Comment by csmeder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csmeder | Hacker News Reader

In the field of UX/Psychology there is a term “suffice”. Our brains are constantly sufficing rather that perceiving all data and interpretating it. If we had to do the latter end of the spectrum, our heads would need to be bigger, to the point birth wouldn’t be possible based on current female autonomy. You wouldn’t have survived child birth.

As a result when a person visits a page on a website for the first time people in average scan the page only reading a few words (I’ve hear 7 on average claimed). However, most beginner designers will not realize this and put a couple hundred words on a page with out proper typographic hierarchy. Better designers (same is true for poster designers) use typography and visual hierarchy (Font sizing, spacing/white-space, color, font weight, alignment) to create a design that is easy to scan for a sufficing human brain.

The less scannable the page is the more the brain needs to work to make sense of what is being displayed (higher cognitive load), and the less of a chance the user will read the highest priority data first (the context or hook data).

If the user reads the data in the wrong order, it will likely be confusing noise. The goal of a designer is to present the data in such a way that the signal to nose ratio is high, as they scan and dig deeper into a presented page or poster.

I've always said that the most important job of a UI designer (or graphic designer in the case of posters) is how you communicate with your users.

Unfortunately it's too common that people, specially designers, put aesthetics first.

To put it bluntly, users don't care about the drop shadow of a button if they can't find the damn button or if they don't understand in advance what the button will do.

>the most important job of a UI designer [...] is how you communicate with your users.

>[...] it's too common that people [...] put aesthetics first.

While aesthetics don't need to come first in a design, they do allow a large amount of information -- that you're trying to communicate -- to be encoded in a way that's processed subconsciously and quickly:

A stranger dressed in "war paint" approaches you to sell you a coffee is going to perform worse than a Nanny wearing a warm, fuzzy, cozy, looking sweater.

Dressing in "war paint" vs dressing in a sweater is a form of communication.

For sure, aesthetics are also a form of communication, it's just that it has less impact in the usability of something.

Am I just fortunate that it has been years since these types of complaints have been true with my teams? My recent (last 3-5 years) experience is that modern designers very clearly understand UX vs. UI, and design intuitive experiences to help their audience, not just make a pretty web site. Frankly, that fields has become so mature, with designers having deep understandings of UX to the point where I just sit back, let them soar, and code what they come up with.

The only place I still see poor design work is from coders (myself included), who jump from "I'm good at CSS" to "I'm a great designer"

> birth wouldn’t be possible based on current female autonomy

I'm not sure if that's a typo (anatomy) or an incisive observation regarding women's rights.

Haha, what’s funny is I’m terrible at spelling, so I asked my wife how to spell anatomy she must of miss understood me (she is good at spelling) and she spelled “autonomy”.

Perception is actually milliseconds behind reality, due to the nature of the brain processing visual signals. Meditative practice can reduce this delay somewhat.

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