6 ms·

Often the bad designs come from the designers themselves. Just as software developers often fall prey to "NIH", many designers feel the established design syste

Often the bad designs come from the designers themselves. Just as software developers often fall prey to "NIH", many designers feel the established design systems like Material are insufficient for some reason. That is OK, if you know the rules you can break them, but often they don't know the rules either (grid system, typography, color for accessibility) and want to make "their own mark" with some new creation that is highly idiosyncratic. This doesn't help much, but as in software, it seems to come down to "taste" which is nebulous. In the landing page for this book, there is an example of good (right) / bad(left) design. I have seen designers simply not know what to do with empty space, so they had to fill it with dividers, outlines, and doodads like the left design. I'd like to hear any strategy one has to deal with that. I have taken up Figma and Sketch so I can meet them "where they are" but still, plenty of disagreements can happen.

drBonkers 4y ago
> Just as software developers often fall prey to "NIH" What does NIH abbreviate?
- AgentOrange1234 4y ago
  Not invented here, probably?
- gdprrrr 4y ago
  Not invented here
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  Not invented here (I.e. if we didn’t make it then it’s either bad or bad for our use case).
- augustk 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here
throwway120385 4y ago
I don't have any strategies, but I've had designers also want to add unnecessary steps to a gui-driven process. One designer kept arguing about the cognitive load of having a user simply insert their credit card into the reader to signal intent to pay. They wanted a flow where the user would touch the UI to indicate whether they wanted to tap or insert or scan a coupon. There was no reason to do it that way. I don't want to get into the specifics but it's a flow everyone uses every day without thinking and we were adding a new input device. It's not like we were inventing an entirely new system. The designer just wanted to make the work more than it was.
- nobody9999 4y ago
  >It's not like we were inventing an entirely new system. The designer just wanted to make the work more than it was. Which is a good reason why fixed-price contracts make more sense in this context than a time and materials contract. How does the old saw[0] go again? It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It [0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/ Edit: Fixed formatting.
- JusticeJuice 4y ago
  This could be tested with usability studies and a good user researcher. Make a prototype of the 'fast' way, and the 'lower cognitive load' way. Try it with 15 people per prototype, track metrics, and ask people about the experience afterwards. Make sure everyone on the team has an open mind and see what sticks.
  - throwway120385 4y ago
    Our "usability study" is the tens or hundreds of thousands of people who use our UI entirely without issue every day. Market validation is better than any usability study you could pay for.
- iudqnolq 4y ago
  I hate that specific issue. Do not ask me if I want to tap a contactless card or insert my card. I'll do one or the other and then you'll know what I want. I call this dropdown-driven-design. "Our UI builder tool had this option, so we have to use it".
asoneth 4y ago
I think you deal with bad designers the same way you deal with bad developers. Try not to hire them in the first place, fire them if you can, and if you're stuck with them try to make sure they are occupied with tasks that will not cause too much overall damage.
- pelagic_sky 4y ago
  The horror stories I hear are usually when a Graphic Designer is given the role of a UX/UI designer. There is nothing that is going to quickly fix that situation other than getting them some much needed education and mentorship.
- Zardoz84 4y ago
  or use "ugly arm" method (I don't know if this is the correct English name of this). Ir, show to they two options. First a obviously ugly option that nobody would use. Then, show your desired option. They would use your desired option, perhaps with some minor changes, and they feel that did something.
  - asoneth 4y ago
    Not quite the same thing but I've heard of people putting "A Duck" in their designs, which is a superfluous design element that is included solely for the purpose of letting a micromanaging superior remove it so that they can feel like they contributed to the design. https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/ But whether it's a duck, anchor, strawman, whatever you call it -- the risk with proposing an obviously bad solution to make the good solutions look better is that every once in a while they'll pick the bad solution. I think it was a talk by Mike Monteiro where he explicitly cautioned against using this approach because it tends to backfire hilariously at the worst possible moment.
23B1 4y ago
The solution is to hire better designers, unfortunately. Savvy/wise/experienced ones know when to follow the rules, and when to break them. Edit: That might not seem like the most helpful advice, and I'm sorry you have to deal with this – but it's the most effective, without having to write an entire book. This book was written for industrial designers by an industrial designer, but I did find a lot of useful advice in here for designers on understanding the business mind, deferring to clients, embracing constraints and requirements, etc. https://www.amazon.com/Designers-Are-Wankers-Neville-Brody/dp/0955096804 https://www.amazon.com/Designers-Are-Wankers-Neville-Brody/d...
JusticeJuice 4y ago
Design is a field where there's no clear 'correct' answer, in a vast sea of opinions. Honestly UI design is surprsingly tame compared to other areas of design (interior, architecture, typography etc). If there's a uni near you, try go to a design critique where work is presented and discussed - it's intense. Debating work is a big part of being a designer. Strategies to deal with disagreements, frankly a big part of it is being comfortable disagreeing. If you want to get more into design, know they're going to happen, and that there's not a clear answer, and it's not personal. A good designer should know it's about the work and the idea not where or who it came from. Source: am a UI designer.
- gspencley 4y ago
  One of my pet peeves in software development is not doing enough upfront R&D into feature and product design. User feedback is often only collected after the feature has shipped, landed and users are forced to deal with the "upgrade." It's hard to take subjective matters, such as UI preferences, and draw objective conclusions from them ... but it can at least be done in the aggregate. Before "SaaS" took over software (and made modern computing mostly unappealing to me as an end-user), companies would have to spend quite a bit of resources doing focus groups and "beta testing" before that big product release. End users could be divided into the "early adopters" and the "review watchers", the latter group choosing to wait and decide whether or not it's worth "upgrading." There is no reason that feature and product design in software can't go through an R&D phase except for cost. It's often cheaper to do your R&D in-house even though it often misses the mark because "real" customers rarely use a product like those who are intimately familiar with all of its quirks and oddities. So, while you're correct that accessibility, usability and aesthetics will often vary from individual to individual ... I still think that companies could arrive at an objectively "right", or at least "best" design if they bothered to do more upfront R&D; soliciting user feedback and data from "real" end users very early on in the design and development process. Doesn't mean you will please everyone, but you can at least maximize the number of end users who are satisfied.
  - JusticeJuice 4y ago
    Hard agree. I've worked with specialised user researchers before and holy shit they're good. I've never ever once thought doing research was a waste of time. It's so worth the money. It's just really easy to get trapped in your own biases - often the bias of "This isn't that complicated, I understand it so the customer can too", and the "I know what they want" one. So in the face of 'we need to deliver fast', a lot of people won't take the time to invest in it. If anyones interested in research methods, highly reccomend this book. https://www.amazon.com/Universal-Methods-Design-Innovative-Effective/dp/1592537561 https://www.amazon.com/Universal-Methods-Design-Innovative-E...
izacus 4y ago
Honestly, I'd just once like to work with a designer that has heard of words longer than 5 letters. Every. Single. Darn. Design I get completely ignores the fact that the texts inside them won't be built from nice little short words with EXACTLY the correct letter counts (especially when localized). Which results in shit UIs like one I've just seen on Android where (in my language) the button literally just says "Tap to..." and every single label on a button is truncated and doesn't finish a word.
- astrospective 4y ago
  When I was a tester first thing I’d do was fill every text box with Ws just to see what ran over. Good to remember as a dev now.
- jstarfish 4y ago
  > Honestly, I'd just once like to work with a designer that has heard of words longer than 5 letters. I blame lorem ipsum. And Latin.
- pelagic_sky 4y ago
  You need to work with designers who are used to supporting localization. Try making a UI using Deutsch and tell me about spacing issues. :D
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  I agree, but would expand that to all parts of the design dealing with variable data, not just text (think thumbnails, avatars, etc). It’s too common for designs to that were beautiful on the canvas to fall apart once brought to life in the actual product. Some designers also don’t have a good grip on what’s actually feasible to engineer, adding in various details that in aggregate can bloat the time and effort required to build the design multiple times over.
- userbinator 4y ago
  I've seen many cases of the opposite, where despite plenty of room, text is inexplicably truncated to leave a huge amount of whitespace instead.
illiarian 4y ago
> many designers feel the established design systems like Material are insufficient for some reason Because Material is awful? In their original iteration they had to do a study with 600 people to find out that text inputs should look like text inputs https://medium.com/google-design/the-evolution-of-material-designs-text-fields-603688b3fe03 https://medium.com/google-design/the-evolution-of-material-d... Their latest abomination has almost nothing aligned optically: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1643607965935476737 https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1643607965935476737 When there are 5 elements, they follow 5 different guidelines: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1643682248959328258 https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1643682248959328258 > That is OK, if you know the rules you can break them, but often they don't know the rules either And that's the problem with what I call "dribbble-raised designers" ("designers" of Material UI included): they work for the designs to look nice in static screenshots on presentation pages without much scrutiny, and that's it.
- illiarian 4y ago
  On that note: you can't even imagine how bad Material UI is https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1645797661684170754?s=20 https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1645797661684170754?s=... and https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1643613144143519744?s=20 https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1643613144143519744?s=...
  - amatecha 4y ago
    Yo I thought those tweets might be from a few years ago and "they must have resolved those by now"... no, the tweets are literally from TODAY and SIX DAYS AGO. What the hell?! Sad times...
    - rchaud 4y ago
      I built a site using Material in 2018. Never again! I have to imagine that Google just leaves it as unmaintained, considering these issues are still happening.
- KyeRussell 4y ago
deckard1 4y ago
> not know what to do with empty space every PM everywhere. They simply cannot leave good enough alone. Eventually every site A/B tests its way until it becomes Reddit mobile site. No one asked for carousels but sites continue to use them. We are getting inundated with popups today. I don't want to say it's as bad as 1990s flash ad popups. But it's getting damn close now. Bullshit cookie popups. "This site is better on our mobile app" crap popups. Google sign in popup bullshit.[1] I would say anti-UX and anti-accessibility is very much the point of many sites. "Dark patterns" help conversion and the bottom line. Every site you visit is engaged in psychological warfare with you. [1] https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/174978821/stop-the-fucking-sign-in-pop-up?hl=en https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/174978821/stop-th...
- wolpoli 4y ago
  Thanks for posting the steps to turn off the Google Sign-in popup. It's annoying that it's buried through.
  - DangitBobby 4y ago
    Thank you for pointing this out, I don't think I would have visited the link otherwise!
- codedokode 4y ago
  Google popup is one of the worst, it often covers useful content, the only one that is worse is full-screen "give us your email" popup.
- DangitBobby 4y ago
  Honorable mentions: - Newsletter popups - Account creation nags on ostensibly free apps - Vanity flaps crowding the viewport - Sticky social buttons
KronisLV 4y ago
> I'd like to hear any strategy one has to deal with that. I have taken up Figma and Sketch so I can meet them "where they are" but still, plenty of disagreements can happen. One option would be to use a premade design system or a component library/framework that gives you a consistent look and feel, most of those design decisions having a good enough baseline. Then just add a color theme and some branding on top of it and call it a day. It will also increase your development velocity and save you from some pixel pushing. For an example of this, consider PrimeFaces: https://www.primefaces.org/ https://www.primefaces.org/ They have working components that are good enough (and support multiple themes, if need be), their own icon solution and also a CSS utility library, including stuff like layouts. For most projects it'll be enough to create something that works and looks okay.

drBonkers 4y ago

> Just as software developers often fall prey to "NIH" What does NIH abbreviate?

AgentOrange1234 4y ago
Not invented here, probably?
gdprrrr 4y ago
Not invented here
unsupp0rted 4y ago
Not invented here (I.e. if we didn’t make it then it’s either bad or bad for our use case).
augustk 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here

throwway120385 4y ago

I don't have any strategies, but I've had designers also want to add unnecessary steps to a gui-driven process. One designer kept arguing about the cognitive load of having a user simply insert their credit card into the reader to signal intent to pay. They wanted a flow where the user would touch the UI to indicate whether they wanted to tap or insert or scan a coupon. There was no reason to do it that way. I don't want to get into the specifics but it's a flow everyone uses every day without thinking and we were adding a new input device. It's not like we were inventing an entirely new system. The designer just wanted to make the work more than it was.

nobody9999 4y ago
>It's not like we were inventing an entirely new system. The designer just wanted to make the work more than it was. Which is a good reason why fixed-price contracts make more sense in this context than a time and materials contract. How does the old saw[0] go again? It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It [0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/ Edit: Fixed formatting.
JusticeJuice 4y ago
This could be tested with usability studies and a good user researcher. Make a prototype of the 'fast' way, and the 'lower cognitive load' way. Try it with 15 people per prototype, track metrics, and ask people about the experience afterwards. Make sure everyone on the team has an open mind and see what sticks.
- throwway120385 4y ago
  Our "usability study" is the tens or hundreds of thousands of people who use our UI entirely without issue every day. Market validation is better than any usability study you could pay for.
iudqnolq 4y ago
I hate that specific issue. Do not ask me if I want to tap a contactless card or insert my card. I'll do one or the other and then you'll know what I want. I call this dropdown-driven-design. "Our UI builder tool had this option, so we have to use it".

asoneth 4y ago

I think you deal with bad designers the same way you deal with bad developers. Try not to hire them in the first place, fire them if you can, and if you're stuck with them try to make sure they are occupied with tasks that will not cause too much overall damage.

pelagic_sky 4y ago
The horror stories I hear are usually when a Graphic Designer is given the role of a UX/UI designer. There is nothing that is going to quickly fix that situation other than getting them some much needed education and mentorship.
Zardoz84 4y ago
or use "ugly arm" method (I don't know if this is the correct English name of this). Ir, show to they two options. First a obviously ugly option that nobody would use. Then, show your desired option. They would use your desired option, perhaps with some minor changes, and they feel that did something.
- asoneth 4y ago
  Not quite the same thing but I've heard of people putting "A Duck" in their designs, which is a superfluous design element that is included solely for the purpose of letting a micromanaging superior remove it so that they can feel like they contributed to the design. https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/ But whether it's a duck, anchor, strawman, whatever you call it -- the risk with proposing an obviously bad solution to make the good solutions look better is that every once in a while they'll pick the bad solution. I think it was a talk by Mike Monteiro where he explicitly cautioned against using this approach because it tends to backfire hilariously at the worst possible moment.

23B1 4y ago

The solution is to hire better designers, unfortunately. Savvy/wise/experienced ones know when to follow the rules, and when to break them. Edit: That might not seem like the most helpful advice, and I'm sorry you have to deal with this – but it's the most effective, without having to write an entire book. This book was written for industrial designers by an industrial designer, but I did find a lot of useful advice in here for designers on understanding the business mind, deferring to clients, embracing constraints and requirements, etc. https://www.amazon.com/Designers-Are-Wankers-Neville-Brody/dp/0955096804 https://www.amazon.com/Designers-Are-Wankers-Neville-Brody/d...

JusticeJuice 4y ago

Design is a field where there's no clear 'correct' answer, in a vast sea of opinions. Honestly UI design is surprsingly tame compared to other areas of design (interior, architecture, typography etc). If there's a uni near you, try go to a design critique where work is presented and discussed - it's intense. Debating work is a big part of being a designer. Strategies to deal with disagreements, frankly a big part of it is being comfortable disagreeing. If you want to get more into design, know they're going to happen, and that there's not a clear answer, and it's not personal. A good designer should know it's about the work and the idea not where or who it came from. Source: am a UI designer.

gspencley 4y ago
One of my pet peeves in software development is not doing enough upfront R&D into feature and product design. User feedback is often only collected after the feature has shipped, landed and users are forced to deal with the "upgrade." It's hard to take subjective matters, such as UI preferences, and draw objective conclusions from them ... but it can at least be done in the aggregate. Before "SaaS" took over software (and made modern computing mostly unappealing to me as an end-user), companies would have to spend quite a bit of resources doing focus groups and "beta testing" before that big product release. End users could be divided into the "early adopters" and the "review watchers", the latter group choosing to wait and decide whether or not it's worth "upgrading." There is no reason that feature and product design in software can't go through an R&D phase except for cost. It's often cheaper to do your R&D in-house even though it often misses the mark because "real" customers rarely use a product like those who are intimately familiar with all of its quirks and oddities. So, while you're correct that accessibility, usability and aesthetics will often vary from individual to individual ... I still think that companies could arrive at an objectively "right", or at least "best" design if they bothered to do more upfront R&D; soliciting user feedback and data from "real" end users very early on in the design and development process. Doesn't mean you will please everyone, but you can at least maximize the number of end users who are satisfied.
- JusticeJuice 4y ago
  Hard agree. I've worked with specialised user researchers before and holy shit they're good. I've never ever once thought doing research was a waste of time. It's so worth the money. It's just really easy to get trapped in your own biases - often the bias of "This isn't that complicated, I understand it so the customer can too", and the "I know what they want" one. So in the face of 'we need to deliver fast', a lot of people won't take the time to invest in it. If anyones interested in research methods, highly reccomend this book. https://www.amazon.com/Universal-Methods-Design-Innovative-Effective/dp/1592537561 https://www.amazon.com/Universal-Methods-Design-Innovative-E...

izacus 4y ago

Honestly, I'd just once like to work with a designer that has heard of words longer than 5 letters. Every. Single. Darn. Design I get completely ignores the fact that the texts inside them won't be built from nice little short words with EXACTLY the correct letter counts (especially when localized). Which results in shit UIs like one I've just seen on Android where (in my language) the button literally just says "Tap to..." and every single label on a button is truncated and doesn't finish a word.

astrospective 4y ago
When I was a tester first thing I’d do was fill every text box with Ws just to see what ran over. Good to remember as a dev now.
jstarfish 4y ago
> Honestly, I'd just once like to work with a designer that has heard of words longer than 5 letters. I blame lorem ipsum. And Latin.
pelagic_sky 4y ago
You need to work with designers who are used to supporting localization. Try making a UI using Deutsch and tell me about spacing issues. :D
kitsunesoba 4y ago
I agree, but would expand that to all parts of the design dealing with variable data, not just text (think thumbnails, avatars, etc). It’s too common for designs to that were beautiful on the canvas to fall apart once brought to life in the actual product. Some designers also don’t have a good grip on what’s actually feasible to engineer, adding in various details that in aggregate can bloat the time and effort required to build the design multiple times over.
userbinator 4y ago
I've seen many cases of the opposite, where despite plenty of room, text is inexplicably truncated to leave a huge amount of whitespace instead.

illiarian 4y ago

> many designers feel the established design systems like Material are insufficient for some reason Because Material is awful? In their original iteration they had to do a study with 600 people to find out that text inputs should look like text inputs https://medium.com/google-design/the-evolution-of-material-designs-text-fields-603688b3fe03 https://medium.com/google-design/the-evolution-of-material-d... Their latest abomination has almost nothing aligned optically: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1643607965935476737 https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1643607965935476737 When there are 5 elements, they follow 5 different guidelines: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1643682248959328258 https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1643682248959328258 > That is OK, if you know the rules you can break them, but often they don't know the rules either And that's the problem with what I call "dribbble-raised designers" ("designers" of Material UI included): they work for the designs to look nice in static screenshots on presentation pages without much scrutiny, and that's it.

illiarian 4y ago
On that note: you can't even imagine how bad Material UI is https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1645797661684170754?s=20 https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1645797661684170754?s=... and https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1643613144143519744?s=20 https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1643613144143519744?s=...
- amatecha 4y ago
  Yo I thought those tweets might be from a few years ago and "they must have resolved those by now"... no, the tweets are literally from TODAY and SIX DAYS AGO. What the hell?! Sad times...
  - rchaud 4y ago
    I built a site using Material in 2018. Never again! I have to imagine that Google just leaves it as unmaintained, considering these issues are still happening.
KyeRussell 4y ago

deckard1 4y ago

> not know what to do with empty space every PM everywhere. They simply cannot leave good enough alone. Eventually every site A/B tests its way until it becomes Reddit mobile site. No one asked for carousels but sites continue to use them. We are getting inundated with popups today. I don't want to say it's as bad as 1990s flash ad popups. But it's getting damn close now. Bullshit cookie popups. "This site is better on our mobile app" crap popups. Google sign in popup bullshit.[1] I would say anti-UX and anti-accessibility is very much the point of many sites. "Dark patterns" help conversion and the bottom line. Every site you visit is engaged in psychological warfare with you. [1] https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/174978821/stop-the-fucking-sign-in-pop-up?hl=en https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/174978821/stop-th...

wolpoli 4y ago
Thanks for posting the steps to turn off the Google Sign-in popup. It's annoying that it's buried through.
- DangitBobby 4y ago
  Thank you for pointing this out, I don't think I would have visited the link otherwise!
codedokode 4y ago
Google popup is one of the worst, it often covers useful content, the only one that is worse is full-screen "give us your email" popup.
DangitBobby 4y ago
Honorable mentions: - Newsletter popups - Account creation nags on ostensibly free apps - Vanity flaps crowding the viewport - Sticky social buttons

KronisLV 4y ago

> I'd like to hear any strategy one has to deal with that. I have taken up Figma and Sketch so I can meet them "where they are" but still, plenty of disagreements can happen. One option would be to use a premade design system or a component library/framework that gives you a consistent look and feel, most of those design decisions having a good enough baseline. Then just add a color theme and some branding on top of it and call it a day. It will also increase your development velocity and save you from some pixel pushing. For an example of this, consider PrimeFaces: https://www.primefaces.org/ https://www.primefaces.org/ They have working components that are good enough (and support multiple themes, if need be), their own icon solution and also a CSS utility library, including stuff like layouts. For most projects it'll be enough to create something that works and looks okay.