
High Priest of App Design - mitmads
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424127887324392804578358730990873670-lMyQjAxMTAzMDEwNzExNDcyWj.html
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seivan
A developer who is a designer. The ultimate goal. This is what most
people/companies don't get when they want to build an iOS app. That the
developer SHOULD be the designer. Especially on iOS. Yet startups still waste
a ton of money of some UX monkeys, some designers and a developer.

Just get one or two guys (depending on project size) who can code AND design.
It's always going to be more efficient and better.

~~~
dan_manges
It's much harder to find somebody who is really good at design _and_
development than it is to find somebody good at just one of the two. As soon
as you have enough fulltime design and fulltime development work, you can have
people who specialize in each rather than people who split their time between
the two.

~~~
seivan
It costs more not to. And specialise is such a bullshit thing to say. A
developer has a better approach to design than a designer that doesn't know
the ecosystem as good as the guy coding.

~~~
potatolicious
As a full-time mobile developer, I have to call bullshit on your claims. The
vast majority of mobile devs I've met are only semi-competent on design, if
not entirely incompetent.

Sure, the perfect mobile person is someone who has a deep understanding of the
code _and_ incredible design skills and taste - but what you're talking about
is a unicorn. I'd be surprised if there were more than a few dozen of these
people in existence.

Here in the real world your choices are:

\- Mediocre-to-shitty engineer with solid design skills. He/she will shit all
over your codebase and mask a boatload of technical debt by how beautiful the
app is (until your crash reports roll in, or it's time to add features).

\- Good-to-great engineer with mediocre-to-shitty design skills. He/she will
create a solid, stable, extensible codebase but the app will range somewhere
between "buttons goes in right places" and "buttons WTF".

On the other hand, there is an increasing demographic of designers who _do_
understand the ecosystem. I'm lucky enough to work with some of them, who
understand the nuances of touch target sizes, gesture-based control, etc.
They're a little harder to find than your typical web designer, but they're a
hell of a lot more common than your unicorn engineer-designer-fused-archon-
deity.

A good engineer pairing with a good mobile designer is a combination far
easier to achieve than hunting a near-mythical figure.

~~~
gdubs
Those are massive generalizations. Yes, plenty of engineers have terrible
taste. Plenty of designers have no deep knowledge of data-structures. It's
status quo to compartmentalize talent. This attitude is so entrenched in my
experience, that it's best to pretend that you don't know anything about
design if you're working in an engineering department. But, a different level
of insight in design can occur when the designer intimately understands the
technological constraints.

------
MarkMc
I was unimpressed when Apple removed their 'refresh' button in iPhone 'Mail'
and replaced it with a pull-down gesture. How would a someone who has never
before used a touch-screen device know how to refresh the list?

~~~
kybernetikos
I've been having lots of conversations recently about the lack of affordance
in touch interfaces. To some extent, this is simply because the visual
language hasn't developed yet - when you see something engraved on a 3d plinth
in a desktop application, you know that it's a button that can be clicked.
Touch interfaces haven't got to this level yet. Pretty much the only widely
used affordance I can think of is a folded corner to show that you can swipe
to turn the page, but even that is inconsistently applied.

How do you know on an android contact that you can swipe sideways to SMS and
the other direction to phone? Or even that swiping horizontally in either
direction does anything at all? I could imagine some universally agreed way to
indicate this, perhaps very subtle visual hints or gradients or a system where
if you press and hold without moving you get a set of icon overlays that show
you what you can do.

There are a few different options, but to form a useful language they need to
be widely adopted.

One of the articles that triggered these conversations was "No to NoUI"
<http://www.elasticspace.com/2013/03/no-to-no-ui> which laments the modern
tendency to hide interactions.

~~~
unwind
Plain old drag and drop on desktop computers, which I guess has been around
for at least 30 years by now (disclosure: figure out of the air, not
researched) still hasn't developed much of a visual language.

It's almost impossible to know when you can drag and drop things, and the only
way to learn is to start trying by dragging on random UI elements. Of course,
knowing what happens once you drop them on something that cares is just as
impossible as knowing what you can drag in the first place.

Sorry if I sound pessimistic, I hope development and focus is better now, and
of course touch screen devices are in front of a much wider audience which
might prompt a more rapid development of some standards.

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lignuist
Wow, not a single screenshot in the article...

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Noughmad
> Mr. Brichter was the first developer to create or help popularize app
> features such as pulling on a touch screen to refresh a page, panels that
> slide out from the side of a screen and the "cell swipe," which is swiping
> to uncover a list of hidden buttons.

Actually, all of these three examples seem bad to me. I guess such hidden
features make sense on an iPhone with small screen and one button, but there
always has to be some indication that additional buttons are there. Conformng
Android apps have a menu button, either hardware or on-screen, and you can
always be sure to find functionality there. I really don't want to have to
swipe around to find expected features.

~~~
adrianhoward
Well - the drag-down to refresh feature is discoverable. It's what you
naturally do to "scroll up" - and when you're at the top of the list the same
gesture turns into "refresh". It's one of the ones that don't need to be
taught when I've done user testing.

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onedev
I didn't know who he was before reading this, but much respect to him. Truly
awesome ideas.

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andrewtbham
loren gave a great talk at stanford. it was a while back but still
interesting.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Zd3iNOXTow>

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tomhschmidt
I still don't think most devs know what to do with the 'hamburger button'.
Although some follow Brichter and use it as a handle to slide a side panel
out, I've also seen it used strictly as a toggle to slide the same pannel out
(OSX 10.8, OrderAhead). In other cases, I've seen it used to just reveal a
popup options menu (Chrome) or act as a handle to reorganize lists (iOS).

Some consistency here would be nice.

~~~
nwh
The "hamburger" button is very strange element. It's often used in panels that
slide horizontally, in which case the "grip" is going the wrong way. In my
mind, the button would work in the physical world if it was rotated 90°. I've
never been able to find out where it came from through, baring it's first
appearance to me in the Facebook iOS app.

~~~
potatolicious
It may have existed earlier, but the earliest I'm aware of it was in Path -
who also invented a couple of other UI bits themselves (background-pan images,
for example).

~~~
modfodder
It definitely existed much earlier on the desktop. Avid Media Composer, non-
linear editing software first brought to market in the late 80s had it. Not
sure at what point it was added, but remember referring to the hamburger menu
in the mid to late 90s.

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mgkimsal
What was interesting to me in this piece is that he lives in Philadelphia, not
Silicon Valley. In contrast to all the "there's not enough developers!" and
"everything happens in the valley - you have to move here", there's someone
who is universally recognized as a leader in this industry, and he lives in
Philly. Perhaps more companies expanding their views beyond who lives in a few
square miles on the planet might discover, nurture and benefit from more
"outside" talent.

~~~
runjake
_> In contrast to all the "there's not enough developers!" and "everything
happens in the valley - you have to move here"_

I see these phrases most commonly come from people who work with makers, not
the makers themselves -- they're probably busy making, and not paying
attention to sweeping statements of "truth".

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auctiontheory
Interesting (and cool) that he came to design with a EE degree, so he really
does understand the _entire_ stack, from elegant user experience down to the
p-n-p junction.

~~~
shmageggy
Maybe he does know all of it but that is not directly implied. Just because
one is keen on the two endpoints doesn't mean you've also got all of the
creamy filling. There's quite a bit in between that one can be ignorant of and
still be effective.

