Good Design
medium.com
medium.com
75% of good UX design is determining in which ways to not be too clever.
Now people don't complain as much, because everyone just got used to it.
Google makes some terrible UX across the board.
I find the following quote from Chris Pratley (creator of OneNote) interesting "You know you have a good design when you show it to people and they say, “oh, yeah, of course,” like the solution was obvious.". No wonder OneNote is so heavily into literal metaphor of a notebook, which frankly does look and feel clumsy inspite they attempting to polish it up a bit off late (it used to look plain ugly till couple of years back).
From official Microsoft document: The user interface is specifically designed to look like a 3-ring binder, complete with tab dividers. Users can divide the notebook into multiple topics and subtopics for the various types of information they want to record and save. Workers have all the advantages of an old fashioned notebook binder with the additional advantages of being able to copy information from one section to another...
Document link: https://www.google.co.in/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web...
'Good design' is sooo much more than the world view laid out in the article. For an organisation like MS, 50% of the job is defending a proposal against 'design by committee' and navigating group politics.
Don't get me wrong, it's a good article but only half the battle, if that!
One note has promise but it's clear that a lot of the design intent got ambushed as the product made it's way out the door.
Anyway "intuitive" is not a top priority if you're designing for power users.
Looking at you, systemd folk.
But when you're designing for power users, sometimes it's more worthwhile to trade intuitive design for deeper functionality.
But intuitive design should always be the top priority, IMO - making something less intuitive in order to achieve power-user goals should be the exception, not the rule.
Just my $0.02, and you're free to tell me why I'm wrong. I'm not a designer, I just like using well-designed tools; and more often than not, the best tools behave exactly as you'd expect them to, and communicate intent pretty clearly and intuitively.
Apple's iOS7, Well, It Was Time For Skeuomorphism To Die
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/09/19/apples-io...
One of the bad example of Skeumorphism of Apple http://dun4nx4d6jyre.cloudfront.net/assets/findmyfriends.jpg. Note the 'hand stitched' detailing.
OneNote could have continued to do things well without using clumsy, awkward, out of place design language.
The issues with skeuomorphism occur when the attempt at making a "real life" object imposes restrictions on functionality that would not have existed otherwise. For example:
- Making something look like a "book" causes designers to try too hard to shove things into a two-page view when computers are outstanding at being far more flexible than a book (e.g. multiple resizable columns, scrolling, and so on).
- Making something look like a "dial" just makes it unnecessarily hard to interact with when using a mouse or even a touch screen. Interface elements designed for use on computers are superior.
I think a lot of people on the flat design bandwagon try to create a false dichotomy with skeuomorphism and try to use this as an excuse. All too often, I suspect they really prefer flat design for other reasons, such as not being any good at more sophisticated styling but also not wanting to hire a digital artist onto a project team, or wanting to avoid anything where the implementation requires real graphics instead of whatever severely limited tools are available using nothing but CSS and the icon font from their favourite UI toolkit. I'm not saying no flat design has ever been done well, but all too often I think it's just lazy and/or unskilled design and the anti-skeuomorphism dogma gets wheeled out to try to justify it in some more flattering way.
Also, clear icons are easier to construct with simple shapes than with detailed pictures, and symbolic icons may localize better. For example, a highly detailed picture of a mailbox varies between a lot of countries; a symbol of an envelope may not, and it's probably more obvious anyway.
Personally, I think a nice middle ground was the original iOS, where you could do cool things like define simple shapes for tab-view icons but have the OS stylize them for you (i.e. a plain white shape would end up with a cool blue gradient and look perfect in the black gradient tab bar, even though the original icon had no gradients or colors or rounded corners). And the UI elements, while sometimes a bit complex, managed to scale just fine between the screen sizes of the time.
Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. Before relaxing the restrictions on functionality and making everything resizable and customizable, you need to think about the cognitive load that is going to impose on your users. Books are actually a good example of this. I'm not sure I've ever actually wanted to resize or reflow the text in a book. Most books work rather well with the default settings. I can just pick it up and start reading. I don't need to mess with the column layout or scroll settings before I can start doing what I intended to do.
The other advantage that skeuomorphism gives you is that you can piggyback on pre-existing user expectations. A dial may be a bit awkward to use with a mouse, but at least I can look at it and figure out what it does at a glance. The same applies to other skeuomorphic UI elements, like 3-d buttons, notebook-like pages, tabs, etc. I can, at a glance, look at all of those things and know what the expected behavior and interactions are.
Compare this to Apple's flat design or Google's material design. Sure, it looks great. But I don't know how to interact with it. Is this text a button, or is it just a label? Does this panel move when I swipe on it? Does swiping in from the edge do something? How about pinching to zoom? The fact that so many apps have a modal overlay tutorial on first run should tell us that our "flat" designs are unusable. Yes, having some kind of help that explains what each control does may be appropriate, but we shouldn't have to explain how to use the controls themselves.
There are a few shortcomings MS could easily solve but like most tools these days they just fiddle with the UI without adding functionality.
But overall I find it very useful.
Good stuff:
1) Search is fairly fast and comprehensive
2) Supports lots of content types easily with paste, including images and other Office app content
3) Shortcuts for Table manipulation, todo checkbox items, and other icons are really helpful. I wish every editor had these.
4) Handwriting is well supported.
Bad stuff:
1) The organizational structure is overly complex and confusing as it has three categories of structure: Notebooks (top pulldown), Sections (tabs on top), and Pages (tabs on right). This makes it hard to know which to use and it's visually overwhelming.
Wikipedia is a good example of something better as its structure is much more uniform: everything is a page and all navigation uses links.
2) Synchronizing is very slow compared to google docs. This makes it fine for simple scenarios where people edit alone and share after it's mostly written, but makes it hard to work together on a document (no multiple cursors on the page)
My guess is (1) and (2) are an artifact of Notebooks being files instead of "in the cloud". This likely forces the organizational structure OneNote has, and slows down synchronizing because it's harder to sync at the file level rather than the text-run level.
3) Shared freeform content like this gets out of date fast. This should be built into the product so we can see which pages are important to the organization. Most people don't delete pages ever, so some way of showing which pages matter and which should be disregarded would be very helpful.
Not for me, however, as I still prefer the CLI in most cases.
Certain arrangements that already exist are basically universal. People know where to look, people understand certain symbols. Use those, don't try and reinvent them. Use what people know.
Trying to be clever is what dooms design.
Amazon's drop down menu comes to mind - http://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega-...
Yes, Amazon did something clever to make it work as well as it does, but barely anyone even notices that there's anything special about it. It 'just works'.
That's key. The actual design pattern here didn't change at all. It just works better.
Can you make something work better? Do it. Are you trying something because "icons and folders are a dated idea"? Then don't.
I think gmail's redesign from a few years ago falls into what you are describing - trying to design something more "modern and clever" which in some way was to the detriment of the users (at least if you were judging by the reception and all the critique). But at the same time if you don't try to maintain a more modern interface I think you risk being left behind, so you have to balance "clever" with "expected" design.
If you believe something has to change, just because it should, then I think you're coming from the wrong place. You have customers that depend on you, your job is to serve them, not some sort of need to invent the next great design revolution.
On the other hand, UI style and UX naturally improves over time. Compare Windows 95 and Windows 7. There are certainly style and UX changes in the latter that are superior. A lot of people may not like Window's Ribbon interface but I think it was definitely an interesting new design, one which I think will in the long term prove to be better than plain drop down menus.
So I guess I am making the claim that if you are really invested in your product you probably have ideas on how it could be improved and a lot of those ideas are uncertain but deserve time to be attempted.
Learning is a necessary part of getting efficient with complex tools.
Between the quest for "the most amazing pixel perfect UX/UI" one didn't have time to properly dispatch NSKeyedarchivers in a queue with groups and synchronise on the main to update the UI or deal with large Core Data writes on a private queue, so now the app is gorgeous but slow as shit until one get some more time.
The problem with most designers who camp in Photoshop is that they become oblivious to implementation details that matters once you run the damn thing.
UI/UX as previously stated, is very subjective although there is always objectivity to performance. But hey, at least we got that amazing custom menu bar that is totally better than the other menu bar that wasn't exactly the same.
Those who've worked in body shops will know this. Take a look at the new Twitter client. Obviously it has some nice style to it. But it's slow, buggy, and crashes.
Factor in that resources are finite and design can be good enough, but performance can't be good enough.
However, designers writing articles tend to be looking for insights that advance their knowledge. They don't write about things that are obvious to them, even though those are the most useful for the rest of us. And most non-designers are really looking for typography and color selection advice, which has a similar relationship to design as programming has to computer science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieter_Rams#Dieter_Rams:_ten_p...
The design of a bicycle however is not obvious.
Taking any advice from a designer at Facebook is a dangerous game to play. It's very likely you work for a company that is structured entirely differently than anything close to Facebook. What makes design "good" at your company is going to depend wholeheartedly on the market you serve (which is not going to be 1 billion people large).
1) Have a clear workflow that matches your business and your user goals.
2) Make it as short as possible.
3) Don't have dead ends.
4) Make sure 4/5 people in your target market can jump into it and accomplish the task within a few seconds without asking any questions. (This is a good target for a V1 release, V2 and beyond should reach for 9/10 or more)
The rest is mostly trend and opinion. Good design is just good HCI -- fast (both quick and understandable) interfaces to complete a task.
I prefer the 2010 design by a mile. FWIW, I also prefer Gmail's old design.
This is a beautiful insight. I wish everyone understood this. There's ZERO reason to reinvent the wheel with design.
Noww I can't find main entrances to buildings. Please stop this experiment.
Street signs, entrances, etc should be optimized for both first time users and everyday users; which is difficult, but without that traffic goes slower and you have more accidents, people get frustrated and hate you.
[1] https://h71044.www7.hp.com/campaigns/2011/events/POD/images/...
I think "design" is ambiguous here. You can look at it as meaning "effort that went into creating something", where "design" is the thing that designers do at their desk.
Or you can think of it as quantity of "stuff" in the end product that a person experiences and consumes. Every button, doo-dad or blob of pixels in an app. Each nut, bolt, accessory or function in a thing.
In that sense, my personal definition of good design is doing more design work to deliver less design stuff. A designer's job is to spent time chewing up and swallowing complexity so the user doesn't have to.
Compare that with a nugget of wisdom from Charles Eames - someone who actually built things that designers can look upto. Humble, to the point and not obvious but insightful.
Is there a design ethic? There are always design constraints and these usually include an ethic.
Rule no.3 stating that a group of designers must decide if a design is good or not is far more relevant to what actually is good design, verses the general populace.
That's like asking a group of patients if they think the drug that's being made seems good enough with several side effects or not, verses asking pharmaceutical experts on the matter.
My experience with user testing is that if you give someone a UI and watch what they do with it (without instruction), you will quickly get a feel for how close to the mark your design is. Different users have different expectations of course, so you need to do this with a fair range of users.
However, I do think there is some merit in getting those in the actual field of functional and "good" design (as the author defines it) to weigh in on why precisely your design is just that. In my own UI/UX research, users all too often miss fully comprehending the painstaking research and work that goes into truly effective and good design.
I guess what my argument really is is that I would prefer to weigh more heavily the affirmation of those in the design field rather than a broad range of users with no particular ethos concerning design. Of course, who we end up designing for is the normal user, and what they think is indeed important. However, if 100 people said my design was good vs. hearing that from, say, Mike Matas, I would pick Mike Matas.
Your target is the users, if the users aren't having a good experience, you're not doing it right.
Testing on your target market is pretty important because you get a "real" example of how usable your product is. For example if you tested your interface on an elderly person (target market) and a UI expert you are going to have considerably different results.
meaning: When you do a user action, like double clicking, the application should do what you expect and hope it will do.