Why I love ugly, messy interfaces
m.signalvnoise.com
m.signalvnoise.com
The cliché is a self-taught designer in a minimalist loft in some gentrified inner city, drinking espresso from an expensive vintage machine, obsessively cleaning their wooden slab desk, listening to post-techno or whatever...
...making designs that look like they signify design... with some new or rediscovered modernist sans serif font... matching pastel colors... tasteful transitions... high-resolution photographs that signify urban creative prosumerism...
It's a kind of functional tradition, but as a whiny outsider I'm really getting sick of it. So I like this article because it's just highlighting that there are other values to aspire for, not just these matte white ideals of OCD modernism.
Reminds me of a video from some old RubyConf, I think, after a presentation about how "beauty corresponds to quality", some humanist in the audience asked a thoughtful question like "the type of beauty you've explained seems mostly like a classical or modernist ideal; what about stuff like postmodern notions of beauty, could that be relevant too?"
(Ruby itself is ugly and messy, a weird mix of Perl and Smalltalk... Hacker News is ugly and messy... even the interfaces polished to look simple and clean turn out to be ugly and messy when you look closer, so maybe part of it is just about honesty.)
Hashtables, resource locking, regular expressions, string formatting, are all things I have to deal with a lot and I like dealing with them in Ruby more than any other language. Also, reflection in Ruby is superb.
But in their redesign they removed it, so now that info is hidden behind two clicks (Guides -> Publishing your gem), but that page isn't near as concise, and doesn't show you how to build the package.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20140311091639/http://rubygems.o...
I fear that it's perverted the discipline of design. Gone are the analytical days of Jeff Raskin and Donald Norman and I see it everywhere.
Systems and user interfaces are degrading and the trajectory appears aligned for more of the same.
Good system/interface design is rare, and good design works well regardless of the current trend.
It's UX - in the marketing sense - rather than UI. And yes, a lot of web marketing assumes the buyer is exactly the kind of person you're suggesting - maybe because often they are.
Craigslist, Plenty of Fish, and all the other "Can't be bothered to add styling" sites are taking the opposite approach.
The lack of overt social signalling becomes an inclusive social signal of its own. By making the design as functional as possible and not aiming for any demographic, they're more likely to create something that's acceptably styled and useful for all of them.
Trained designers don't seem to understand this, because although they pay lip service to the idea of usability, they're mostly only interested in designs that include aesthetic signalling.
In fact there's a whole tradition of professional 'get shit done" design in hardware and software which gives users all the options they need at the same time with minimal fuss. This kind of flat design can be very productive, but it rarely looks pretty.
Tangentially, I think FB has the worst of all worlds. The aesthetic choices are poor. The ergonomics are poor. Critical settings are hidden. Content appears more or less randomly. You have limited control over what you get.
FB is only popular because of network effects. If the design was less dictatorial, it would be more popular still.
This is a very common human pattern: Confusing signalling+lip-service around a complicated and subtle issue with genuine understanding. I suspect it's a common pattern because it's a part of the learning process.
And exactly for the pursue of the minimalism I went from Delicious to Pinboard. Cleaner... (OK, plus - working).
Also, it's why I prefer HN looks to Reddit looks. Or even aesthetic looks of things like Blizzard forum.
If Couchsurfing looked like Airbnb, that would be a design failure, probably. Or at least it would alienate many of its existing users.
Couchsurfers typically don't mind a reasonably messy room, because it's all about thrifty hospitality and this student/traveller community.
Looking at Couchsurfing now though, in fact it does look like Airbnb... Like they "modernized" the design... and indeed I've heard from former big fans of the site that they don't like it anymore, that it's changing culturally, and that they now prefer BeWelcome... and their site doesn't look like Airbnb at all.
With a lot of SaaS landing pages I just wonder who they imagine as their target market.
Maciej at Pinboard seems to be doing good and earning respect by designing the site he and his friends would actually like to use.
Suppose you were to pitch a new startup today, at YCombinator or Product Hunt or a VC meeting, and your web app copies the Craigslist aesthetic. Would you be taken seriously or laughed out of the room, even if the functionality and content was top-notch? Would you take that chance?
If the site is "designed", it looks like someone just hired a designer to sell me something.
Why? Because looks good at the first glance, looks polished, fits the current fashion. Still, it does not mean that it makes it better for the users.
Highly usable environments require some sort of training. The amount of self training that someone will do for something like a web site will entirely depend on how motivated the user is to achieve the definite result that is the ultimate goal.
The question then is; do pretty websites cause motivation for further engagement? I suspect the answer is yes, at least a little, at least for now. In the future that probably won't be true, people will get tired of anything anyone can possibly do in terms of appearance and will value usability more.
All too often, people want to cater everything to everyone so they just throw all the options on the page and expect you to know where to find what. Or they don't think you're a human and should just be happy with whatever you're given because hey, the functionality is there.
But as consumers get used to a level of design through the apps/websites they use on a day-to-day basis, the ones who do care are going to want that sense of quality in their other tools.
I don't love the F16 analogy. Some things do require highly specialized training. The vast majority of websites and applications don't. Furthermore, there's an additional layer of difference since physical buttons/gauges have an advantage of easy access as compared to layering functionality in digital interfaces.
Is it possible to ramp complexity while ramping motivation? Games seem to do this quite well.
Craigslist for example is not unbeatable, nor is it a messy interface I think is truly good. Really, I think it's more a matter of who they are at this point, and that they have a user base that gets things as are, and they can't change now. New users will deal with the mess, because they more or less "have" to use Craiglist for something. Not that craigslist needs to be pretty, but being frustrating for even regular users is not a good sign.
Photoshop is a better example, I think. Its ugly in the sense that there is a lot, but whats there IS actually designed; well mostly.
Facebook is trickier. They have a network effect which drives many new users to overcome on boarding, but also people view it on mobile a lot, and so don't see that interface. And those that do, probably have blinders and only see the second column.
Really, I think there is a time, place, product and audience for it. It's important to think about what information you "bubble up" in an interface, and what you require them to click-thru for. Obviously if users learn your messy UI, they're going to be upset with complete redesigns, so don't do that. Do care about the look of the interface, it always matters, but sometimes "matters" is pretty, and sometimes "matters" is functional and complete. If you can strike a balance between the two, and create an experience that your users can understand and enjoy, you're on the right track.
Blender on the other hand...
For serious photo editing, GIMP is completely useless because it lacks the Adjustment Layers feature that is critical for non-destructive editing, and it did not even support 16-bit color until a few months ago.
GIMP is one of the huge failures in open-source software IMO. They should have just made a Photoshop clone.
mirror horizontally/vertically does tho opposite in PS and gimp. (mirroring over the said axis and mirroring said axis).
I thought blender changed dramatically in term of UI / ergonomy. I used to say that blender is the GIMP of 3D. But I came with a strong Maya/Houdini superiority complex.
People have gone way overboard in hiding functionality in modern design. Discoverability seems like a dirty word these days. The ironic thing is that by removing the obvious controls for so many of the features in the name of simplifying the interface for new users, you actually make the interface more complex and require more training on the user's part to operate it.
The days of browsing through menus looking for an option that vaguely sounds like what you want seem to be gone. Now you have to just know the magical screen gesture to make it do what you want. The only way to discover it is to know that such a feature already exists and Google for it.
Hey iPhone users, did you know you can swipe up on the lockscreen to bring up a menu full of useful controls? I'd say roughly 1 in 2 iPhone users I've talked to know about that feature. Do you know how you were supposed to discover it? Because I don't.
Well said! I think the same thing about magazines and newspapers. Although we should not be so quick to compare; part of google's success was their simplicity, compared to yahoo's complexity.
> The days of browsing through menus looking for an option that vaguely sounds like what you want seem to be gone.
Maybe. I'm doing something like this within my app, but for anywhere complicated I just have a dropdown with a bunch of examples that they can start out with and tinker with from there. I think that can go a long way in discoverability and understanding how to do something, and whats possible.
By watching the WWDC keynote demo?
In other words, you want the simplest interface that allows you to do what you need to do.
From which follows the thing I've been repeating over and over and over again here - all this simplification of interface comes at the cost of cutting down features to the point the product is barely usable for anything at all.
It does what it sets out to do, without pretension or fluff. If that's considered unsimplistic, I don't know what the word means.
I think the argument is a little different for Photoshop, but I'm not a user and frankly I do find it confusing. But like the mixer analogy, a professional tool should sometimes sacrifice simplicity for utility.
Oh man, this.
Even richer is confusing usable with pretty. I guess nowadays people say "user experience" instead of usability, or the extremely unfortunate: UX.
Simple usually covers the very first prototype version, but then there are always requests for complicating the feature set so you can't have a simple interface anymore.
Joel Spolsky had a conference talk about this once (can't remember where I saw it). There is a tension between simplicity and power: some need simplicity; others, power. It's a spectrum. What developers and designers should strive for is elegance so that one can move along the spectrum without noticing it.
Also GIMP.
P.S: The article is missing Blender, as it's a go-to for "ugly, messy interfaces", even though (after learning the concepts) it's highly usable.
But you know what! People are different and have different preferences. And I am far from alone preferring GIMP over the Photoshop UI.
While I love PS, I've also switched to the GIMP (for work stuff, anyway) as it covers most of my use cases.
Many of the proponents of an 'old' interface, compared to some newer remake, are resisting the change in order to defend their prior investment.
I just love those kinds of interface. I don't think I would enjoy using them, but I love the history that sometimes go with them. Typically they're in-house apps that just get extended until they do every thing, and only an old guy named Gary knows how everything works... sort of.
The person who works with this every day knows intuitively that "pink box, bottom row, second from left" means something specific without having to read the labels.
If this UI were redesigned in the prevalent iOS 7 style with uniform design elements, abundant whitespace, very little contrast and lots of text labels in a light typeface, I think it might actually reduce usability.
I used to have an application that could tell me anything about any student a couple of decades ago. Attendance, address, any issues from tutors &c.
We are getting back to that now slowly, but with Web interfaces on screens with 9x the area and a quarter of the information on each page.
It's just a matter of how you conceive simplicity. John Maeda talks about "thoughful reduction". It's not less for the sake of less; you take away while it makes sense to take away. That's simplicity. Clutter isn't the opposite of simplicity. Simplicity has to be conceived always factoring in the scope of the design. If something is necessary and you remove it, you're not making your design simpler, just dumber, limited or crippled.
tl;dr: simplicity will look different in different apps. Photoshop will always look more cluttered than the prospective and portfolio-enriching weather app which is featured on Dribbble.
Also, there are quite a few sites which benefit (profit) from throwing off the user's train of thought and injecting unrequested information:
- Go on Amazon looking for a product and you'll see lots of other products that may be relevant but that are totally not what you were there for.
- Facebook being an advertizing company is of course happy to inject promoted posts to satisfy their clients.
Edward Tufte has written at length[1] about information density, and has shown that it is possible to design interfaces that contain a huge amount of information AND yet are clean to the point of being beautiful.
Those products all have years of growth and hefty network effects backing them up. You can infer exactly nothing about the importance of ux based on the difficulty of unseating them.
It is unadorned. Unadorned isn't a synonym for ugly.
It is neatly organized into a clear structure which stays consistent and in which you can easily find everything. Therefore it cannot be called messy.
Yes, people love presentations which are neatly organized into a clear structure. So if you falsely equate that with ugly and messy, then you can argue that people love ugly and messy.
Suitable word definitions of words make almost any point come true. If not, you can always bring out the bigger guns, like outright equivocation: shifting the meanings of words while midway through making the point.
The most striking thing for me is that during this period the web felt much more like physical space. I would go to some of these websites just to spend some time immersed in the atmosphere they had so effectively created with this old, pixel by pixel style of design.
The biggest effect of html5/css3/social network era for me is that i no longer give a shit about your website. I might end up on your website if i click a HN link, but the desire to be on your website, with all the sense of place that entails, is completely gone.
And all of these websites are completely gone now too, vanished without a trace. It's like an entire generation of the webs history has been erased.
Even bad geocities pages were unique and interesting. I haven't come across anything that's like that in so long. It seems like an endless cycle of content aggregators and the usual news website. There's really no reason to actually explore or any easy way to do it. Might just be me though.
Even myspace allowed you to edit the CSS and pretty much do whatever you wanted with your personal page. Now all we have is Facebook and the actual information isn't important at all. I rarely even bother visiting people's pages nor have I updated mine in so long. It just doesn't matter for the most part.
Even so much as flattening out some of those beveled edges and gradients would be enough to throw people off.
"Ugly and messy" doesn't have to be a part of the equation when what you want is "dense." It's possible to have minimal, clean, dense design. With lots of buttons and features, beneath a simple UI.
It's worth noting that all of these examples are world-class, industry-leading applications in their respective domains. People use them in spite of the interface. If your app hasn't proven itself to be in that class then an ugly, messy interface isn't going to work.
True in theory, but I don't think this is the case with Photoshop and Craiglist. Maybe with phpBB though. But in the two mentioned in the article, any serious attempt on making the interface prettier would most likely kill the usability. Those products are tools. The interface is there to let you get the job done quickly and efficiently.
And yes, you may have to spend few minutes learning how to use it. Just like you have to learn how to use a microwave, or a car.
The current trend of "beautiful and simple" is driven by the market - beause companies don't care if the product is useful for anything else than getting you to sign up (and sometimes start paying - startups that aim for an exit don't even care about that). You can clearly see how little a company cares about solving their customers' problems by looking at how much they prefer beauty and simplicity to functionality.
Minimalist makes complete sense on mobile and I'd wager that most of what's driving the "minimalist everything" is responsive layouts.
I don't like his usage of the word cluttered though, which implies disorder and bad UX design for me. An audio mixer or Craighlist are not disordered, but have quite a lot of order. I guess he means dense interfaces, which can be the right thing to do for a UX design, if use cases demands it.
https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-is...
And I would also point out to Emacs and Vim, which have visually terrible interfaces, yet some people swear to them.
And if we're talking about mixers — what about Sonar or Reason vs Ableton?
Simplicity can be applied to professional, feature-rich software too.
A messy interface is NOT a good thing. What the author seems to try to imply is that minimal interfaces means you lack of functionality or capability. That is a misconception. It is perfectly possible to make complex interfaces with few features or simple interfaces with lots of features.
You can e.g. simplify a interface by making it easy to combine functionality and you can complicate it by making lots of overlapping functionality which can't combine.
Another way to make something complex without adding features is to always display all possible actions even when they are not relevant for the task you are presently doing. Clean interfaces strive towards only showing the actions relevant to what you are presently doing.
Should have done it on one of those tiny-fonted 1998 Blogger templates.
My point is: there is no single right way to do things. There’s no reason to assume that having a lot of links or text on a page, or a dense UI, or a sparse aesthetic is fundamentally bad — those might be fine choices for the problem at hand. Especially if it’s a big, hairy problem.
I'm not sure whether to blame Privacy Badger or Medium, but this isn't the first time I've had problems with the funky progressive scaling thing Medium does with images.
Maybe the thesis of this article should be:
Don't let your designer go berserk and just make whatever white-space-heavy-drop-shadow-gigantic-photographs-four-words-per-screen mess they feel like if that's not actually what your users need to find satisfaction in your site or app.
That's the single right way to do things.
Of course they look 'messier', in as much as there's more on the screen. People use spreadsheets --yes, in 2016!--because they're the best way to see some types of data, even if the interface is horrid and outmoded.
Least I heard Yamaha hired a bunch of people to redo the interface on some of their higher end equipment. Trust me, they need it. When you need to go to 3 different menus to configure one setting properly then there is a problem.
Some of these are virtual EQ racks, piping audio, and doing some other cool stuff like eco reduction and speaker sound offsets based on distance from crowd.
Clean, beautiful, minimal. RIP.
As for messy, that comes down to it getting in the way of getting something done.
If something has tools and parts all over, but the workman knows exactly where everything is and can reach for them as needed, it may look like a mess to an outsider, but will be efficient in operation to the workman.
And for a personal example, I come to Hacker news for the content and the community. I do not like the look of it.
Much as I dislike Apple, I do think this is a great principle and something I try to do with my own software.
I don't like it at all ... I just want to reach out and spin a knob.
The YouTube App on my iPad looks wonderful, but for the life of me, I can't find any back/forward navigation buttons. I suspect they were minimized away (I'm on iOS7 on my iPad2, this may be different in newer versions).
My Android phone (Cyanogenmod) has a wonderfully minimal interface that even includes a universal back button - but a "go forward" button was presumably deemed too messy and either thrown out completely, or hidden so deeply that I did not manage to find it in a year. This is especially bothersome in the Android browser...
Yesterday I used a personal Oxygen sensor, for safety reasons. It's a wonderfully designed piece, with just two buttons. Yet their functions are so overloaded, there is no way you can use the sensor without studying and memorizing the user manual.
My Windows PC becomes "simpler and more beautiful" each time the Windows version number goes up, but always at the cost of useful (but messy-looking) interfaces. Quick access to wireless network properties? Too messy! Modify the DDE-commands that the Explorer issues when double-clicking a file? A GUI is too messy for that, users should just use regedit.exe. The "go up"-button in Windows Explorer? Why, "go back" should satisfy all our users' needs!
Of course, destuffying messy interfaces is a noble and important cause. But the degree of mimimalism that current designers seem to strive for is, in my personal opinion, too radical, and I enjoyed reading a piece that points out how sometimes, great interfaces must have lots of buttons.
It is odd how we're getting more and more screenspace to play with, phone screens and computer screens are getting larger with higher resolutions regularly, and yet we're pushing to remove functionality in the name of simplicity.
It's boring perhaps but for a certain category of apps you want boring+familiar.
He conveniently overlooks the fact that many of these sites sporting minimalist UI, are doing so due to lack of content. They need a natural way to take up the canvas for a site that is low on content.
But it doesn't change the fact that complex UI is hard for users to learn.
If users only use your software rarely, instead of daily, they will not be capable of learning a complex UI.
If users don't know or think of what they are doing as complex or at least important, they will not be willing to learn a complex UI.
If your software started out with a clean simple UI but added features little by little, and many/most of your users have been with you all along -- that was a lot easier to learn, because they learned it little by little, and don't even realize how complex the thing they learned is.
(This also means if you can hide complexity for beginning users and add it in little by little, this can help it's learnability. But easier said than done -- Microsoft Office's attempts to hide 'less used' menu items is an example of failure that made things worse).
A shopping site with a complicated UI is going to fail miserably -- unless you manage to make a shopping site that convinces users it really does something much much better than the competition, and/or a shopping site your users will use daily.
Photoshop is something users use daily, often as part of their paid job, to do something the users recognize is fairly complex work and find valuable -- AND many of it's users have probably been using it since it was simpler and learning it little by little. Newcomers to photoshop (or gimp), especially those not using it for a paid job, often find it very difficult to learn and give up.
Facebook is something users use daily, for something they find indispensable. It also does an _okay_ job of providing a UI where the users can ignore _most_ of it until they need it (and there are many parts that many users have never found even if they would be useful). It's also got the network effect lockin -- a Facebook competitor with a "better" UI would have trouble competing even if it _did_ manage to come up with a just-as-powerful-but-simpler UI, assuming that were possible.
Craigslist -- I think actually _is_ a clean/simple interface. Better graphic design styling probably wouldn't hurt it (I really don't think it would, in any way, if done well), but it's not complicated.
It's true that powerful functionality is very hard, or sometimes impossible, to do with a clean simple UI. And powerful functionality is great. But it's also true, I think, that no matter how powerful your functionality, users are going to find a complex UI difficult, and they have to have a lot of motivation to learn it.
For a shopping site someone uses only once or occasionally, I am still convinced clean simple UI is always going to 'win' (increase sales, get more sales and users than it's competitors all things being equal, etc).
I am also convinced that you should always _aspire_ to as clean and simple an interface as possible. If you can get powerful functionality _with_ a clean interface, users will always like that better than the same func with a complicated interface. (People _use_ MS Word, but few _like_ it. If someone could figure out how to provide the same func with a cleaner interface, people would go wild for it. It's a big 'if', it's not easy). If you can't figure out how to do that (and it's not easy) -- it is hard to predict whether less powerful cleaner software or more powerful complex software will 'win' with the users in any given case, it just depends.
It's also worth noting that Facebook, Craigslist, Photoshop, etc are not necessarily optimizing their UI for new users, but rather those users who have been using their software for a while. I imagine that one's design considerations will change based on the prototype of the typical user.
There is Ello which was a kind of anti-facebook pitched as a "simple, beautiful & ad-free social network.”
Didn't do great though it's still there.
http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-what-is-...
He already covers that, but it seems you didn't take that section of TFA into account.
He says about how alternatives created to be more minimal, nicer to look etc. fail because they don't offer the same functionality, information density, etc. -- and how that is a necessary tradeoff.
It looks as though there are no real alternatives now but that wasn't the case when Facebook was starting out. It was much smaller than MySpace, and Google's Orkut got bigger faster, for example. Later, it had competition from many other rivals including Google+.
There's only a "lack of alternatives" to Facebook's UI because Facebook already won all those battles.
I'd wager that neither application would be as popular if they came out today as our standards have been raised.
Shout out to Basecamp for getting attention for another one of their link-bait-y, contrarian articles though. They are so good at that and it keeps their name out there.