Characteristics of a good UI designer

Question

What are the characteristics of a good UI designer? How much does one have to have graphical design abilities these days as opposed to interaction design abilities. I see this of growing importance with the advent of WPF and Silverlight.

I personally consider myself good at interaction design, but would like to strengthen my skills in the graphical design area. Is it even possible to learn these skills or are you born with them? Can anybody recommend any good books or resources that would help?

Thanks,

Craig

Answer 1

I would look at any of the edward tufte books.

Jakob Nielson is a good author also.

Answer 2

Try the Non-designer's design book.

In my experience, interface design is a skill all in itself. Graphic designers are good at making wonderfully beautiful but completely confusing and unusable interfaces.

I have a few tricks I use but they mostly involve stealing design elements from well designed apps and websites.

Answer 3

In my experience, it's a lot easier to find someone to make pretty pages, than someone who can do really amazing, subtle, non-obvious use cases. Use cases that aren't fundamentally table maintenance input forms.

If you're there already, I'd suggest you might think about finding a gui artist to pair-program with.

Answer 4

Thanks for the book recommendation - I already own that book :-)

Answer 5

In my experience, the hallmark of a good UI designer isn't necessarily a snazzy, do-it-all, isn't-that-cool solution, but generally one that's almost invisible because it just works with very little help from the user:

• Controls and information are laid out logically, intuitively, and consistently.
• The ease of accessing a feature is proportional to its frequency of use.
• The user finds it almost impossible not to use the product correctly.
• It breaks the "rules" when doing so increases its usability.
• It's attractive in a "girl (or guy) next door" sort of way. Pleasant to look at, but not distracting.

Answer 6

On the opposite side, if I find something laid out poorly, boxes that don't line up, awkward usage, poor grammar, I assume that the programmer is just as sloppy in their internal code. I expect more bugs in applications with a poor UI.

It's somewhat dated, but I enjoyed "The Design of Everyday Things". Good UI makes the user feel good without them ever noticing.

Answer 7

Most people can look at user interfaces (like they look at anything graphical) and say "that looks good" or "that doesn't look good". What usually makes a graphics person able to produce good-looking material is a willingness to change and tweak things near-endlessly, and even throw out entire lines of effort, until something that looks good emerges. Most programmers do not have the patience for this kind of thing, so their user interfaces look like they were designed by someone who didn't much care what they looked like.

On a deeper level, the concept of "talent" or "innate ability" is most often used as an excuse not to even try something (e.g. "I'm not musically talented, so I'm not even going to try playing the piano"). If you want to become good at something, you have to practice it a lot - there is no alternative.

Answer 8

About Face is a nice book too.

Subtlety is always something good to watch out. Harsh gradients and some color combinations are just a pain.

Answer 9

As a resource for designing user interfaces in Windows, I'd say that the Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines offers great tips and examples on designing user interfaces.

It provides both good and bad examples of user interfaces from actual Microsoft products, so I'd say it's actually quite objective and a valuable guide to use as a reference when learning about user interface design.

As it is designed as a guide for Windows Vista applications, it would fit in well with UI design for WPF, but the tips offered are general enough that they can also be applied to user interfaces that aren't Windows-based as well.

I'll add a pointer to a related question: Java User Interface Specification

Answer 10

Joel Spolsky's got a simple, elegant idea in the "Hallway Usability Test," as well as a series of posts on UI design.

Answer 11

This can be debated until the end of time, personally I believe that interaction design and graphical design are two quite separate things.

But both of them van be learnt, at least to a satisfactory level. You'll probably never be4come truly great at it unless you have a "talent" for it.

A book that I myself havn't read but I have heard many people recommend is "Don't make me think" by Steve Krug.

Answer 12

It is definitely possible to learn these skills.

What a lot of people get confused with is the difference between Art and Design. In many ways the difference between Art and Design is that Art has no understated functionality. It looks good...because it does. With Design there is usually a reason for something to exist. To be a good designer one must understand what good design is and how to efficiently break the boundaries of logic to create something that works with as little cognitive-load as possible. If a new UI design allows me to perform a task twice as fast as the old one then it is better. If I enjoy the experience of using the new one then it is better.

Of course, there is an artistic side to design, and by using flair and creativity a designer can make better designs.

If you want to become better at designing then there are two things you can do:

1. Read everything you possibly can about design. Find the best design Blog's and stick them in your RSS feed. Read through everything you possibly can about design.
2. Design something, then design it again, and again, then stop! Now, design something else...
3. Learn as much as you can about HCI. There are some great HCI books out there, even past the obvious choices. Read as many books as you can find.
4. Join a design community and monitor the work people produce. If you get the chance, collaborate with someone better than you and see how they tick.

I don't know enough about Art to say if you can learn how to become an artist. All I do know is that everyone is naturally creative; you just have to learn how to let it out in your work, that means learning how to use your tools effectively. Once you can do that then you can experiment.

I like to think that many of the standing HCI concepts we use today haven't just come from calculated thinking; more an artistic vision come to life.

Answer 13

The sites I recommend for UI and design specifically are:

1. Alert Box, about web design, in particular. Good examples, use cases, and studies there.
2. Humanized, design principles. Check the blog too, specifically this and it's setup article.
3. Aza Raskin's Blog. He's part of Humanized (and now Mozilla), and his personal blog is a mine of insightful commentary on interface design.

The interesting thing about these sites is that they don't just give examples of UI "do's and don'ts", but back these examples up with specific metrics and methods that you can actually use to measure how "good" your UI is. Aza's blog is particularly interesting because he goes through his design iteration on several projects he's been part of, and talks about the "whys" for a lot of the UI decisions that were made.

Answer 14

it's all about the end-user's mental model - the abstract structure they form in their minds that leads them to just 'know' what to try as they explore your UI design. As a UI developer you need to clearly understand and then create that mental model for them - and a lotta times it will have nearly nothing to do with the composition of the underlying software system. So don't be surprised if some UIs are difficult to develop.

Once a user begins to visualize and embrace this mental model, they will start to explore and try things based on logically filling in the missing pieces. Good UI design will reward them with expected results, a bad UI will stymy and confuse and they'll wanna hunt you down.

Answer 15

Lots of links here to good guides, but the initial question remains: "What are the characteristics of a good UI designer?"

The ability to view a process, system or practice, and design an interface that makes the greatest improvement to it.

It's not about pretty interfaces, it's about what works best in that exact situation. And my advice for becoming a better user interface designer is to get better at putting yourself in the user position. We could all improve on that.

Answer 16

Great UI means:

• All the tools/data you see are actionable

That is, everything on the screen has meaning. If it doesn't have meaning or doesn't affect what you're going to do next, it shouldn't be there.

• Understanding and using conventions

This is most of the time. Occasionally a great UI designer invents a new interface model (tags were invented to better handle photo-sharing).

• Making everything frictionless

If you want to do something, you want to do it in as few steps as possible.

• Making everything clean and understandable to the eye

You can't diminish the need for good UI design to at least be palatable to the eye. If you can't digest something visually in a very short amount of time, it might not be a good example of good UI.

Answer 17

You can find a lot of designers who are able to draw pretty pictures, but the best have a working knowledge of interface design. Inherent in that is the ability to anticipate how a user will interact with an application without being prejudiced by the knowledge of how that application is supposed to work.

Regarding your second question - in my opinion, the programming model of WPF and Silverlight allows for a clearer separation between designer and coder (i.e. Microsoft Expression Design is for designers, .NET 3.5 is for coders, and Microsoft Epxression Blend is somewhere in the middle). That being said it is always better to have a UI designer who can handle both the design and the code.

And just to throw a book in there that I like - Luke Wroblewski's Web Form Design - you can get a PDF version of the book for under $20 bucks.