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You're not working with properly trained designers then. Layouts have certain empirical properties which can be judged objectively: * Conforms to a grid *

• jessedhillon 13y ago
  Those are fundamentals of design but a) they're hardly universal, and b) they only serve to anchor the debate. A person with that list can't answer you which color the buttons should be, or say, whether a certain button is more like a confirm, info or cancel. They don't tell you how wide is too wide, or whether the hero needs to be above or below this particular content. It's a good starting point, but hardly anyone will be satisfied to be told, "well, the golden ratio is preserved when we make the content area 700 pixels wide" -- again, in the end these discussions always come down to trusting a person's taste. I've worked with plenty of properly trained designers, whatever is supposed to be proper.
• hueving 13y ago
  Is there strong scientific evidence that when one of these is slightly violated, it will negatively impact the user?
  • Chris_Newton 13y ago
    The short answer is no, slight violations of these ideas don’t tend to cause the sky to fall. Indeed, the list of examples given by nikatwork was unfortunate, because some of them are well established with a decent evidence base, but a few are basically just nonsense that has unfortunately somehow become dogma. For example, a few studies have been performed under controlled conditions to try to determine how typographic details like line length affect measurable performance levels such as reading speed and retention. There are many rules of thumb floating around — “2.5 alphabets”, “8–10 words”, and the like — and it actually does turn out that most of them are reasonable. It also turns out to be unwise to consider line length in isolation, that a wider range of lengths can be used before serious degradation is widely observed than some of the old folklore would suggest, and that having lines too short can also cause serious degradation in reading performance, among other interesting results. Another good example is the consistency of user interface elements. Numerous usability tests, from formal studies to simple A/B tests on web sites, support the theory that violating a user’s expectations tends to have negative effects, sometimes severe ones. Of course you always have to be careful not to assume too much about what your users’ expectations might be, but things like using green for cancel and red for confirm almost invariably exhibit poor performance with audiences who are used to the opposite convention. On the other hand, if someone tells you the Golden Ratio is important for keeping some sort of page area proportionate, it’s a good bet that this person should be hunted down and locked away by the maths police. Using precise ratios really does matter in some contexts: if you look at the ratio between the width and height of a piece of A4 paper, it is aiming for exactly √2, which is why two A4 sheets fit neatly into one A3 sheet and so on up and down the scale. However, someone who is advocating use of the Golden Ratio for width/height proportions usually just likes the look of dimensions that are proportioned roughly 5:3, and probably has no hard data to support choosing that over 3:2, 16:9, 1:1, or any other ratio that fits with the rest of the design. Likewise, if someone advocates picking a colour scheme based on where certain hues fall on a wheel, consider that hue represents only one dimension. The most common colour models for human vision use three, and in practice if you fix the others (typically saturation and lightness) and just choose evenly spaced and/or opposing hues around a colour wheel, the results are rarely good. That means much repeated ideas like choosing analogous or complementary colours are, at best, only part of the story. If you’re using a typical colour wheel for computer graphics that has red, green and blue at 120 degree separations and then cyan, magenta and yellow on the 60s, those ideas are even less helpful, because it turns out that by the time the human eye has detected the light and the human brain has interpreted the resulting signals, those colours aren’t really uniformly spaced around the wheel anyway; see the trichromatic vision and opponent process theories, or the early experimental work of Munsell. In short, there really is robust evidence that some established design principles are worth following, though rarely do minor variations in design cause major variations in performance. However, there are also some dogmatic assumptions in the design world that get passed on as if they are inalienable truths but in reality have little evidence to support them.
    • nikatwork 13y ago
      We're talking at cross-purposes here. My point is that if someone hands me a layout with wildly inconsistent internal margins, no call to action and a text column that is a full screen width wide, I can objectively say those elements are wrong and need to be fixed. Of course, the other side to design is "style", which cannot really be quantified, merely subjectively judged against current trends, the target audience and "taste".
      • Chris_Newton 13y ago
        Apologies if I misunderstood your previous post. From your final paragraph before, I thought you were arguing that the properties you listed were not only things that could be judged objectively but also desirable principles that should be taught as part of design courses. I was countering that this would have been OK for some of the items but dubious for a few others, because while they are widely held and promoted beliefs in some quarters, they are also examples of things many designers say that aren’t backed up by rational arguments or empirical data.