8 ms·

UI is hard hear hear. ui is harder than back-end stuff in my opinion.

by jamieb 15y ago

hello_moto 15y ago
Why do you think many companies/organizations are giving UI work to interns or fresh grads? UI is hard UI sometime is "boring/tedious" work UI sometime is "just that, if it breaks, so what..." Meanwhile back-end stuff usually gets the hype: BigTable, MapReduce, billions load! Yet at the end of the day... if the user finds it hard...
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  Why do you think many companies/organizations are giving UI work to interns or fresh grads? There are many difficulties with UI, but the most relevant one here is that UI is a bike shed. Everyone's a critic. If you work in a big company you'll learn to dread the UI projects because you're going to have to sit in a room with fifteen people, at least fourteen of whom will dislike something about your approach and all of whom will offer suggestions. There will be 23 revisions and lots of compromises and turf battles and possibly blood, and usually the result will be the legendary horse that was designed by committee. This is why the author's primary complaint is the team was too big, not we didn't have the best UI people. Without mindful management the big team will squash your UI people no matter how good they are. Esoteric technical problems don't suffer from as much bikeshedding. Just as in the original parable of the bike shed, nobody wants to suggest changes to the nuclear reactor shielding. If you're the expert on reactor shielding you can basically run your part of the show. So the author's argument is: build a giant team that is prone to endless meetings, and you will select for traits that help people avoid endless meetings. People will retire into shells. They become narrow technical experts whom nobody wants to gainsay. They will focus on problems that your company already understands well, to take advantage of the cultural consensus which precludes endless argument. And only the young and naive will step forward to do something like UI, where every move is weighted down by bureaucracy and politics.
  - scorpioxy 15y ago
    This is especially true in healthcare(IT). So what if management(middle, and upper) are one of those critics and all they add to the equation is the constant back and forth on UI iterations as if coding UI interfaces is free or easy?
- devs1010 15y ago
  yeah but if the user loses a crapload of data because someone did something stupid on the server-side that can get the company in a lot of trouble. (even if they have backups, as it may take a day or 2 to get them in place) With UI bugs, it usually becomes obviously quickly that its not working and the user will then have to wait for it to work, but usually existing data, etc isn't in jeopardy
vecter 15y ago
UI is hard in the way that art is hard. It's difficult to understand what people really want or will value. Backend is hard in the way that building a skyscraper is hard. You need a solid design and framework, but you also have to make sure every wire runs in the right place. Managing complexity is really the problem there. Which is harder? I don't think they're very comparable, in the way that I don't know if creating beautiful art or building a skyscraper is harder.
- javert 15y ago
  This sounds remarkably like something pg would say. Not necessarily content-wise, but style-wise and topic-wise.
  - vecter 15y ago
    I guess his essays must be rubbing off on me lol.
- jamieb 15y ago
  Yes, that's the mistake most people make: back-end is engineering, front-end is art. No wonder we have such shitty front-ends. Sure, there are a whole slew of "applications" that will suffice with a basic form-driven UI accessing a rails or servlet back-end. And indeed there are applications like twitter where the entire complexity is in the complexity of the back-end. But then there are all the apps that simply aren't web-apps yet, because nobody has figured out how to do complex, rich, and above all Interactive, applications using fucking javascript. We're getting there, but people are writing the code to do it as I type (jquery, backbone, etc). So this is why UI is hard: its art and its engineering. And nobody thinks about the engineering part. And when they do, they have to find an engineer who can talk to the designer without scaring him/her (very often "her").
  - danmaz74 15y ago
    In a word... UI is architecture (in the original meaning, like "designing buildings where people live/work", not the IT one).
moonlighter 15y ago
Exeptional UI skills (both the design and the implementation of it) require taste, which isn't something you can just learn. You either have it, or you acquired and cultivated it. I've seen this time and time again: Great developers producing awfully horrible UIs. They sense that something doesn't 'look right' but can't fix it. It's usually a culmination of things, starting with basic layouts issues, spacing/margins off, wrong logical grouping/clustering of information on screen, off color schemes, the entire gamut. That, and a low tolerance for precision work. They would obsess over shaving off another fraction of a millisecond on a backend server transaction (nothing wrong with that, btw), but if something is a few pixels off, "who cares". Well, everyone who has to stare at your UI... It's also noteworthy that UX designers who rely on other developers to actually implement their designs get much more frustrated with such developers... Long story short, trying to shoehorn 'back-end' developers into UI jobs is a recipe for a crappy user experience.
- devs1010 15y ago
  Doing CSS and HTML is completely different than programming and its frustrating to go back and forth between the two. For example, if I'm tasked with fixing some bug or implementing a feature to where I have to write Java code and then also write some JavaScript (such as an AJAX) app, then also do HTML and CSS, by the time I get the functionality working with the Java / JavaScript code it can be hard to focus on that CSS / HTML.. sometimes doubts start to creep in about the code, things you want to double check, etc, thinking about maybe making small optimizations, etc, basically I think most engineers simply don't want to think about the HTML / CSS layout stuff because thats not what they're paid to do, for the most part, and if they make a mistake in the server-side logic, for example, by putting in something to where its not adequately supporting concurrency and data loss / corruption occurs, this is going to get them into a lot more trouble (damage reputation, etc) than if they messed up the spacing on the HTML page.. bottom line is if you want a UI done well then hire someone who spends all their time thinking about that sort of thing
rcneel 15y ago
Speaking of UI is hard - and I mean this in the most constructive way possible - this article was exceedingly hard for me to read with the transparent/light-grey "Mythical Man Month" ever-present behind the left-side of the text. Too cute.
moonlighter 15y ago
UI is like music. It's easy to listen to when done right, but even then, just listening to music all the time doesn't make you a musician.
- shareme 15y ago
  Its like listening to Japanese do English songs at a Karoke bar..sure they get the words right..but the understanding of the music and song is not there to allow them to carry that into their performance.
shin_lao 15y ago
You cannot compare UI and backend. It's like saying making music is harder than painting.

UI is hard hear hear. ui is harder than back-end stuff in my opinion.

by jamieb 15y ago

UI is hard hear hear. ui is harder than back-end stuff in my opinion.

Why do you think many companies/organizations are giving UI work to interns or fresh grads? UI is hard UI sometime is "boring/tedious" work UI sometime is "just that, if it breaks, so what..." Meanwhile back-end stuff usually gets the hype: BigTable, MapReduce, billions load! Yet at the end of the day... if the user finds it hard...

mechanical_fish 15y ago
Why do you think many companies/organizations are giving UI work to interns or fresh grads? There are many difficulties with UI, but the most relevant one here is that UI is a bike shed. Everyone's a critic. If you work in a big company you'll learn to dread the UI projects because you're going to have to sit in a room with fifteen people, at least fourteen of whom will dislike something about your approach and all of whom will offer suggestions. There will be 23 revisions and lots of compromises and turf battles and possibly blood, and usually the result will be the legendary horse that was designed by committee. This is why the author's primary complaint is the team was too big, not we didn't have the best UI people. Without mindful management the big team will squash your UI people no matter how good they are. Esoteric technical problems don't suffer from as much bikeshedding. Just as in the original parable of the bike shed, nobody wants to suggest changes to the nuclear reactor shielding. If you're the expert on reactor shielding you can basically run your part of the show. So the author's argument is: build a giant team that is prone to endless meetings, and you will select for traits that help people avoid endless meetings. People will retire into shells. They become narrow technical experts whom nobody wants to gainsay. They will focus on problems that your company already understands well, to take advantage of the cultural consensus which precludes endless argument. And only the young and naive will step forward to do something like UI, where every move is weighted down by bureaucracy and politics.
- scorpioxy 15y ago
  This is especially true in healthcare(IT). So what if management(middle, and upper) are one of those critics and all they add to the equation is the constant back and forth on UI iterations as if coding UI interfaces is free or easy?
devs1010 15y ago
yeah but if the user loses a crapload of data because someone did something stupid on the server-side that can get the company in a lot of trouble. (even if they have backups, as it may take a day or 2 to get them in place) With UI bugs, it usually becomes obviously quickly that its not working and the user will then have to wait for it to work, but usually existing data, etc isn't in jeopardy

vecter 15y ago

UI is hard in the way that art is hard. It's difficult to understand what people really want or will value. Backend is hard in the way that building a skyscraper is hard. You need a solid design and framework, but you also have to make sure every wire runs in the right place. Managing complexity is really the problem there. Which is harder? I don't think they're very comparable, in the way that I don't know if creating beautiful art or building a skyscraper is harder.

javert 15y ago
This sounds remarkably like something pg would say. Not necessarily content-wise, but style-wise and topic-wise.
- vecter 15y ago
  I guess his essays must be rubbing off on me lol.
jamieb 15y ago
Yes, that's the mistake most people make: back-end is engineering, front-end is art. No wonder we have such shitty front-ends. Sure, there are a whole slew of "applications" that will suffice with a basic form-driven UI accessing a rails or servlet back-end. And indeed there are applications like twitter where the entire complexity is in the complexity of the back-end. But then there are all the apps that simply aren't web-apps yet, because nobody has figured out how to do complex, rich, and above all Interactive, applications using fucking javascript. We're getting there, but people are writing the code to do it as I type (jquery, backbone, etc). So this is why UI is hard: its art and its engineering. And nobody thinks about the engineering part. And when they do, they have to find an engineer who can talk to the designer without scaring him/her (very often "her").
- danmaz74 15y ago
  In a word... UI is architecture (in the original meaning, like "designing buildings where people live/work", not the IT one).

moonlighter 15y ago

Exeptional UI skills (both the design and the implementation of it) require taste, which isn't something you can just learn. You either have it, or you acquired and cultivated it. I've seen this time and time again: Great developers producing awfully horrible UIs. They sense that something doesn't 'look right' but can't fix it. It's usually a culmination of things, starting with basic layouts issues, spacing/margins off, wrong logical grouping/clustering of information on screen, off color schemes, the entire gamut. That, and a low tolerance for precision work. They would obsess over shaving off another fraction of a millisecond on a backend server transaction (nothing wrong with that, btw), but if something is a few pixels off, "who cares". Well, everyone who has to stare at your UI... It's also noteworthy that UX designers who rely on other developers to actually implement their designs get much more frustrated with such developers... Long story short, trying to shoehorn 'back-end' developers into UI jobs is a recipe for a crappy user experience.

devs1010 15y ago
Doing CSS and HTML is completely different than programming and its frustrating to go back and forth between the two. For example, if I'm tasked with fixing some bug or implementing a feature to where I have to write Java code and then also write some JavaScript (such as an AJAX) app, then also do HTML and CSS, by the time I get the functionality working with the Java / JavaScript code it can be hard to focus on that CSS / HTML.. sometimes doubts start to creep in about the code, things you want to double check, etc, thinking about maybe making small optimizations, etc, basically I think most engineers simply don't want to think about the HTML / CSS layout stuff because thats not what they're paid to do, for the most part, and if they make a mistake in the server-side logic, for example, by putting in something to where its not adequately supporting concurrency and data loss / corruption occurs, this is going to get them into a lot more trouble (damage reputation, etc) than if they messed up the spacing on the HTML page.. bottom line is if you want a UI done well then hire someone who spends all their time thinking about that sort of thing

rcneel 15y ago

Speaking of UI is hard - and I mean this in the most constructive way possible - this article was exceedingly hard for me to read with the transparent/light-grey "Mythical Man Month" ever-present behind the left-side of the text. Too cute.

moonlighter 15y ago

UI is like music. It's easy to listen to when done right, but even then, just listening to music all the time doesn't make you a musician.

shareme 15y ago
Its like listening to Japanese do English songs at a Karoke bar..sure they get the words right..but the understanding of the music and song is not there to allow them to carry that into their performance.

shin_lao 15y ago

You cannot compare UI and backend. It's like saying making music is harder than painting.