Comment by mmatants | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mmatants | Hacker News Reader

If you decide to study how to build bridges, you will start out with calculus, build a background in science of materials and then a guided tour of approaches to structure-building. In addition, you have to learn typical environmental factors. And, of course, there are workflow patterns and human factors involved in actually constructing a typical bridge. Oh, and sure, there will be a bit of CAD.

Let's apply this metaphor to programmers working on UIs: a huge chunk of practitioners right now get by via simply having learned a bit of CAD (i.e. HTML/CSS/JS). And also, yeah, they have walked over a bridge once/seen a panoramic postcard, so there's that. Very ad-hoc, very disorganized, full of gaps.

Of course the impact of mistakes is magnitudes different between designing bridges and building UIs. Except for when that UI drives medical automation. Or finance (one of my faves is an anecdote about how a bad input form field cost a fund management company literally in the 8 digits of money).

Our industry is of course very young, and so I think this education gap is simply a temporary issue. I am looking forward to (and am personally investing into) a day when there will be a more systematic and comprehensive education on how what a good UI looks, behaves and feels like, not just how to code buttons and boxes on a screen.

Meh. If you read The Design of Everyday Things and then look around, you see so many faults with the UI of physical things, even some which have been around for more than a century.

A good example is packaging: "The Consumer Product Safety Commission estimated that attempts to open packaging caused about 6,500 emergency room visits in the U.S. in 2004."

Lets say conservatively that 70% of Americans open at least one package a year, equalling 223,230,000 packages opened. 6,500 injuries is 0.0029%. Not bad I think.

0.0029% for injuries that require an emergency room visit, not injuries at all. Let's go for a conservative, 100:1 ratio of minor cuts vs injuries that make you want to spend a bunch of money on doctors, and we see that it's pretty darned dangerous. Dangerous enough that at work, we have mandatory training on how to open different kinds of packages safely!

That said, the state of blisters has improved, precisely because people complained about how easy it is to get injured with the older, plastic on plastic blisters that require either heavy duty scissors or a box cutter, and leave behind very sharp edges.

>0.0029% for injuries that require an emergency room visit, not injuries at all.

If you get an "emergency room visit" for trying to open a package, there's also some sort of idiocy involved.

I wonder if the level of E.R visits would for perfectly designed packages wouldn't be close or similar, because of idiocy.

You've probably been downvoted (although, not be me) for using the term 'idiocy' which is a really unfair and derogatory accusation. I've cut myself on packaging before, definitely. I've probably done it in the past year. I am not 'an idiot'. ER visits could be for a number of indirect reasons; blood disorders that could prevent blood from clotting affect at least 6,500 people in the US. Just because the injury you're imagining wouldn't be serious to you, doesn't mean others are 'idiots'.

>* I've cut myself on packaging before, definitely. I've probably done it in the past year. I am not 'an idiot'.*

Well, I've cut myself too. That's not the problem.

It's the E.R level injury though that I say implies some incompetence.

And if they have "blood disorders that could prevent blood from clotting", they shouldn't mindlessly be using knives and other sharp objects to open packaging.

another example would be petrol/gas station pumps: http://www.olivierlorrain.com/2009/06/20/bad-design-gas-pump...

Another example of bad UI of a sort: comment form spam, demonstrated by the last two comments on your link.

I don't think that's a good example. Packaging is deliberately designed to be hard to open as a theft deterrent mechanism.

Some packaging may be designed in this manner, but that's bad (or simply lazy) design. Packaging can, and should, serve the interests of the manufacturer, retailer, and consumer equally well.

Some packaging is theft-resistant, but can be 'unlocked' by the retailer at POS. I'm thinking, in particular, of razor blades in the UK. Is that the best compromise?

I assume you're talking about spider wraps [1] - a wire that goes around the box and connects back to a little lock.

As a consumer, I don't like these because the lock portion often obscures an important piece of information on the box. They also don't work for packaging that's designed to be manipulated on the shelf, e.g. boxes with a magnetically attached book-style cover that let you examine the product or read more information by opening it [1].

They're not ideal for retailers, either. They detract from the the aesthetic appeal of the packaging - reducing sales - and increase labor costs by adding extra steps (and, thus, time) for employees stocking shelves and working at the POS.

EAS systems (the little RF tags that are deactivated by placing them on a pad at the POS) are probably the best things going right now for passive deterrence, but they have their own set of problems (e.g. false positives).

1. https://www.americantheftprevention.com/uploads/2Alarm_Mini_... 2. http://www.pcgameware.co.uk/images/CM-Storm-Pitch-Pro-Gaming...

I think many of these problems aren't caused by someone unable to construct a good UI, but that the manufacturer's other goals happen to be opposed to good UI. UI is just not high on the priority list and is inadvertently trampled on.

E.g. clamshell/tamper-proof packaging is awful (I like calling it "customer-proof"), but the goal to reduce theft is a much higher priority than making it easier to open.

I highly recommend The Design of Everyday Things to everyone I know who is designing any kind of user interface, whether machinery, houses, or software.

I believe that until there is some effective, easy, and universally-accepted metric of UI quality, there will be little to differentiate good designers from poor. ("Our UI meets UIQC Class 1 Standards", or in a specification, "All user screens must score level 96 or better on the UIQC test", or some such thing.)

There is the multi-part ISO-9241 that covers the ergonomics of human-computer interaction. It even provides a definition of usability.

I don't believe user interfaces could be evaluated in such a quantitative and useful way, as you describe. You could slap some number in there, but that doesn't make it useful.

Bear in mind that the UI itself is just a part of the equation, alongside the user and the usage context. Two identical UIs (evaluated at about the same score with the hypothetical UIQC) can perform radically different in the hands of the end-user, because the users and their contexts are different.

>with the UI of physical things

That's not the building bridges level engineering that the parent talked about.

In fact, any designer/CAD hack in some factory can get his hands in building packages or other physical items, so the situation is mostly the same as the one the parent criticizes. In most countries you don't need to have an engineering degree to design a package container, kitchenware or a toy car -- at best an "industrial designer" degree will do.

I work in product development for things that have mechanical and electronic bits, etc. There are disciplined processes for designing things, typically applied to life support systems such as bridges and jet planes. Or, hi-reliability components like hard drives.

But outside of life support products, I would guess that the majority of product development is only as disciplined as it needs to be, for what's being made. A lot of stuff is designed by seat-of-pants, by people sitting at CAD stations who mostly have engineering degrees but don't engage in engineering and have forgotten all of their math and theory.

The level of organization and discipline needed to do things like design airplanes is done by the segment of engineers who enjoy that discipline and gravitate towards those industries. People who prefer to do seat-of-pants design find their own niche as well. At my workplace, I can't count the number of times I've heard: "But we don't design airplanes here." Our stuff works when it gets to the customer, but if you scrutinize our designs the way we've all been trained to scrutinize UI's, you'd be horrified.

While on the topic of airplanes, we shouldn't think they have perfect user interfaces. There have certainly been some design choices that should be criticized, and likely contributed to people dying.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Human_fa...

A bridge supporting a weight load of X in wind/water conditions Y is a testable thing.

A UI that is "easy to use", "intuitive", "has the things you use most front & center", etc, are all soft subjective terms. Even when you run stats over a population to try to find generic mediums, those overall expectations will change over time as well.

Where/how do I learn good design? I'm an iOS developer with just under a year of full-time experience. I have never had to design anything at work, and I'm painfully aware that my design skills are horrible.

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