Design for programmers | Hacker News Reader

Design for programmers

method.ac

96 pointsadamnemecek27 comments

Programmers are not an alien species that needs special instructions catered to their profession. They're regular people, who learn the same way anyone does: by doing.

This website wastes time talking about how programmers are analytical people, and can't hope to understand design without special teaching methods. Let's end this myth. Programmers are not inherently more logical and analytical than other people (Lots of jobs require logic, even design jobs). Programmers are normal people who learned a skill.

Design is also a very experiential field: you don't learn how to do good design, you eventually get good at it by doing it a lot. It helps to know some basics before getting started, but most of what design school does is force you to do a lot.

That sounds exactly like programming.

Or any profession really - you have to put in the time. Which is why expecting a good designer to be a good dev or vice versa is kind of outlandish.

How is that different from progressing as a software developer? I learned 90% of what I know today from hands on experimentarikn

I didn't say it was different. I used "also" to mean the same; sorry if my wording was ambiguous.

From the blog post, I think the point isn't that developers need to learn differently. Their contention is that developers need to unlearn some of the things that make us good at what we do. For example, as developers, we're trained to think about the data model first which leads to scalable architectures, well-structured code and UIs that are little more than CRUD interfaces. The blog post lists a few other developer tendencies that sabotage our designs.

As a programmer myself, I believe there is some truth to it though. Programmers tend to be superusers and therefore design for other superusers.

By the way, old but gold: "User Interface Design For Programmers" http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/fog0000000249.html

But doctors tend to be doctors and tend to design for other doctors.

This problem is not unique to programmers.

Yes it's not unique in principle, but programmers find themselves having to do UI design (or at least contribute to it) way more often than lawyers, nuclear physicists or beekeepers ;) That's why this issue keeps returning.

There's also the (absolutely false) notion that designing interfaces somehow is a subset of a programming skillset, so if one is a proficient coder, they're by definition capable of delivering sensible UI solutions, pretty much like an academic could teach in their field in high school since they already know more than enough

This. I don't understand why people desperately need to categorize other people. Just yesterday i saw some guys being confused by someone on TV who was an electrician and enjoyed sewing.

Co-founder here, sorry to let you know this course will no longer be. So many things have happened since we had this idea, it's been difficult to even change the homepage to reflect this. I'll put up a placeholder homepage asap.

Interesting, I guess since I'm used to seeing sites for programming for designers a lot.

There's something that looks a little weird: http://i.imgur.com/BIbGxZUl.jpg I'm on Firefox 32 using Ubuntu.

While this is a pretty fun idea, it's pretty much dead:

=================

Hi <...>,

I'm glad that you find it amazing but we have Method on hold for now. We are focusing on other projects we think will work better.

Thanks for your kind words,

Maria.

mariamunuera.com

=================

I got this response after I sent an email asking for any status updates sometime in April. Unfortunate.

Very cool, I did the font one. I found myself first adjusting the leaders based on how well the letter looked to my eye and could easily get into the 80+% range. But when I tried to use my analytical eye by lining up the dimension leaders, I dropped a solid 10 points. Guess I have a fair eye, but no skill. Thanks for posting.

Even though it still hasn't launched, I posted this since I thought that the design games at the bottom of the page were cool.

I don't think that design (or programming) is for everyone though. You can only learn so much

What do you mean. I dont get it. It's just a skill, as everything else.

It is much needed course but it really doesn't compare with Codecademy's beginner course.

The design games were very vague and had no clear objective. I guess it is a bit harder to gamify something that is more subjective and "looser" in nature

I played the kerning game. It's true they don't give you any instruction on what good kerning is, so if you've never been exposed to the concept you have to discover it by failing through it.

87% :D

What Codeacademy course are you referring too? I went to their website and didn't see any beginner design course.

Although different in nature (less interactive, more articles), HackDesign course is worth mentioning. I learned a lot there: https://hackdesign.org/lessons

Very interested. Are there any courses already out there that can teach basic design?

This book is pretty good http://www.amazon.com/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-Bea...

Also, the other day I came across this pretty exhaustive blog post https://medium.com/@karenxcheng/how-to-get-a-job-as-a-design...

Kadavy's book is great. I also highly recommend it.

I'm of the analytical type of people and his book does a great job explaining fundamental design concepts in a very logical way.

Check https://hackdesign.org. It's great resource. Not entirely focused on the analytical minded people, but I found it nicely paced and structured to build a mental "how design works" framework.

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