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In UI design, developers perennially mistake the aesthetics of a design with how well the design functions, generally. Interfaces are a form of communication, a
by chefandy 3y ago
In UI design, developers perennially mistake the aesthetics of a design with how well the design functions, generally. Interfaces are a form of communication, and the most important pieces of it are things like visual hierarchy, gestalt, and implied lines to show relationships between elements. Just like any other sort of communication, lay people tend to either say all the right things in a way most people find confusing, or not say enough because the other way is too confusing and assume the problem is what's being communicated rather than how it was communicated. Developers putting an interface together ad-hoc tend to do the former, blowing off complaints as people not trying hard enough or reading the docs or whatever. Other developers trying to gussy up the mess the first developer made assuming the problem is aesthetic tend to do the latter, and dismiss complaints by saying things like 'design is subjective' entirely disregarding the possibility that they did a bad job.
An aesthetically pleasing interface is a side effect of someone fluent in that language working hard to figure out how to communicate information, action, cause and effect, etc to the end user. It's not an easy language to learn, it's important even in relatively trivial cases, and developers trying to wing it are about as good at it as designers cargo-cult assembling PHP to modify a WordPress deployment: It might get the job done in a very basic way, but nobody should convince themselves it's a real solution. Just like a developer might look at their interface and say "read the docs" or "design is subjective," that designer might see how slow their 5-deep for looped set of database queries is and say "this server is too slow" or "why can't those damned developers make WordPress faster?"
- anonzzzies 3y agoSo why does everything look the same (even to the same colours, locations (responsive & fixed) and sizes) after spending all that money and effort? And when something looks/behaves different, 'normal' (not in IT) people find it annoying to use? How can my wife find trivial operations in our shite IT banking site, but is lost on Instagram for some of the same settings? Our bank has an IT spending which is a rounding error on Insta's budget. I agree with what you say somewhat, but I believe about the massive difference between UI/UX. If I have to sign up to something for the first time or have to buy something, I want pretty pictures. If I have to work with something often (all day let's say), I want UX and I couldn't give a shite about UI; I want things easy to find, fast (not latency) etc. Combined would be great, but tell me what has that, because I always see one, never both done to perfection. If there is a 50/50 mix, it's usually annoying as hell on both sides. My most productive interfaces are ugly as hell ; no animations, no overhead and everything crammed on a screen and very fast. I would never 'sign up' for an application like that seeing it first, but I would never use any application long term for productivity like most people say is 'beautiful' because it's inefficient.
- blowski 3y ago> but is lost on Instagram for some settings Are they settings that Meta wants you to change?
- troupo 3y ago> I agree with what you say somewhat, but I believe about the massive difference between UI/UX. There's bo difference. The GUIs have started rapidly going downhill right after some idiots decided they are different and the rest of idiots believed it to be true. How can you have a UI without understanding how it functions and how it's used?
- greatpostman 3y agoNote that meta has A/B tested their ux to death. Any opinions you have don’t hold water to the aggregate opinion
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mrits 3y agoWhen looking at the aggregate you can get things like the two political party system in the US that is a perfect compromise but doesn't function for anyone in the aggregate.
- notahacker 3y agoThey've A/B tested Meta's goals of increasing user time on site and ad views, not user goals like discovering how to change the setting for something that annoyed them. A/B testing isn't immune to being as broken as the UX in some of the gnarlier bits too. Perhaps some of the links that simply don't work on the Facebook mobile app are busy signalling that they get way more clicks than the one that successfully loaded the content...
- greatpostman 3y agoI don’t agree with this viewpoint. Major companies with billions in R&D and some of the smartest people on the planet are not making fundamental ux mistakes.