Think Your App Is Beautiful? Not Without User Experience Design
- By Dave Feldman
- September 1st, 2014
- 2 Comments
Lately, any app is “beautiful”. If we review tech news, you’ve seen this pageant: Beautiful charts and graphs1. Beautiful stories2. Beautiful texting3. Beautiful notebooks4. Beautiful battery information5.
Aspiring to beauty in a designs is admirable. But it doesn’t pledge usability, nor is it a product or selling strategy. Like “simple” and “easy” before it, “beautiful” says really small about a product. How many people, fed adult with PowerPoint, cry out in frustration, “If usually it were some-more beautiful”?
At best, a problem is simple: No one has figured out how to report their product effectively. For example, Write6, a note-taking app, describes itself as “a pleasing home for all your notes,” that doesn’t contend many about since one competence wish it. Macworld describes it as “Easy Markdown Writing for Dropbox Users7.” That’s both obvious and specific: If we like Markdown and use Dropbox, you’ll review more.
Changing adjectives simulate changing attitudes. In his new essay “The Seduction of a Superficial in Digital Product Design8,” Adaptive Path’s Peter Merholtz writes:
“Digital product pattern sermon over a final few years has turn literally superficial. Much (most?) of a courtesy has been on issues like ‘flat’ vs ‘skeuomorphic’, a tone intrigue of iOS 7, parallax scrolling, or underlining links. And not that these things aren’t critical or value discussing, yet as someone who came adult in pattern by approach of usability and information architecture, I’ve been unhappy how a village has willfully neglected a deeper concerns of systems and structure in preference of a surface. we mean, how many pixels need to be spilled on iOS 7.1’s redesigned change key?”
It wasn’t always this way. Indeed, when we became a designer, we had a conflicting problem.
Design Before Aesthetics
When we started conceptualizing in a mid-’90s, we called it “user interface design,” or “human-computer interaction.” Software wasn’t a quite hospitable place for striking designers. The web was a singular medium, with 216 “web-safe” colors9 and a need to support 800 × 600 displays during 72 PPI. Desktop platforms were even some-more limited: A symbol looked like a symbol looked like a button, and few apps undertook a staggering bid of formulating their possess demeanour and feel. Animation was singular to image-swap rollovers. The idea of a “front-end web developer” didn’t exist, since a height was limiting adequate that designers with no coding knowledge could do it themselves.
Practitioners of human-computer communication tended to negligence visible design. We dealt in usability, information pattern and information visualization. Making it flattering was, if anything, a good approach to problematic piece with Flash.
And that worried me. Aesthetics didn’t seem exclusive with usability; and given a choice between a serviceable nauseous product and a serviceable appealing one, since not a latter? we also couldn’t assistance meditative about form and duty together, any ancillary and enhancing a other.
I found support in a work of Edward Tufte10, whose books laid out beliefs and processes for information design. Many of these beliefs — like a “smallest effective difference” and a eminence between information ink and chartjunk11 — continue to beam my work today.
12Tufte frequency talks of beauty, nonetheless his work is infused with it. Over and over, he takes a bad pattern and turns it into an effective one — and in a routine transforms it from ornate to gorgeous. For Tufte, beauty is an constituent partial of presenting information well. In closing The Visual Display of Quantitative Information14, he writes, “Graphical magnificence is mostly found in morality of pattern and complexity of data.”
15Putting The Visual In Design
By a mid-2000s, a attention had held adult with Tufte. Digital designers tended to tumble into one of dual buckets: “user knowledge design” (UX) and “visual design” (although titles varied). Visual pattern was, in a sense, unsentimental striking design, and it brought UX to life in pixels. It wasn’t peculiar to put dual designers on a project, one of any type. The ensuing work benefited not usually from their extent of skills yet also from a interplay between a two.
Why this newfound acceptance of a visual? In his 2007 Emotional Design1917, Don Norman writes:
“In a 1980s, in essay “The Design of Everyday Things”, we didn’t take emotions into account. we addressed application and usability, duty and form, all in a logical, unfeeling approach — even yet we am murderous by feeble designed objects. But now I’ve changed. Why? In partial since of new systematic advances in a bargain of a mind and of how tension and discernment are wholly intertwined.”
Perception and discernment are subjective, and a romantic state influences how we think. That malleability is pervasive: The universe we see is not a universe as it is. (For a fascinating and minute scrutiny of this, we suggest David Eagleman’s Incognito: The Secret Lives of a Brain18.) The consequences are profound: If, in crafting an app’s demeanour and feel, one can put a user in an romantic state gainful to a charge during hand, afterwards a visible pattern will have been a foundational partial of a UX.
This change in viewpoint paralleled technological improvement. We had millions of colors, incomparable displays and a horsepower to build well-spoken animations. CSS and a DOM gave us a coherence to build wholly styled, animated, interactive apps in a browser. Displays were still low-resolution and typography rudimentary, yet it was probable to build a product that represented a distinct, discriminating graphical prophesy from tip to bottom — and to request a beliefs of information pattern with distant some-more subtlety.
And it kept removing better. The iPhone put dynamic, context-aware program in everyone’s pocket. Display fortitude doubled, and afterwards kept increasing. Animation got smoother, richer and many easier to build — finish with bouncing, colliding objects that mimicked real-world physics. Web fonts liberated us from a shackles of Arial and Verdana, and those high-resolution displays gave legibility to rise families and weights that weren’t formerly practical. Today, we have rare energy to broach cinematic delight.
Taking The UX Out Of Design
By 2011, we beheld attitudes changing again. We’d taken a “design” out of “user knowledge design,” and some companies had apart UX and “design” teams. Wireframes had depressed out of preference in some circles. Design debates were increasingly divorced from user needs, as Peter Merholz noted.
Last year saw a pleasure of “flat” over “skeumorphic” design, secure in a peculiar Modernist-esque evidence that dump shadows, textures and shimmer are somehow wrong to a middle of a digital display.
But a digital arrangement is not, in fact, a medium. The display, a keyboard, a rodent and a touchscreen are themselves artifacts that we’ve designed in sequence to work with a loyal medium: a user. Our middle is a strange, quirky one, developed over millennia to correlate with an sourroundings that frequency matches a one we find him in, stranded with a heuristic approach of meditative that infrequently produces implausible flashes of discernment and infrequently steers him in wholly a wrong direction.
So today, maybe Don Norman’s discernment in Emotional Design1917 is indispensable in reverse. Beauty is squandered when a products don’t residence genuine user needs in a serviceable manner. Again, notice is subjective: The product gets uglier if it fails to accommodate user needs or becomes confusing. It’s like descending in adore during initial sight, afterwards descending behind out after a brief conversation. Your vanquish looks reduction appealing now; we can’t even remember since we were so perplexed in a initial place.
Great pattern is a singularity of art and science, of aesthetics, usability and a low bargain of user needs and behaviors. To succeed, we need a balance. Beauty that isn’t partial of holistic, effective product pattern will be wasted.
As digital designers, a apparatus is a pixel, yet we have higher-level collection as well. We can satisfy an romantic state. We can use cinema and shapes to elicit informed objects, endowing a grid of pixels with illusions of a earthy world, call informed interactions in an unknown environment.
Furthermore, we can pleasure with animation, even as we use it to safety context and impersonate physicality. We can deliberately select typography, tone and density to emanate visible hierarchy — emphasize some elements and de-emphasize others to assistance a user’s eye upsurge opposite a page and know what needs to occur next. We can precipitate a universe of information points into a draft that allows present understanding. And we can interpose all of it with a beauty built not as a element to a efforts, yet as an constituent partial of it.
(cc, al, ml, il)
Footnotes
- 1 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/haiku-deck-presentation-slideshow/id536328724?mt=8
- 2 https://medium.com/beautiful-stories/welcome-to-medium-for-ios-8d530817bdc9
- 3 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/textie-messaging-beautiful/id353912946?mt=8
- 4 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sticky-beautiful-notebooks/id364899302?mt=8
- 5 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/battery-diag/id836505650?mt=12
- 6 http://writeapp.net/
- 7 http://www.macworld.com/article/2032176/review-write-for-iphone-brings-easy-markdown-writing-for-dropbox-users.html
- 8 http://www.peterme.com/2014/05/06/1416/
- 9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors
- 10 http://www.amazon.com/Edward-R.-Tufte/e/B000APET3Y/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1409571115sr=8-1
- 11 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartjunk
- 12 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/01-tufteesque-example-opt.jpg
- 13 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/01-tufteesque-example-opt.jpg
- 14 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0961392142/
- 15 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/02-Minard-opt.png
- 16 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Joseph_Minard
- 17 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005GKIYD4/
- 18 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004J4WK9W/
- 19 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005GKIYD4/
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Think Your App Is Beautiful? Not Without User Experience Design
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