I am preparing two classes at the moment. One is an introduction to user experience design, the other to user interface design. I did not come up with this division, it was part of the assignment. I thought it was odd at first. I wasn\u2019t sure where one discipline ends and the other begins. I still am not sure. But I made a pragmatic decision to have the UX class focus on the high level process of designing (software) products, and the UI class focus on the visual aspects of a product\u2019s interface. The UI class deals with a product\u2019s surface, form, and to some extent also its behaviour, but on a micro level. Whereas the UX class focuses on behaviour on the macro level. Simply speaking\u2014the UX class is about behaviour across screens, the UI class is about behaviour within screens.<\/p>\n
The solution is workable. But I am still not entirely comfortable with it. I am not comfortable with the idea of being able to practice UX without \u2018touching the surface\u2019, so to speak. And it seems my two classes are advocating this. Also, I am pretty sure this is everyday reality for many UX practitioners. Notice I say \u201cpractitioner\u201d, because I am not sure \u2018designer\u2019 is the right term in these cases. To be honest I do not think you can practice design without doing sketching and prototyping of some sort. (See Bill Buxton\u2019s \u2018Sketching User Experiences<\/a>\u2019 for an expanded argument on why this is.) And when it comes to designing software products this means touching the surface, the form.<\/p>\n Again, the reality is, \u2018UX designer\u2019 and \u2018UI designer\u2019 are common terms now. Certainly here in Singapore people know they need both to make good products. Some practitioners say they do both, others one or the other. The latter appears to be the most common and expected case. (By the way, in Singapore no-one I\u2019ve met talks about interaction design.)<\/p>\n My concern is that by encouraging the practice of doing UX design without touching the surface of a product, we get shitty designs. In a process where UX and UI are seen as separate things the risk is one comes before the other. The UX designer draws the wireframes, the UI designer gets to turn them into pretty pictures, with no back-and-forth between the two. An iterative process can mitigate some of the damage such an artificial division of labour produces, but I think we still start out on the wrong foot. I think a better practice might entail including visual considerations from the very beginning of the design process (as we are sketching).<\/p>\n Two things I came across as I was preparing these classes are somehow in support of this idea. Both resulted from a call I did for resources on user interface design. I asked for books about visual aspects, but I got a lot more.<\/p>\n In \u2018Magic Ink<\/a>\u2019 Bret Victor writes about how the design of information software is hugely indebted to graphic design and more specifically information design in the tradition of Tufte. (He also mentions industrial design as an equally big progenitor of interaction design, but for software that is mainly about manipulation, not information.) The article is big, but the start of it is actually a pretty good if unorthodox general introduction to interaction design. For software that is about learning through looking at information Victor says interaction should be a last resort. So that leaves us with a task that is 80% if not more visual design. Touching the surface. Which makes me think you might as well get to it as quickly as possible and start sketching and prototyping aimed not just at structure and behaviour but also form. (Hat tip to Pieter Diepenmaat<\/a> for this one.)<\/p><\/li>\n In \u2018Jumping to the End<\/a>\u2019 Matt Jones rambles entertainingly about design fiction. He argues for paying attention to details and that a lot of the design he practices is about \u2018signature moments\u2019 aka micro-interactions. So yeah, again, I can\u2019t imagine designing these effectively without doing sketching and prototyping of the sort that includes the visual. And in fact Matt mentions this more or less at one point, when he talks about the fact that his team\u2019s deliverables at Google are almost all visual. They are high fidelity mockups, animations, videos, and so on. These then become the starting points for further development. (Hat tip to Alexander Zeh<\/a> for this one.)<\/p><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n In summary, I think distinguishing UX design from UI design is nonsense. Because you cannot practice design without sketching and prototyping. And you cannot sketch and prototype a software product without touching its surface. In stead of taking visual design for granted, or talking about it like it is some innate talent, some kind of magical skill some people are born with and others aren\u2019t, user experience practitioners should consider being less enamoured with acquiring more skills from business, marketing and engineering and in stead practice at the skills that define the fields user experience design is indebted to the most: graphic design and industrial design. In other words, you can\u2019t do user experience design without touching the surface.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am preparing two classes at the moment. One is an introduction to user experience design, the other to user interface design. I did not come up with this division, it was part of the assignment. I thought it was odd at first. I wasn\u2019t sure where one discipline ends and the other begins. I … Continue reading Design without touching the surface<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[625],"tags":[726,584,1049,19,1048,1046,559,466,462,1045,1047,4,54,1044],"class_list":["post-2839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-behavior","tag-bill-buxton","tag-bret-victor","tag-design","tag-design-fiction","tag-form","tag-matt-jones","tag-prototyping","tag-sketching","tag-structure","tag-surface","tag-ui","tag-user-experience","tag-user-interface"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2839\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n