Holy shit this UI/UX/Whatever looks good! Wish all apps could look this good. ++ to the Firefox App designers!

In electronics there's 3 options.
1. You pay a small fortune to get something decent.
2. You pay a smaller fortune to get crap.
3. You build it yourself and it'll be nicely priced AND decent.

Why is that? I have no idea. Profiteering gluttons perhaps.

Case in point: my watch. A waterproof one, so you'd expect to be able to take it in the shower, which I often did.
But then, le wild drop from 50cm height occurred and the whole thing just popped open, with soapy water rushing in. Luckily it didn't short out, and I quickly evacuated it out of the shower and dipped it with my towel.

Then already I thought.. what the fuck is wrong with the designers of this thing?! I'm all for keeping the inner parts of electronics accessible for self-servicing. But in a waterproof watch you wouldn't expect the backside to pop right off and expose the bloody internals, would you? So that's one thing. While evacuating it I quickly figured that I'd want to remove the battery immediately.. except that fucking thing was screwed in place?! WHAT THE FUCK?!! Use those screws to keep the fucking backside of the watch in place you certified pieces of shit that designed this craptacular piece of garbage!!!

Finished showering, went ahead and troubleshooted the thing. Miraculously it still worked. Except that now the UI of the fucking thing is biting me in the ass. A single button on the watch is used to operate the whole thing, and get it to set itself to the correct time, get radio signal, go in sleep mode (where the watch stops ticking, for storage purposes) and activate itself again. So I dived into the manual.. and still couldn't get it to work properly. So it's got one button just like an iPhone, it craps itself when it's dropped just like an iPhone, its design is shit just like an iPhone, and it's completely unusable when it craps itself just like an iPhone.

And the manual... Oh fucking shit. It specifies that the watch is 3 bar water resistant, yet apparently you can't take it into the shower. 3 FUCKING BAR!!! That's supposed to enable you to take a fucking dive with it! And apparently you can't drop it either.. who would've thought, when they lock it with no more than outwards pressure from the back plate into the main body! How difficult can it be to use fucking screws, and to make it watertight put some rubber bands or whatever?!

CERTIFIED MOTHERFUCKERS!!!

And the watch, it's in the garbage can right now. Right where it belongs!!

Fuck designers with 0 UI/UX talent FUCK YOU

Why are so much software developers working on open-source projects, but only so few designers?
A proper UI could increase the userbase a lot. I am quite sure that a lot of projects could benefit from good designers.

I hate some parts of this company.

They literally have a "Designer" which made a mockup for our new UI and honestly when I first saw it I almost threw up.

Having made a lot of designs myself for personal projects and for fun I LITERALLY SAW he barely put any effort into it he just threw some stuff together took a shit on it and called it a UI.

For that interview we were actually expecting wireframes and not mockups since we were not sure what workflow we wanted for the UI.
Of course this would have come with feedback from us and then would have been reiterated and this was clear from our last talk with him.

Maybe he didn't know what wireframes were ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If this wasn't enough, he was also consistently misspelling words all over the place, not aligning parts of the UI, misplacing common UI elements and stupid stuff like having a GIGANTIC + button for adding a object to a list for a NO TOUCH SCREEN UI.

(The plus button was all the way to the bottom left of the screen as far away from the list so users get a good hand workout).

But everyone just loved it because "We have known him for a long time and he has a big portfolio so he must know what he's doing".

I couldn't bring in anything, you truly notice the difference between "I don't agree with your opinion but you are heard" and "Shutup my buddy the designer is amazing".

I was not being an asshole I was giving critique on specific parts of the UI and not just saying "it's shit" hoping we could improve on it. Still having naive hope for the future of this project.

He even looked kinda mad and irritated by my opinion and just looked at the people previously mentioned.

I truly hate people who just keep using the exact same worthless piece of garbage people because they have known them for a long time.

Personally I wanted to grab him off his chair and throw him out through the window, 2 floors down, straight into the garbage bin, making damn sure he doesn't accidentally fall into the recycle bin.

Never ever would I enjoy or like this application's UI if I had to work with it as a user.

F*CK...that feeling when you were working as a junior UI/UX designer for about 3 weeks in new company, you were on a project which is almost finished and delivered...

1 and half week Later (after technical issues - check my older rants)......

you have noticed one quite importat mistake in the designs, which were done by senior designers, which can lead in future to a huge Ux problems - so huge, that users will probably leave/close the app and will not purchase the product via that app... ( We can say than whole design solution was a waste of money for the client)... On that designes was working a team of 4 people, about 3 Months (and the app (prototype) had to be ready already 2 Months back)...

the deadline was pushed 2x already...

And your boss (senior designer) tell you that this is not such an issue.. But thx for your opinion.....

1 week Later by user testing 4 out of 4 people were asking about that stuff I told to my boss that is missing...

And I was ignored...

In less than 1 week Later after the testing I get fired from the company without no reason...

Or better - the reason was:

I have too little experiences for this job...
Dont know if I should laugh or cry🤦‍♀️🤣/😭

So, I'm the only developer in a marketing firm. I was asked to develop the company website. The deadline was within a month. A full on CMS. When I was interviewed I told them that I'm more fluent in back-end development rather than UI design etc. So the company's designer started designing the website. Incomplete designs were given to me one week before the due date. I'm a fresh grad so I'm relatively new. So I used a website builder knowing that I can't code the whole CMS within a week. I asked them which they gave approval to knowing it was $16 a month.
I started making it using webflow. 2 pages in, I asked them to pay for the subscription because webflow allows 2-3 pages for the free version. When the time to pay came, they were like, "wow, $16? That's a lot every month for just a website". Keep in mind, it's not that they don't have the money. Just cheap. This was like 5 days before the deadline and they said it's too expensive and asked me to code everything by myself. And gave an extension for a few months.
I said okay and started development. I said we would still need to spend on a cloud instance for deployment which would be like $6 monthly. My manager asked me is there a way to not pay monthly and pay like $100 and get one for lifetime. I facepalmed so hard. I tried explaining to him cloud-server costs are either monthly/yearly or pay-per-use basis. He told me maybe because I'm new I don't know and go to do some research on it. I researched and the only solution was to buy a server which costs $100++ monthly. I sent him the costs in a document which he did not even bother to read.

That was back in November last year. Fast forward to February. I've coded the website thrice. The design keeps changing every week. The design is still not complete. And they are saying I'm not eligible for a promotion because the website is still not done. It pisses me the fuck off. It's not my fault it's not done. The designers haven't done the design, the manager can't decide on shit. I'm just here because it's my first job out of uni and I thought it might be a good experience, but honestly right now the way they are treating me it pisses me off.

To download data from Google drive, click on the download icon. But to download data from Google contacts, click on the upload icon! Why? because that's not upload but export, at least in the minds of Google's UI designers if there are any.

Designers use plugin in WP to modify UI. CSS and JS is saved (somewhere?) in database. No version control. Changes are made across different envs at the same time and all need to be migrates to prod later.

Pls

Pulled into an 'emergency' meeting with a group of web designers deeply concerned a particular service wasn't going to meet all their requirements.
DevA: "For each page, Its going to be A LOT of work to retrieve all the data and store it's state. Every page load will require a round trip to the service."
DevB: "Yes, we aren't sure how the service should be changed to do what we need."
Mgr: "What is it not doing now? Doesn't the service already returns all the necessary data?"
DevA: "Well...um...its all the boolean fields. Some may be defaulted from the database or false because the user unchecked the box. We have to know which is which"
Me: "Why? Are you doing anything different in the UI? Checkbox will be true or false. What or who set that value is irrelevant"
DevC: "Well, it matters if the user didn't fill out all other other values."
Me: "How so?"
DevA: "Its matters because the values in the other fields. Its going to be A TON of work to figure out."
<mgr goes to the white board>
Mgr: "Lets map this out...what fields are you needing to trigger the state on?"
DevA: "Um...uh...the 'Approved' field...and um...'OK to Contact' field"
Mgr: "Just those two?"
DevA: "Yea..um...there are other fields, but whether or not to show the edit box depends on those two."
Me: "The service already returns data, you only have two fields to check? I don't see a need to change the service at all."
DevA: "Returning all that data, we are going have a serious scaling problem. We'll be hitting the service A LOT. All that javascript could cause performance problems too"
Me: "How much data are we talking about? Name, address, couple of booleans?"
DevA: "I have to serialize the data. All that logic is going to be reeeaaallly complicated. It might be better if the service returned only the data I need."
Me: "$64,000 question, how often is this feature going to be used on the web site? Maybe once? Few hundred a week?"
Mgr: "We have no idea. A lot of the data will be pre-populated and we're only sending out a few thousand invitations. More around the holidays...but honestly, not very many."
Me: "Changing that service only for this particular area of the web site isn't going to happen. Changing the UI is the only course of action."
DevA: "Oh frack I can't wait until this project is over."

DevA...how the funck do still have a job here? You wasted about half-hour of my time with your cry-baby crap. Where is my hammer...no...no..don't go there...ahhh...thanks devrant. Prison sentence diverted.

working with UX/UI designers who don't understand the concept of style guides or reusable UI components is torturous, why don't they understand things work a bit different in real life than in Photoshop, Illustrator or Sketch

I honestly have no problems with UI designers, I really don't and actually respect the work they do..

But god dammit, those fucktards should try designing the UI with actual code rather than photoshop or whatever they use these days..

UI designers! Please understand that whilst animations are pretty, people don't want their webpages, apps and game UI elements jumping around when they're trying to interact with a button.

So Firefox for Android recently received an update that, stripping out 90% of the browser's functionality aside, has two glaring issues:

1_ about:config got disabled, so any options that, say, scaled webpages to not look like they're made of Duplo are now totally ignored. Enjoy your toddler websites!

2_ The search bar auto-hides. On every scroll. It changes the viewport size when it hides, making webpages frantically jump around and change CSS rules. There's no option to turn off auto-hiding. Twitter already jumps around like a rabbit on the strongest crack carrots can buy, and they somehow made it WORSE.

F%^&

which one is better?

sitting on a comfortable chair with foot rest,
having very powerful computer,
having the best IDE's with UI designers,
ML based auto completions,
Free food. but $4000 per month

or

sitting on an average chair without foot rest,
having average computer,
having only notepad or vim*, without UI designers
NO auto completions!
paid food. but $40000 per month

* Vim is actually very nice text editor

I’ve been self-employed for the past three years. Though I did spend my first year out of college working for a three person, now-defunct startup, I’ve never had a typical 9-5 (or more like 10-8 nowadays) and to be honest, never really wanted one. Lara Schenck, LLC is a profitable business, and every day I do work that is enjoyable and challenging. I make my own hours, take vacations when I want to, and run everything on my terms.

While that’s all awesome, what you don’t get from working independently is the team experience. I base my work on teaching technical literacy to non-technical designers and content producers so that they can better communicate with developers. The theory is that if a designer understands why it’s a bad idea to request 18 fonts, and if content producers know why it’s not trivial to edit the titles of a set of related posts, life will be easier for everyone. At least that’s my theory, and the assumption on which I’ve developed my business.

Lately though, in a bout of the good ‘ol impostor syndrome, I’ve been feeling like, wait, how can I be telling people how to work on teams if I’ve never really worked on one? I’ve always been the ‘Lead UI/UX/Visual/Web/Front-end Designer-person-thing’, and have never worked for a larger company with separate teams for product, UX, marketing, content, frontend, backend, etc.

So I felt the urge to look for a job, and a seemingly perfect one fell into my lap. It was for an awesome company, and it sounded right up my alley skill-wise. The title was ‘UX Engineer/Interaction Designer’. I usually balk at the the term “engineer” (perhaps for good reason) but considering the presence of “designer” and the nature of the job post, I wasn’t too bothered.

So we started a new Unity video game project for mobile in June 2021. Hooray!

Being a mobile project, one of the earliest things we think about is scaling the interface across all sorts of device screen resolutions and aspect ratios, right? Well, to preemptively solve this problem early on, I decided to letterbox the game view - just choose one aspect ratio for the game and pad black bars to the sides of the screen. Simple, solves the game's world space problem without trying too hard, and it automatically adapts to Android's split-screen mode.

I showed the early builds to management as well as game design team and they gave me some general nods. Sounds like green light ahead. I spent the next few months building the game logic and scale the UI around a consistent letterboxed game view. If you had experience scaling Unity UI to a letterboxed area, you should already knew that it takes a whole paradigm of its own that's kinda hard to break out of, but the fact that it stays consistent across all screen aspect ratios is so worth it. Regardless, the biggeer benefit of letterboxing is simpler world space setup. You don't worry about whether this particular area will be overflowed horizontally or vertically in a particular device or not. You have a 9:16 window to view the world through, nothing needs to move at runtime and that's about it.

Fast-forward to early September 2021 and 40+ builds later, the GD started having concern that the playing area is not filling up his phone screen and that the letterboxes are bothering him. He wants to get rid of the letterboxes and wants the game world as well as UI to fill up his screen.

Yes. After 40+ builds, for all of which the letterbox was present, nobody in the project raised a concern about the letterbox. It's only NOW that they all of the sudden side with the GD and demand the removal of the letterbox. I feel like almost half of my effort on this game has been wasted. These clueless guys didn't spend one second looking at the early builds thinking of the possibility that the black bars at the top and bottom of their phone screens (which I repeat: has been around since the very first build) is gonna bother them? Somebody must be playing a cruel joke at this company. They had all the chances to bring this up as a potential issue and TODAY is the first time I hear of it.

See, designers. You waste our time and your time by doing this kind of thing. Please raise your issues early. Complain to us ASAP. If you wait for so long before raising an issue that has been in-your-face the whole time, I can't fault any developer for assuming you're trying to play a long prank. I can tell designers right now: it's not funny.

So called UX/UI designers don't belong in the same room as a developer.

Does anyone think tech recruiters are failed used car salesmen?

Bad experiences this week

One reached out to me on clearance jobs to apply for a job that I applied for, interviewed and was turned down for because of course they do not know Javascript is not Java and they were looking for a Java developer. She didn’t remember and then never responded. Out of spite I replied all to the last email that company sent me but of course no one responded.

This person who says that she is a recruiter for GOOGLE does not know the difference from UX designer and UX developer.

“ UX design still involves coding... idk where you got information that UX designers don't code but they absolutely do. UX designers are simply front end software engineers that work on refining the user experience of a particular program app or website.”

I don’t know because I used to be a fucking UX developer and used to work with UX designers??? Who didn’t code because figuring out what humans what is tough enough on it’s own. UI designers may know html/css but that is it.

I know we are going into a recession and I need to start being nice to these dumb recruiters because I may need them one day.

Context: large project moves to touch friendly UI, request and initial specs late last year, specs initial mockups early this year, designer promises final design before end of Q1.
Two sprints into development no fucking design, meeting today about it, designer has no fucking clue about what we actually agreed to last time. Promises again to have it for next time.
What the actual fuck? How difficult it is to least read up the fucking notes and do your fucking job that you are being paid for? Had a half fucking year!
After meeting...
Me: why do we even keep him around?
Pm: he is really overbooked...
Me: my balls are overbooked, don't promise if you can't deliver! (Leaves meeting room)
Fairly confident that this is the last project with this guy...
Am I the only one who just hates working with designers?

Fucking UI designers finally broke Firefox. Border-radius infects everything.

I'm getting tired of coding. Not really the coding part, the dealing with people who tell me what to code and why part. Sort of considering making a move into a scrum master or PM role just so I can get fired when I say "No, we're not changing everything they've been working on in the middle of the sprint" or maybe "Yeah, no we're not going to put in a bunch of tickets to change the UI/UX without first talking to the designers, because that's what they do. Yes, I realize we aren't Facebook, but do you realize we "compete" with them because a huge number of people will compare our usability to theirs? (even if just subconsciously)"

Hi. Quick question, I came across a rant that described the best tools for a designer to help developers be on the same page for the prototypes. Can you guys suggest some? I remember there was one that shared the same exact hex color or code for UI/ux interfaces between designers and developers.

Sorry if this isn't very dev related:

Does anybody know any good freelancing websites for artists, illustrators, ui/ux designers, etc. ?

I've seen upwork, but they're so uptight they don't accept everyone.

Client is a group of designers and asks for a website reskin, we made the previous one.

They spend like 4 months fixing up their design and after they're done, we developer look at it and decide what can be done and what can't be done and we go on like this for a few days.

At the end, I begin the development of the website, the data structure is already done, it's there and it's working.

The design is there, we all asked to not modify ANYTHING about it.

After I finish making the website, which is kinda unusable bc of the UI, they decide to completely redo the about page (which took like 3 days to get done)

After all it's done they just say "ok, now we gotta just add animations and transitions between all of the pages"

It took like 3 months to finish...

Is it too hard for clients to actually have a specific idea on what they want to do?

Ever since I started out in a programming job, I have always been a sole developer. I have worked in teams before but it was usually me being the mentor, despite my own knowledge being very limited.

However years ago I worked for a successful ecommerce business and it was the first time that I felt like a junior. At the time I was the type that never cared much about front-end and design. But the senior developers there had taught me how design of the website, and how we treat the customers is important. By making sure that we give them the best customer experience, they will come and shop again.

Although I still primarily focus on backend development, I still hold onto what they taught me. Even now at times I give my input to designers and project managers about design, UI/UX, and the customer experience. But more importantly bestow that mindset to my fellow developer co-workers.

First post and of course it's a rant.

I work for a mid sized development agency with approx 50 developers heading up the main development backend team.

So, on this one project the head of design goes through the client agreed spec but starts adding loads off additional UI elements and data that isn't in the spec, isn't collected anywhere and isn't needed

When reviewing the mock ups I raise this and push back saying it all needs to be taken out as we dont have that data and that the additional elements are not recoverable in the sprint time.

Designer sends the mockups to the client anyway and gets sign off from the client, who now expects all this additional work in the same sprint and at no extra cost to what we agreed for the sprint.

After an aggravating day trying to figure wtf we are going to do, I end up working until 3am (having started at 8am the previous day) implementing the addition shit, which needed to be collected and surfaced throughout the entire back end.

Owner of the business walks in this morning and gets told by the management team about how late I was working and what had gone on.

His response........

Pay for all employees in the business to have a takeout lunch on the company.

Best of it all, I was so busy catching up on the shit I should have been doing, that I didnt even get my free food!!!!

Why do designers think everything is so simple and just takes a few key presses?!?

I've always been a strong critic of the mac operating system and apple in general for they're overpriced products. few months back my old laptop kicked the bucket and repairing it was not an option as i was sick of charging the laptop after every 3-4 hours and had to purchase a new laptop immediately. loooking at my options around 50k rs or 700$ all windows laptops available in indian markets sucked (except for lenovo 320s) so i made the shift to macbook air 2017.my daily work involves photoshop illustrator and a dash of premiere pro. I also work on nodeJS and python using the pycharm and atom IDEs. After using it for a month i feel in love with mac platform and macos. Its a wonderful experience. gone are the days of crashes and the windows updates (ugh). the boot of the laptop is like magic and softwares like wmware imovie and notes keynote are f**king awesome. Long hours of work have become fun rather than hell dealing with constant windows gimmicks and bad battery optimisation on linux.

An explanation why all developers (except for the ones who require high powered gpus) graphic designers should shift to macos rn.

Advantages of using mac

No forced updates update whenever now or a f'ing month later no probs.
better battery optimisation than linux
no more installing os again and again (ubuntu)
better vm than virtualbox (vmware)
terminal for running bash commands
no crahes
Xcode platform
trackpad is worlds better than the best windows trackpad

Disadvantages

some softwares not available for macos
storage is generally less on macbooks
UI is simple (less elaborated than windows)

Workarounds

get a vm and install linux(vmware fusion 8)
ps. u may not need it though
wine and wine bottler for using windows apps
get a microsd to sd adapter for macbook and expand storage

The moment when the UI designers had included their design as a zeplin link in your Jira story. You finished coding it, the designers made changes to it and expected me to magically know about it.

Ubuntu 20.4 is not very cool.

It might look "polished" in some (barely noticeable) areas , which doesn't matter to me as i already used better themes and icon packs. Moreover they tried make ui and icons flwt which looks terrible. It feels like to ubuntu's designers , flat= every icon in a dark gray color. Am not a fan of black topbar either, the old darkish looked much better

The worst thing is that now i have to go through multiple start screens since my laptop is dualboot :/ .

Its now like : black screen > (hp+ubuntu logo) + grub > (hp) > (hp+ubuntu logo + loading icon) > lockscreen > my system

Earlier it was just hp> grub>lockscreen>my system. The fast start up was one of my favourite features of Ubuntu, now its a million loading screens. The lockscreen is cool tho

Assuming Mac: Alfred for OS such as searching and opening apps, using spaces to setup smart project areas, divvy app to quickly size and move around the windows, terminal shortcuts to open files in the OS or in an editor, transmit for hidden files and dragging between panes and server + occasional mounting for preprocessing, inbox-zero mentality, a properly setup google drive app so you don't email forked files back and fourth, beanstalk for deployment of larger stacks, surge.sh for targeted front-end sites, Ember CLI or brunch for build pipelines, CodePen for UI experiments outside of the project, slack instead of email, pick up the telephone and just call for clarification more often, stylus is easier to maintain then scss, hire designers that actually know what their job is if you can. For arduous WordPress administration, rightclick open in new tab for everything - or half your time will be pushing the back button, wp-migrate pro, and in general try to get out of WP when you can.

Someone should make a language that you read bottom to top, just to really fuck with UI/UX designers :^)

What is it with UX designers who have no clue about what makes a good, usable, logical and efficient to develop and maintain UI that users will be happy to use?

The profession appeared out of nowhere a few years back and I have yet to meet a single one who has even basic sense of what makes good UX.

I tell a designer at the company to take a look at a (huge) corporate web project we're currently building. He's not assigned to the project, but I thought a fresh eye and recommendations could be good for future Sprints, since we're doing a first release in a month.

The guy knew all of this, yet his "designer a.k.a artistic spirit" couldn't hold him from sending a UI/UX review to the PM, of about 6-7 pages or smth - I dont even remember now.

The whole report had a total misunderstanding of the business logics, because he didn't even wait for me to explain that shit to him. Eventually his versions of UX suggestions were irrelevant. It was pretty funny, now that i think about it.
I'm guessing he just hoped to get some attention...?

tldr: its fucking disgusting when designers try to act as artists;

Not a rant more of a guidance question. That being said,

What are some of the best websites, tutorials, books to becoming a UI/UX designer? Or just a graphic designer?

Thank you all in advance 😁

You guys probably use slack at work. Or teams. But what about using discord? Would it be a good idea to use a discord server and create and manage clients' projects that way? Its free and simple to do. I have the most experience with discord even coding custom discord hooks.

For example I'd categorize each project by discord categories, and within each category I'd have channels such as general, ui, coding etc so engineers team project managers designers and clients can communicate in real time.

The biggest downside to this approach is... Discord allows maximum 50 categories per server. What if i have more than 50 projects to work on? I wouldn't be able to create a new category for that project. The growth and scalability of a company is limited thst way. That's what sucks. I'd have to create a brand new server and repeat this cycle again. And each server having max 50 projects. This doesnt sound very efficient right?

Is there a better way? Or do i have to use slack?

All you front end devs who work with dedicated design teams, what's you usual workflow? Do the designers pass on the UI kit with all the assets and dimensions and you clone the thing using whatever stack you're using or do you all decide the specs on the fly looking at the general visual structure of the design?

You know why UI - designers do not a girl - or boyfriend?

'cause they are too superficial.