The problem with designers is I have to google words like "gestalt" and perform some sort of sacred incantation to "learn" it, all while forcing my eyes to roll back forward.
Who can afford to think like this though? FAANGS? Every designer I've worked with loosely knows some design theory that is impossible to question beyond a quick "hmm maybe a few more pixels on the padding?" and is largely a pixel pusher due to pressure. If I started to talk about visual grouping and the golden rule my boss would have blown a gasket.
I can't name a single well-designed app off the top of my head. I can name a million good-looking ones though. The problem with design is people have to eat. The UI reaches an ideal point but is never frozen, it lasts a limited amount of time before they start shaping the hedge down to a stump. Linear comes to mind. Spotify too. How are you going to reach a good design for a music player when there's 7000 people that need to put in 40 hours a week?
A little lighter on the "gestalt" and a bit heavier on the "will this design murder the weekends of my dev team and scramble the brains of my users" please.
I feel the world "gestalt" has been thrown around in your circles a little too heavy handed.
Who can afford to think like this? Anyone curious about the human brain.
If you're concerned about the time to design something well, I would take just as long designing a terrible solution to a problem!
Explaining with words why your design is the way it is isn't a waste of anyone's time, it's having a degree of confidence moving forward. It's having a healthy conversation about the said product.
If anything, knowing what you're doing and being able to justify decisions, leads to a quicker decision making and therefore more time for implementation.
A good design is thoughtful precisely to prevent re-work in the future. That's the point: understand, analyse, solve & apply.
Don't get me started on large companies and their design teams... Going from one design system to another, redesigning every 6 months, and never quite finishing... I've seen those and I'm too old for that.
I'd never imply that good design should be a road block or causing a late Friday evening of work; it takes just as long to implement a terrible design than a good one!
I am merely encouraging everyone to stay curious, and look into building some skills in a field that is timeless, unlike most software engineering fields, and henceforth worthy of your time.
I read your comments and I think you come across as intelligent, thoughtful, knowledgeable and as someone who cares about doing a good job.
Most people aren't those things, certainly not all at once. Most people seem to me like they mostly care about collecting a paycheck. That was their motivation for their studies and it's their motivation for their employment. You see people talking about writing obscure code so others can't replace them, you see this guy above talking about redesigning an app to justify their work week.
I think these people who don't care are the same ones who make up all these excuses - we didn't do a good job because we didn't have time. We didnt do a good job because the client asked for a bad job. We didnt do a good job because if we do a bad job we have more job security.
Any time I see these types of excuses I judge the person making them to be someone I don't want to work with. I don't make these excuses. I always strive to write good and maintainable code. I take the time I need to do things right and if someone pushes me to take shortcuts I push back if I can or I find a compromise like fixing it later(and then actually do so). If a client asks me to build something I know will be bad I tell them and suggest a better approach.
In short, I take responsibility for my own work and I do not allow others to compromise the quality of my work. I do not respect people who blame others for their own shortcomings. Quality is less about constraints and more about having the ability and caring about it. Doing bad work generally isn't faster, if anything it's usually slower at least after a while. It's just that the people who do bad work needs an excuse to explain why their work is bad.
When I contracted (for many years) I always told my employers at the time "my job is to return the value I cost, or more" and that if somehow I couldn't, I'd quit. I never had to quit. Sometimes I'd pivot internally as "it's what the company needs".
It was always a healthy relationship with my customers/employers.
I learnt early on that work is such a big part of life; why suck, or barely scrape the bottom of the barrel 40+ hours a week? Isn't that a complete waste of a life?
You might as well strive at being in the top 5% of "your people".
My business motto has always been "Find good people and do good work" - note that I don't say "the best people" or "amazing work". With age comes pragmatism; life isn't a self-help book. Having good people means that no matter the work, how terrible of a slog it is, you still wake up to work and look forward to the next week; even if this one stank! Surround yourself with people that care, that take it upon themselves to improve and that have your back (no genius psychopaths).
Sure I've come across a plethora of oxygen stealers and time robbers, and I could count on my right hand the people I'd chase up to work with again...
The key is to not let the bad apples ruin your experience (and sometimes, they're overwhelming all over, at every level, and you have no choice but to move on). Take pride in your work and ignore the bad apples. If the business is any good, they'll get weeded out. Constructive honesty works. And if you talk yourself out of job, it wasn't the one. A good dose of daily humour certainly helps.
Jobs in our industry, we change like we change cars. Often we get more jobs than cars actually. So don't get too precious about your first scratch...
Many CEO, CTO, manager, whatever, will recognise quality in their people if they see it. Weasels have a limited shelf time. No matter how good they're at lying, they're scared of people who confidently do a good job quietly. Eventually they'll stand naked in the spotlight without any excuses.
Any job worth doing, is worth doing well - my father said, he was always inspired by the Japanese culture.
When I found myself in a daily slog, I found that routine was extremely important. That walk to coffee. That walk at lunch time. That little detour during commute. Whatever could be small wins throughout the day, I'd take it. It helped the drudged work where I was stuck in for a while, because having nothing to look forward to, is depression.
Work is a marathon, not a race; even if the industry wants you to believe that you're missing out, you're too slow, etc. As long as you can sleep with yourself at night, and it brings the pay check, strive to do your best in any condition and accept the things you cannot change. But don't let bad people define your work.
I worked somewhere that (IMO) placed a lot of emphasis on good design. Even among engineering folk we'd talk regularly about Dieter Rams' 10 principles of good design. Two of those principles being "it is unobtrusive" and "it is as little design as possible".
> I can't name a single well-designed app off the top of my head
Which wouldn't be a surprise to anybody who actually cares about good design. Precisely because a really well designed product should just help you do whatever is it needed to help you do, and be all most invisible in doing it. It just worked however you expected it to so well you barely even give it a passing thought. It was unobtrusive. It was as little design as possible. I was not trying to wow you by the fact it's one of the million good-looking apps you've seen.
> I can't name a single well-designed app off the top of my head.
When it's well designed you don't notice it. Surely you've encountered badly designed apps and interfaces in your life. Now think of the apps that don't make those same mistakes.
The purpose of digital technology is so that people who are not developers should be able to use them and be productive with them. Just like cars are designed so that people who are not mechanics or engineers can also drive them.
If you haven't met a good designer and have been working in any industry more than a few years, maybe you don't know what you're looking for.
Design is everywhere in your life & career & and you'd be lost without it.
Perhaps you need to learn what design is, so you can start to notice it around you. Then, you'll be able to put that knowledge to work yourself and might become the mythical creature you desire to see in the world.
Look up the Joshua Tree principle - I recommend Robyn Williams book series "for Non-Designers" get one that interests you and open your world up!
I mean, for a start, literally every human-made object is designed. It may be designed poorly, or designed purely for function, but every one is designed. The pen you use to write notes with, the sticky notes you write on, the traffic cones blocking off the open manhole on the way to work, the manhole cover lying nearby...all of those are designed.
Design isn't just "making things look nice". It's every thought that goes into the structure, function, and aesthetic of an object, whether physical or digital.
There's a difference between design and styling. I'm a visual person rather than a verbal thinker, but more like a graphs / topolological kind of visual person, not about alignment, size or colors of things so much at all.
I wish I could specify the content and topology and the computer would do the styling. I don't want to select fonts, font sizes, align boxes etc.
Currently I think the best a computer can do is bullet points. Anything beyond that and you have to become a manual stylizer, which is what I specifically want to avoid.
When using tables, you already you have to start manually adjusting column widths or they become very often very wasteful and hard to read.
Who can afford to think like this though? FAANGS? Every designer I've worked with loosely knows some design theory that is impossible to question beyond a quick "hmm maybe a few more pixels on the padding?" and is largely a pixel pusher due to pressure. If I started to talk about visual grouping and the golden rule my boss would have blown a gasket.
I can't name a single well-designed app off the top of my head. I can name a million good-looking ones though. The problem with design is people have to eat. The UI reaches an ideal point but is never frozen, it lasts a limited amount of time before they start shaping the hedge down to a stump. Linear comes to mind. Spotify too. How are you going to reach a good design for a music player when there's 7000 people that need to put in 40 hours a week?
A little lighter on the "gestalt" and a bit heavier on the "will this design murder the weekends of my dev team and scramble the brains of my users" please.