
The User Interface Design Process - augustvdv
https://fakeclients.com/blog/user-interface-design-process
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enumjorge
Articles like this one give content marketing a bad name. It’s disappointingly
lacking in details. It’s main purpose is to sell a product, not to inform, and
it shows. Let me give you a summary of 90% of its contents:

\- Research who will use your product and how it will be used.

\- Start with paper and pencil sketches. It’s faster than other methods.

\- Turn those sketches into digital mockups. Fill in details.

\- Have someone else look at your stuff.

The few other comments on this thread already provide more insight into the UI
design process. I wish more content marketers spent more time on the content
part.

~~~
ralphstodomingo
This is what you get when you make a post when you've got no expert on this
subject matter. Token example.

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Waterluvian
I suffered through a few seasons of having some UI designers who obsessed over
doing the _whole process_ despite our target UI was for maybe 6 in-house users
and was to expose the front-end on a work-in-progress system that changed
heavily over time. I learned two main things from that experience (that likely
doesn't apply when you have millions of users):

1\. The "sketch" step yields about 80% of what you'll benefit from the whole
process. If you can't do anything else, at least do that.

2\. Very often, getting something, anything, built and working, and letting
your users test and critique it will reveal far more than any amount of
thoughtful design process will.

~~~
sonofhans
As someone who’s done UX for 20 years, I agree with you entirely. Some of the
value of a UX process is that decisions are reversible. When you user test it
can be difficult to integrate the results, especially if many things are
wrong. With a thought-out design and a good paper trail of decisions, design
decisions can be evaluated atomically and the team can react faster to user
feedback.

Sadly, some of the value of a UX process is that many teams will not test with
users at all. A process can give people a better shot at building something
useful to begin with.

But your point stands well for most software: sketch something Good Enough,
build it quickly, and get feedback.

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chefandy
I have a hard time taking a supposedly user-focused design resource seriously
when they set paragraph text in a bold sans serif font. Not reader-friendly.
Anybody who's been to design school would learn not to do that in Type 1. It
might be a valuable resource, but that's not the right way to get off on the
right foot, especially with a design-savvy user-base.

~~~
kohtatsu
I was wondering why reading it was such a pain..

~~~
chefandy
It really is eye-wateringly bad. Open up the inspector in your browser and
remove the reference to roboto for the paragraph text, and see how much more
readable it is. The problem is they only import two Roboto fonts, one is a
semi-bold and the other is a bold. Firstly, there's almost no situations where
a semi-bold should be paired with a bold because there isn't enough contrast
between them to show any meaningful difference in the content, but they still
look different enough to kill any sense of harmony you might have by simply
using a larger-point font. Secondly, paragraph text should only be set in
regular/roman/book/normal/etc width. That width is "regular" for a reason—
it's the most readable.

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barbecue_sauce
An approach that I was taught in an interaction design course (taken from
SIGCHI research) that doesn't seem to be used much, is to have a sample of
intended users design what they think they want (with simple approaches like
pencil and paper, pasting UI widgets on paper, etc.), and then have the
designer synthesize and refine those ideas into something more
polished/concrete utilizing their own knowledge of the principles of the
medium. This helps to more accurately reflect the mental models of users, and
sometimes even helps elucidate functional requirements for the overall project
that may not be readily apparent. This probably mostly works for
internal/enterprise development where the overarching goal of the software
being built is commonly understood by the user base, rather than a greenfield
consumer facing product.

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krm01
In the 10+ years designing for mostly Software companies [1] (large and small)
I found that the most important aspect of Interface design is the continuous
cycle of eliminated things. Sketching and planning on paper is nice (and a
must), but you are always wrong in the beginning. We usually only work with
companies that have a working product, because we found that Interface Design
is less critical in the early stages. A good UI can help you grow faster, but
not necessarily achieve product market fit. In the beginning, UI isn’t all
that important and you can go far with something decent. Once you have a
working product and users, that’s when you can start the simplification
process in order to pave the road for smoother growth. User Interface design
can be summarised as: __Eliminating obstacles from the user’s experience and
remove as much friction as possible. __

[1][https://fairpixels.pro](https://fairpixels.pro)

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tobr
Maybe I’m just grumpy today, but this looks like poorly written marketing blog
spam with zero useful advice. The product it’s promoting gives you very trite
fake “briefs”, like this:

> I would like you to create an interface design of an on/off switch. Can you
> do that?

