’t need it, and in general most things in Emacs are scrollable and you can recognize them as such once you’ve used it for a while. It would not be the right choice for a default config, or in a context where sometimes things are scrollable and sometimes they aren’t. (This is often the case on mobile phones; if there’s no scroll bar, the only way to tell if something is scrollable is to try it, if you think to.)
  • sporkologist 6y ago
    It adds to cognitive load, now I have to hunt for the frickin scrollbar... mystery-meat UI if you ask me.
  • mrob 6y ago
    It makes me waste valuable working memory remembering my position in the document, and the animation of it appearing and disappearing is distracting. I have a widescreen monitor so I have plenty of horizontal space already.
    • nwienert 6y ago
      Even though I agree with you re: pure black text, I sense a lack of understanding that should be present here. Design is always a trade off. Do you want more focus on content, or more information with less focus? Is your default setting more friendly to smaller or larger screens? Every person has different preferences, and every trade off has cost benefits you can run. Yet your statement here is very “black and white” (ahem), assuming everyone should think like you. That betrays a lack of nuance in understanding how design works. In the programming world, you also have these trade offs, yet it’s easier to avoid thinking about them at times. Static vs dynamic languages are full of trade offs like this. To avoid coming across as yelling at clouds, attempt to frame why it’s a trade off you prefer, rather than a platonic ideal others don’t see (because it isn’t).