I've been caring more and more recently about design as opposed to programming.
How do I get better at UI design for a given program? For a concrete example, if needed, say website design.
Design
Leo Bailey
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Bentley Collins
Keep it simple stupid is the best words of advice. Having two completely different menus on the top and bottom of a page is a good example of bad design. That looks like it was made in the 90's.
Aiden Scott
Read a few blogs about it. Then ignore all that actual advice and follow hipster trends.
Brandon Richardson
This gives you some simple website designs. As the other anons have said, I would say simplicity is best, and you shouldn't make everything look like a toy, with buttons hidden before more buttons.
wiby.me
Kevin Brooks
Maybe read on general graphic design instead? Usually anything to do with the web is laced with retardation and laziness and hipstershit.
As far as websites specifically, mobile is unfortunately what majority of people browse the web on, so you should make sure the website works on any screen size all the way down to 320px width. You can use CSS media queries to make changes to the layout depending on screen width.
The hardest thing from my experience is designing good navigation menus, because people like to have more pages than they need. One part of design is organizing and/or condensing the information to make it easy to understand, not just making it look good. For example in your pic Materials, References and Brochures sound like they should be in the same page and others could be combined as well such as employees+contact, and news on the front page, though I'd have to see what's actually in the pages.
That led me to some real shitty looking website:
fishlore.com
Not too bad in terms or organizing information, but the visuals aren't good, in fact they make it harder to understand.
Levi Jenkins
Aiden Lopez
I like flat themes, interface elements and icons, more than the pseudo 3D of the 90s, tbh. Grouping and organization of elements just became worse for some reason, e.g. windows settings/systemcontrols then vs now.
Also you can bash the "hamburger menus" all you want, but the average user knows what clicking this pictogram will do. So as far as standardized language of form goes, that's not a bad thing per se. What's bad is that there's a perceived need to have structurally the same UI (under hamburger menus for example) on every device, which makes not a lot of sense. Manipulating on a touchscreen is not the same as manipulating with a mouse/keyboard and that should be accounted for.
- have tree like structures, where the items are grouped and ordered within groups sensibly
- UI elements should be where a user that hasn't mastered the UI would expect them
- separated pictograms (for heavily used items) should be used sparingly and should be ordered sensibly too
- a user should be able to fulfill the basic goals of the program without instruction in a sensible timeframe
- avoid surprises
- as the average user is not something static, the UI should be tested
Charles Taylor
because you have no taste.
Luke Murphy
Windows 95/98/ME/2000 unironically had the best GUI. It was very practical but it didn't look pig disgusting. I especially miss the theme and wallpaper customization options and the icons.
this.
Brandon Foster
Why can't we have simple designs? Why does modernity have to be so shit?
Isaiah Ross
Because a bunch of people need to justify getting a continued wage. There's literally no other reason.
Eli Jackson
What JS framework are you using? Did you check that it's still trendy? If it's older than 2 years it's probably time for an upgrade.
The internet is now mobile. It just doesn't make sense to make a desktop site anymore, so just optimize it for phone and your desktop customers will slowly catch on to the future of tech. Mobile only.
Do you have an app? Apps are pretty cool and more intimate than a web page, and you should redirect your mobile users to the Apple Store or Google Play Store when they arrive.
This page is too static. Have you considered making the entire background a video? Bandwidth is a solved problem son don't try to optimize for a fast load, it'll just work. 5G is coming soon too, so even less of a concern. Future proofed! yah.
What CDN are you using? Literally no one bothers to setup a HTTP server to handle static content anymore, it just goes on the CDN. Your data lives is the cloud, say a MongoDB store, and then the page itself can load a javascript to render the rest of the page by making a series of API calls to your mongo backed store.
Jason Thomas
It's simple, easy on the eyes, enables high contrasting elements and looks, in a way, more "clean" than pseudo 3D. Mainly because all optical elements are very reduced. That's not a bad thing, all things considered.
What you subjectively find more pleasing doesn't matter as long as you can't provide reasons for it (other than "i like it").
Brandon Bell
Flat design is bad because it lacks visual cues. In a traditional interface, there is more visual distinction, you know at a glance what things are. A display is a display, a button is a button, a border is a border, and so on. You have to go out of your way to fuck up a traditional interface.
Now that pic reminds me that, flat or not, the Start menu always sucked because of another problem: it provided no organization for the programs. Compare that to most other desktop environments out there, for example pic related: all programs are automatically placed in categories that make sense.
Landon Sanders
Your pic is not flat design yet it still has everything that makes flat design so shit; elements floating randomly in a flat surface.
The problem is not in the design style, it's simply just shitty design period. Pic related is that menu in non-hipster version of flat design, I can only speak for myself but I think this is way clearer and better looking than the default cinnamon or whatever menu.
Xavier Johnson
Not him, but the different shades indicate layers, which makes it non-flat.
Wyatt King
But then is better at indicating such hyerarchy.
Asher Bell
any desktop / user.env that uses over a GB of RAM is trash IMO. you can say that's because my computer is trash but the ever increasing hardware requirements are bullshit and are used to hide background monitoring & telemetry as the IoT will do with omnipresent sensor tech.
there was nothing missing that I actually needed, in windows XP running on less than 200 MB of RAM, or around the same on XFCE linux.
modern OS' bloatware is cancer and spies.
I'm about ready to start designing new hardware and OS from scratch, because everything new is so shit, and everything in general (x86, AMD, ARM, ?) is backdoor'd by (((82OO/talpi0t))).
(OP)
apply NLP to your design process, and engineer the UI from the user experience backward. study NLP. but that's on the conceptual and human side side, learning to effectively use the language you're operating in is a separate matter. still if you study NLP it helps with learning and applying information so there is never a loss to learning NLP.
that's Bandler's NLP btw, not ML's Natural Language Processing.
Nathaniel Kelly
you're wrong, you can organize programs on the start menu exactly how you want. I hope it's still the same on the more recent Windows versions... or maybe it's not, but mine is kind of well organized.
Back in the 90s visual consistency was simple but tricky, you had either 32x32 or 48x48 icons, and you needed to know pixel art to create icons for your software. and it was cute, it was not XP ugly or cancerously minimalistic.
Faience/faenza icons are great, they'e stylish and have consistency. not minimalist at all.The rest of the interface.... meh.
I kind of find this pc very productivity oriented.
minimal design is null if it comes with wasting 2Gb of RAM for rendering itself and running spyware processes.
Alexander Harris
You can, but it's completely manual.
Liam Watson
You need it to be manual to organize things how YOU want, how can you let the computer decide for you what does what?
User mustn't be pampered. User must make the program or the machine adapt to his needs and not the opposite.
NEVER, the opposite.
Dylan White
Hunter Garcia
everything is just responsive design navbars with hamburger menus these days
dude bootstrap lmao
Cameron James
look at that crazy frenchman running Win9x in 2019. But seriously, I liked win9x. Sure it was proprietary and often a piece of crap, but man it was the 90s and I was young and everything was better.
What does your workflow and what are the machine specs you run all this on look like user? Genuinely curious.
William Robinson
Yes. You need to do it manually, such as create the directories under "all programs" and then direct installers to create start menu shortcuts in the right directories (some won't allow this, then you need to move the shortcuts to the right place manually and then also manually remove them when the program is uninstalled).
Jonathan Brooks
Seconding , please tell more about the system (both hardware and software), maybe picture of the computer? Does it have a CRT monitor?
Adam Peterson
I don't hate you because you wrote this, I hate you because it is true.
Jaxon Peterson
Here are some things that would already make your shit better than 99% of the absolute shit out there:
-All actions should happen within a single frame (e.g 16.66ms for 60Hz, 8.33ms for 120Hz)
-No modal dialogs
-No retarded transitions that block the user from doing shit while making him watch that bullshit
-No hamburger menu
-No mobile-first
-Have fucking rectangles and shit like Windows 95. See
-Don't do subpixel rendering (waste of CPU and only works on certain monitors)
-Have hotkeys for everything
Basically do what Windows 95 does but without modal dialogs. Don't follow any of these retarded modern (((UX))) memes.
Robert Gonzalez
I really got hard nostalgia at those highly detailed icons and this makes me curious to know more how I can get this on my machine.
Late versions of Netscape were basically Mozilla 1.x and it seems to work with chanboards. And those fucking icons, my God it's cute, I hope this style could make a comeback.
The "ThinkPad" icon is a hint.
Owen Young
Listen to this guy. Modern UI design is retarded.