Re:Fuckin' user interface design, I swear
by prox on Tuesday March 09, 2021 @07:29AM
(#26398161)
You literally described my job, I bridge the gap between design, code and make sure there is a thorough implementation of both, I have skills that overlap in those areas and so I can advise clients properly for any gaps that might have arisen. My bible is About Face : Interaction Design.
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Haha, yes! And that book is pretty ancient. I think the first edition dealt exclusively with building Windows desktop apps because the web wasn't ready yet. It lays out some of the blindingly obvious UX axioms that a lot of devs just don't bother to think about. One of them is "hide the ejection lever" (a metaphor for the ejection lever on a fighter jet) for exactly the kind of thing MJD is discussing. Have those irreversible, destructive controls be present and findable, but really hard to click by accident.
Haha, great example! It has had some revisions, my copy is from 2014, but the great thing is that it all remains relevant.
The big takeaway is that humans shouldn’t be required to think like computers when they are interacting with one.
“Warning : Failed to load library” <ok>
Why did the library failed to load? Why are we being informed? Why does it say “Ok” when it is not ok?
As a lovely example. And on the regular you still have these problems. The daily wtf is full of current day examples.
I think my favorite lesson was their term "implementation-driven design" that I still see pretty frequently. It's where you build your UX to match your system architecture and is the opposite of "user-driven design". Like building forms that are just one-to-one with the database tables. It's why I cringe every time I see devs on hacker news saying they don't need managers or designers to build products because you'll end up with an implementation-driven design more often than not.
Speaking as a programmer who only occasionally interacts with design and considers himself largely terrible at it, reading "About Face" is probably the single book that helped the most to make me (slightly) less terrible.
It is always good to hear this! Especially the part about smart products and posture is very good to know by heart. So many apps still just botch their posture or completely forget the users intent and context (if they even consider it!)