More like this:
https://asktog.com/atc/principles-of-interaction-design/
https://www.nngroup.com/articles
I recommend prototyping the flow/feel of the app before working on the polish, or the functionality:
After over a decade of people jumping into these discussions with this line, I’ve gotta push back: Design is also how things look, and how things look can be important.
Consumers care about how things look. If we dismiss presentation and drive people towards UX stuff every time it comes up, then the people we talk to are going to end up having good ideas that no one buys because the packaging is a mess.
Yes: If you have a pretty modal but it can’t be dismissed by clicking outside of it, that’s Bad Design. But when you’ve hammered in all those errant nails and built something that works well, often you look at it and go “I wish it weren’t so ugly”. And we do need books/resources to give people the building blocks they need to make an app that people will agree is “basically good-looking”. (And then hopefully more advanced books/resources about particular styles so people can develop their own stylistic voice)
Or, in business terms, beauty has terrible ROI.
Look at almost any premium product and the premium that is being paid for is in the beauty. Rarely is it in the actual quality of the product.
SAP (everything), Workday (HR), Service Now (help desk), Archer (compliance), SailPoint (compliance), and other applications that have been inflicted on my miserable existence over the last 25 years of corporate IT; all B2B enterprise applications that I guarantee did not consider either speed or ease of use to be remotely important.
Even a Rolls Royce is a vehicle (and a damned fine one to boot) before it’s an art piece.
When functionality is a given like it is for a kitchen toaster, we can argue the presentation and style is more important.
The point is, it's hard and rare to get into such a position. Yes, eventually there will be a new Apple, but not yet. So anyone *today* looking to perform well should probably be more practical.
Beautiful, not in the least. Thanks to the cameras (a functional feature) I need to have a fugly case wrapping the entire thing.
It feels like a variation of learned helplessness, watching someone fumble with a Stripe terminal.
> How much of a premium are you, as a customer, willing to pay for the beauty?
Depends on the category of goods, but if I can afford it then I will probably choose something aesthetically pleasing to me most of the time. I can easily get by with an ugly screwdriver if it works well, but I would not like wearing bad-looking shoes.
Generally if I use something often, be it tools, clothes, guitars, utensils and whatnot, I try to find something appealing to my eye. Some people seemingly don’t care much about that, but it just so happens that I do. Paying a premium for the beauty relieves me from being very irritated about something I might not like.
Also, in my opinion, aesthetics, ergonomics and beauty sometimes all are side products of working hard on one of them. Beauty in tools and architecture and interfaces is not to be discarded since it makes our life more pleasing and tolerable. We could live in the holes in the ground, you know, if pure application of things to their intended purpose was all that mattered to us.
> How much functionality will you give up for the shinies?
I’m not sure something has to be given up at all, that’s the point.
Working all day in ugly software is like a mini version of this.
I don't think anybody considers beautiful software ad a premium, more that ugly software will not be considered at all because it can't be trusted.
Everything has terrible ROI if you don't understand the "I" and aren't tracking the "R".
Must be a complete and unfortunate coincidence then, that the richest tech company on the frickin planet rose to that prominence through "beauty", at least as their critics still like to call out.
That’s not the definition of UX.
UX is multi disciplinary, an umbrella term for many things, eg design research, IA, HCI, UI Design, …
There is so much to say on the topic, books have been written arguing at length even. I would never argue for worse UX if I had a choice, there should be a baseline “good” visual design, but poor UX can and will sink your product in most metrics that matter in the business world.
Oh, please no. We already have more than enough of that line of thinking. In software, especially, we see far too much pretty stuff that is horrendous to actually use.
I'll take the ugly thing that makes my life easier over the pretty thing that does the opposite every single time.
People judge apps by how they look more than how they work.
If it looks professional and good looking they give it more credit and chances than it deserves. If UX is good but looks are not airbnb/apple wannabe they tend to distrust it.
I think that a lot of software is inherently low (or even negative) value and thats why shiny wins.
Could easily be dreaming tho
The cone of shame my dog has right now “looks cool”; very sleek and streamline for a disposable thing, the designer surely was paid a premium, but the fasteners mechanics were poorly designed; vet tech said even she struggles with them and she puts them on dogs all week.
Design is how it looks and works as “designers” come up with both. The whole idea we can just put our foot down regarding definitions is not at all how reality works since nothing works on divine mandate. It’s relative.
Anybody telling you different is arguing from a pretty severe bias. If you're designing on the basis of how something works, and not also on how it looks at the same time, you're going to create a subpar outcome.
> I’ve gotta push back: Design is also how things look
To synthesize these two comments: How it looks is a huge part of how it works.
I had one old structural engineer spend a great deal of time trying to convince me that beautiful bridges were stronger than than ugly bridges. because our ideas of beauty are so tied to what works well. I am not entirely convinced, I have seen the sins some of these so called designers do in the name of "looking good" but I do see his point.
It's a contradiction to what I "should" want as a developer and I'm very aware of this.
No, it is not. If you're Steve Jobs then yes, but otherwise how it looks and how it works are usually two different job functions. People who are good at visual design are not usually knowledgeable enough to do functional design, and people who are good at functional design are not necessarily good at visual design.
Yes, it is. If it's about how it looks, then it's illustration, not design.
> how it looks and how it works are usually two different job functions.
Again, no. If you skip functionality in your design, you will end up with an unusable product.
Edit: don't also forget, that after initial perception comes the actual usage.
Bold statement for something subjective. I think you are confusing design and art (from your own experience or misfortune). The processes of visual design have informed (or formalised) the design as a process in other fields. Artists have a style as a function. Designers (visual or not) have process. No one is great at everything. Mediocre designers are either too visual or not at all (especially the latter), in my experience. Good to great designers grasp both and have breath. Even the ones that don't have art as a function can direct, steer and brief the art of a project (or be resourceful with it.) But you can't have design without process.
Functional design (how it works) and visual design (how it looks) is really two different job functions. You don't need an art degree or even be good in art in order to design the functionalities or even interactions of a product. At the same time, being good in art and designing cool looking UI doesn't make you qualified to design the functionalities or interactions of the product. Not even close.
Both job functions are needed to build a good product. In rare cases one person may be able to do both.
"In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service."
Design is not just one thing or another. It happens at each layer. From deciding how many options you want to present to the user, to how they will be presented. Or deciding how to deal with errors in the backend, versus reporting them in the front end. Design decisions are made the whole way through.
I think this is visible with lots of Apple products because some people complain that they aren’t flexible enough. But reducing configurability is as much a design decision as the colour of the icons. (And sometimes more challenging)
I think we are in agreement. "How it works" is design. "How it looks" is also design. Sometimes, but not usually, one person may be able to do both types of design.
UI (user interface) is a part of UX (user *experience).
Later, they produced Material Design.
The prosecution rests, your honour.
- (not strictly design system s) https://every-layout.dev/ and https://book.inclusive-components.design/
These are by people whose primary goal isn't promotions, keynotes or CVs.
Tailwind also does a decent job with both the framework itself and the commercial UI examples: https://tailwindui.com/
In any case, it contradicts your claim, since all this user research was way, way before UX was a thing.
Honestly I just got the feeling that the phrase UI had become stale and UX was just seen as a way for a new generation to put their mark on the world.
Nothing wrong with that, of course.
The 1985 edition "includes e.g. case studies (useful!), and an extended discussion of Jung's theories of intuition and how they should influence your designs (!!)"
So it is both "Look" and "function". Claiming looks aren't part of it is incorrect.
I think it's both. Interior designers are primarily interested in aesthetics. Same for the majority of famous fashion designers, who are usually not focused on making utilitarian clothes. It seems like most peoples' definition of design would include the work in those fields. UX is a better description of the aspect of design that cares about functionality and not aesthetics.
I think we're getting confused by fuzzy and overlapping definitions of different scope.
Absolutely, design is also how it works. However, how it works is also very much engineering. In fact, I'd argue that the overlap is even stronger there.