我们中的一些人只是在UI设计的软方面遇到了困难(尤其是我自己)。“后端编码器”注定只设计业务逻辑和数据层吗?我们是否可以做些什么来重新训练我们的大脑,使其更有效地设计出令人愉悦和有用的演示层?

同事们给我推荐了《网站设计》、《不要让我思考》、《为什么软件很糟糕》等几本书,但我想知道其他人在这方面做了什么来弥补他们的不足?


当前回答

原因有很多。

(1)开发者不能站在用户的角度看问题。这是通常的怀疑:缺乏同理心。但这通常不是真的,因为开发人员并不像人们想象的那样陌生。

(2)另一个更常见的原因是,开发人员太接近自己的东西,在他的东西上呆了这么长时间,没有意识到其他人可能并不那么熟悉他的东西(这是一个比直觉更好的术语)。

(3)还有一个原因是开发人员缺乏技术。

我的最大主张:阅读任何UI,人类交互设计,原型书。例如:设计显而易见的:一种Web应用程序设计的常识方法,不要让我思考:一种Web可用性的常识方法,设计时刻,等等。

他们如何讨论任务流程?他们如何描述决策点?也就是说,在任何用例中,至少有3条路径:成功、失败/异常、替代。

因此,从点A,你可以去A.1, A.2, A.3。 从点A.1,你可以得到A.1.1, A.1.2, A.1.3,等等。

他们如何显示这种向下钻取的任务流程? 他们没有。他们只是掩饰它。

因为即使是UI专家也不具备技术,所以开发者也没有机会。 他认为这在他的头脑中是清楚的。但它甚至在纸上都不清楚,更不用说在软件实现中了。

我必须用我自己的手工制作技术。

其他回答

一个有用的框架是积极地考虑你在设计一个沟通过程时所做的事情。在非常真实的意义上,你的界面是一种语言,用户必须使用它来告诉计算机该做什么。这导致我们考虑以下几点:

Does the user already speak this language? Using a highly idiosyncratic interface is like communicating in a language you've never spoken before. So if your interface must be idiosyncratic at all, it had best introduce itself with the simplest of terms and few distractions. On the other hand, if your interface uses idioms that the user is accustomed to, they'll gain confidence from the start. The enemy of communication is noise. Auditory noise interferes with spoken communication; visual noise interferes with visual communication. The more noise you can cut out of your interface, the easier communicating with it will be. As in human conversation, it's often not what you say, it's how you say it. The way most software communicates is rude to a degree that would get it punched in the face if it were a person. How would you feel if you asked someone a question and they sat there and stared at you for several minutes, refusing to respond in any other way, before answering? Many interface elements, like progress bars and automatic focus selection, have the fundamental function of politeness. Ask yourself how you can make the user's day a little more pleasant.

实际上,很难确定程序员认为界面交互是什么,除了交流过程之外,但问题可能是它根本没有被认为是任何东西。

UI设计很难

对于这个问题:

为什么UI设计对大多数开发者来说如此困难?

试着问相反的问题:

为什么编程对大多数UI设计师来说如此困难?

编写UI和设计UI需要不同的技能和不同的心态。UI设计对于大多数开发人员来说是困难的,就像编写代码对于大多数设计师来说是困难的一样。

编码很难。设计也很难。很少有人两者都做得很好。优秀的UI设计师很少编写代码。他们甚至不知道怎么做,但他们仍然是优秀的设计师。那么,为什么优秀的开发者觉得自己要对UI设计负责呢?

了解更多关于UI设计的知识会让你成为更好的开发人员,但这并不意味着你应该对UI设计负责。对于设计师来说,情况正好相反:知道如何编写代码将使他们成为更好的设计师,但这并不意味着他们应该负责编写UI代码。

如何更好地进行UI设计

对于那些想要更好地进行UI设计的开发者,我有3条基本建议:

Recognize design as a separate skill. Coding and design are separate but related. UI design is not a subset of coding. It requires a different mindset, knowledge base, and skill group. There are people out there who focus on UI design. Learn about design. At least a little bit. Try to learn a few of the design concepts and techniques from the long list below. If you are more ambitious, read some books, attend a conference, take a class, get a degree. There are lot of ways to learn about design. Joel Spolky's book on UI design is a good primer for developers, but there's a lot more to it and that's where designers come into the picture. Work with designers. Good designers, if you can. People who do this work go by various titles. Today, the most common titles are User Experience Designer (UXD), Information Architect (IA), Interaction Designer(ID), and Usability Engineer. They think about design as much as you think about code. You can learn a lot from them, and they from you. Work with them however you can. Find people with these skills in your company. Maybe you need to hire someone. Or go to some conferences, attend webinars, and spend time in the UXD/IA/ID world.

这里有一些具体的事情你可以学习。不要什么都学。如果你了解以下所有内容,你就可以称自己为交互设计师或信息架构师。从清单顶部的事情开始。专注于特定的概念和技能。然后向下延伸。如果你真的喜欢这些东西,就把它当做职业道路吧。许多开发人员转向管理,但用户体验设计是另一种选择。

Learn fundamental design concepts. You should know about affordances, visibility, feedback, mappings, Fitt's law, poka-yokes, and more. I recommend reading The Design of Everyday Things (Don Norman) and Universal Principles of Design (Lidwell, Holden, & Butler) Learn about user experience. This is becoming the umbrella term for the human-centered design of web sites, applications, and any other digital artifact. The classic primer here is The elements of User Experience (Jesse James Garrett). You can get an overview and the first few chapters from the author's site. Learn to sketch designs. Sketching is fast way to explore design options and find the right design, whereas usability testing is about getting the design right. Paper prototyping is fast, cheap, and effective during the early design stages. Much faster than coding a digital prototype. The key text here is Sketching User Experience: Getting the design right and the right design (Bill Buxton). Sketching is a particularly useful skill when working with IA/ID/UX designers. Your collaboration will be more effective. For a good primer on how and why designers sketch, watch the presentation How to be a UX team of one by Leah Buley from the 2008 IA Summit. Learn paper prototyping. The fastest way to iteratively test an interface before you write code. Different from sketching and usability testing. The definitive book here is Paper Prototyping (Carolyn Snyder). You can get a good DVD on this from the Nielsen Norman Group. Learn usability testing. Discount testing is easy and effective. But for many UIs, usability is hard to do well. You can learn the basics quickly, but good usability people are invaluable. If you want a book, the classic is The Handbook of Usability Testing (Jeffrey Rubin). It's older but offers thorough coverage of lab-based testing. The famous starter book is Don't Make Me Think (2nd Ed) (Steve Krug). I caution people about this one: Krug makes it sound easier than it is. But it is a good starting point. The user research books listed in the next point also cover this topic. And you can find piles about it online. Learn about information architecture. The main book here is Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (3rd) (Louis Rosenfeld & Peter Morville). A good starter book is Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web (Christina Wodtke). For more, visit the Information Architecture Institute or attend the annual Information Architecture Summit. Learn about interaction design. The main book here is The Essentials of Interaction Design (3rd) (Alan Cooper, et al). A good starter book is Designing for interaction (Dan Saffer). For more, visit the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) or attend the annual Interaction Design conference. Learn fundamentals of graphic design. Graphic design is not UI design, but concepts from graphic design can improve an interface. Graphic design introduces design principles for the visual presentation of information, such as proximity, alignment, and small multiples. I recommend reading The non-designer's design book (Robin Williams) and Envisioning Information (Edward Tufte) Learn to do user research. Where usability tests an interface, user research tries to model users and their tasks through personas, scenarios, user journeys, and other documents. It's about understanding users and what they do, then using that to inform the design instead of guessing. Some techniques are interviews, surveys, diary studies, and cart sorting. Good books on this are Observing the User Experience (Mike Kuniavsky) and Understanding Your Users (Courage & Baxter) Learn to do field research. Watching people in the lab under artificial conditions helps (ie: usability), but there is nothing like watching people use your code in context: their home, their office, or wherever they use it. Goes by various names, including ethnography, field studies, and contextual inquiry. Here is a good primer on field research. Two of the better known books here are Rapid Contextual Design (Karen Holtzblatt et al) and User and task analysis for interface design (Hackos & Redish). Read UX design web sites. Some of the big ones are Boxes & Arrows, UX Mag, UX Matters, and Digital Web magazine. Use UI pattern libraries. There are patterns for interfaces. For web sites, I recommend The Design of Sites, 2nd ed (Van Duyne, et al) and Homepage usability: 50 websites deconstructed (Jakob Nielsen & Marie Tahir). For desktop applications I recommend Designing interfaces (Jennifer Tidwell), and for web applications I recommend Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions (Bill Scott & Theresa Neil). Online you should check Welie pattern library, UI patterns, and Web UI patterns. Attend UX design conferences. Some good annual conferences are: Information Architecture Summit, Interaction '09 (IxDA), User Interface, and UX week. Attend a workshop or webinar. You can take workshops, webinars, and online courses. This is far from a comprehensive list, but you might try the UIE virtual seminars, Adaptive Path virtual seminars, and UX webinars from Rosenfeld Media. Get a degree. A graduate degree in HCI is one approach, but these programs are mostly about writing coding. If you want to learn about the design of digital artifacts and devices, then you want a graduate program that's not in CS. Some options include Interaction Design at Carnegie Mellon, the d-School at Stanford, the ITP program at NYU, and Information Architecture & Knowledge Management at Kent State (disclosure: I'm on faculty at Kent; we are seeing more and more people with CS degrees moving into UX design instead of management, which is interesting, because management is the traditional path for developers who want to move away from writing code while staying in their field). There are many more programs. Each has their own perspective, areas of emphasis, and technical expectations. Some come out of the arts and visual design, others out of library and information science, and some from CS. Most are hybrids, but every hybrid has deeper roots in one or more fields. If this interests you, look around and try to understand the differences between these programs. Some offer online courses and certificate programs in addition to full-fledged degrees.

为什么UI设计很难

优秀的UI设计很难,因为它涉及到两种截然不同的技能:

A deep understanding of the machine. People in this group worry about code first, people second. They have deep technological knowledge and skill. We call them developers, programmers, engineers, and so forth. A deep understanding of people and design: People in this group worry about people first, code second. They have deep knowledge of how people interact with information, computers, and the world around them. We call them user experience designers, information architects, interaction designers, usability engineers, and so forth.

这就是这两个群体——开发者和设计师之间的本质区别:

Developers make it work. They implement the functionality on your TiVo, your iPhone, your favorite website, etc. They make sure it actually does what it is supposed to do. Their highest priority is making it work. Designers make people love it. They figure out how to interact with it, how it should look, and how it should feel. They design the experience of using the application, the web site, the device. Their highest priority is making you fall in love with what developers make. This is what is meant by user experience, and it's not the same as brand experience.

此外,编程和设计需要不同的心态,而不仅仅是不同的知识和技能。优秀的UI设计需要两种心态、两种知识基础和两种技能。而掌握其中任何一种都需要数年时间。

开发人员会发现UI设计很难,就像UI设计师会发现写代码很难一样。

我认为他们的技能非常不同。优秀的设计师了解人类行为、颜色和字体的心理等。我认为这就像同时做营销人员和开发人员一样。非常有挑战性,但也不是不可能。

我会试着找一些用户界面专家,看看他们的学习建议是什么。除非你设计的是像谷歌这样极简主义的东西,否则如果这是一个重要的项目,你最好雇佣那些研究过UI艺术的人。

也就是说,如果你正在设计一款非常实用的应用,我认为你可以试着专注于界面的简单性和清晰度——我认为这至少是谷歌成功(以及堆栈溢出)的一半关键——即它是直观的,使用起来很愉快。

我认为部分原因是UI设计和程序设计的目标经常相互冲突。当我编程的时候,我经常会想“最简单的方法是什么?”在设计UI时,最简单的方法并不总是最友好的。如果你两者都做,你可能会倾向于选择最简单的实现,这对用户友好性有负面影响。

我还认为程序员太接近产品,无法从用户的角度来看待它。对编程人员来说非常容易和直观的东西对用户来说可能并不容易。获得用户的输入是必要的。

UI设计也不是总是正确或错误的。不同的人对UI的评价不同。例如,有些人讨厌Office中的新“Ribbon”UI,有些人喜欢它。有些人认为苹果的OSX UI很棒,有些人不喜欢它,觉得它很难使用。不管你设计出什么样的UI,总会有人不喜欢它。

“好的UI设计”其实是两个问题:

获得正确的设计 正确的设计

两者都是难题。以我的经验来看,这两件事应该并行进行,这样才能避免在项目后期出现糟糕的惊喜(“为什么我们在IE8中拖放的速度非常慢??”你说它无法修复是什么意思??”)

为了得到正确的设计,你必须探索各种可能性。书籍可以引导你尝试对你的情况最有意义的事情-经验当然更好。此外,你绝对需要来自真实用户的反馈——否则你怎么才能发现设计已经是正确的呢?)你当然看不出来。继续阅读!)

“使设计正确”是下一个问题,因为这意味着必须执行你认为合适的设计。

那些“用户体验/图形用户界面”的事情是如此困难,因为找到正确的答案包括理解人类想要什么——他们不能客观地告诉你,而你也不能从“外部”找到。这意味着(经验)引导的试错方法是唯一可行的方法。


为了更清楚地回答你的问题:

为什么优秀的UI设计对某些人来说如此困难 重击

对于硬核开发人员来说,一个大问题是,他们对软件如何工作的理解与用户认为它如何工作的理解是非常不同的(例如,URL“www.stackoverflow.com”应该写成“com.stackoverflow.com”,如果你知道DNS如何工作的话。但试着销售一个浏览器,它期望url:))。

作为旁注:我建议你着眼于“体验设计”而不是“用户界面设计”,但这是另一个故事。