Happy Leap day! If today is your birthday, congrats on having an age on paper that is 1/4th of the age you actually feel. :)
Design
For the past few weeks, I have been reading ”User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play” by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant. Sometimes I think that design is looked at as the least important of a developer’s skill set. Backend is typically seen as more complex, and is usually more highly compensated. Kuang and Fabricant’s book has had me thinking a lot this month about the importance of design.
The first thing that I found interesting is the story of Apple. When Apple began its rise to world dominance, I was still too young to be a heavy computer user. It’s interesting because when I say “too young” I was actually much older than the age that many children today surf the web and watch Jake Paul vlogs. The difference is that before Apple ushered in the age of user friendly devices, children did not use computers at nearly the rate they do today. Since I was too young to really use a computer before Apple became prominent, I did not really understand the context in which Apple began making hardware.
Before Apple, computers were powerful machines that required specialized knowledge to use. They came with large, densely worded manuals, and despite the fact that they could do many tasks better than old methods, their difficulty of use prevented them from being nearly as prevalent as they are today. Apple’s designers strove to create user interfaces that lessened the difficulty of taking a task from an idea in your head --> to the interaction with the computer --> to the desired result. The iPhone and the ability to physically touch and drag objects around the screen really embodies this ease of use. To move down a page you simply drag down, just as you would drag a piece of physical paper across a table if you wanted to move it downward. Apple helped revolutionize the world of intuitive computing.
One aspect that “User Friendly” has had me thinking about is the difference between UI and UX. UI and UX are often grouped together as UI/UX, and it wasn’t until recently that I started thinking about their differences. UI stands for User Interface, and I think this is what most people think about when they imagine a designer. UI includes aspects such as color, layout, and aesthetics. UX stands for User Experience, and may have very little to do with visual design, but rather with how a human interacts with an object. UX involves thinking about how a designer can help make using a device as intuitive as possible. UI and UX can be completely independent of each other. Imagine you download an app with great UI: the colors are beautiful, there are tons of animations when you interact with the screen, etc. Now imagine that you start interacting with the app. You want to move an object from the bottom to the top of the screen. Instinctively, you click and drag. Nothing happens. Finally, you realize if you tap on the object, a menu appears. In that menu, hidden at the bottom of a scrollable list of 20 options, you finally see “Move”. You tap “Move”, and are taken to a new screen where you are asked to enter X and Y coordinates for the desired location of the object. Talk about bad UX. I’m sure you can also imagine a case when an app with minimal User Interface, could have a great, intuitive User Experience.
For more information on UI and UX, I recommend reading “User Friendly”, or to check out some of Apple’s documentation on Human Design Interface Guidelines.