I rebound on a comment about my User Interface Design framework posted on Hacker news
This post says : “Mmmm… that’s an interesting approach. I think it’s perfectly fine for creating quick jpg mockups but I wouldn’t use it for the real app for two reasons: 1. Attribution. 2. Differentiation is design.”
I personally don’t agree with this definition “differentiation is design”.
Everybody has his own definition of design. As a webdesigner mine should be : “Solve problems, make users life easier, bring profits to my customers”.
No need to differentiate for the pleasure to be original. The interface should be invisible and even monotonous.
Monotonous ?
Yes, it could be a quality interface design : using some convention than the user already knows, repeating the same look or patterns with consistency. Thus, the user don’t need extra brain efforts and the really important elements in a interface screen immediately pop to the users eyes, because they are different from the monotonous interface.
Ok, this is my own approach to designing, but if you agree with it, you will feel the need of this kind of framework.
The idea of this framework is inspired by the Agile software philosophy . Even if I’m not developer I’m a big fan of this efficient iterative development. Especially Ruby on Rails and the 37 Signals method.
As in Ruby on Rails, the main principle behind this GUI design framework is “dont repeat yourself” to gain productivity.
The agile developers use the “convention over configuration” approach. Convention doesn’t means the best solution, or a principle to blindly follow, it’s just a default setting which is often the most appropriate. And you can customize it according to your needs.
My GUI framework follow the same philosophy of using “Conventions” for interface. It provides some patterns and default GUI elements that most of the time you will use as it. You save some time, some energy, you can concentrate on more important tasks : understanding the users needs, solving problems, finding the right patterns and carefully building the interface.
In my experience, the design problem is not about designing the GUI elements themselves ; it’s more finding the right visual hierarchy between these elements, balancing their visual weight to make the interface the most clear and the less crowded as possible.
Here I can spend hours tweaking, changing size, create more white space or changing the colours to give more focus to one element, fading another one… But usually I use the same interface elements with roughly the same look: radio buttons, tabs, breadcrumb, accordion menus.
Thus the idea of grouping all these elements in a library for saving time. As it we obtain a side benefit : the interface is more consistent and clear. Creating a GUI library force me to compare all the elements in the same place and check their coherence.
If you don’t like the convention, you can make your own configuration
As all the elements provided in the GUI Design framework are vectors, you can easily adapt them to your needs. But you already have some foundations that you’re free to customize and you save time.
You can also use the library as a GUI reference : I tried to make a comprehensive library with a lot of patterns, and to inject some usability good practices. Even if you don’t use the elements, it could be a inspiring reference.
I plan to add more elements to this framework for saving time : grids, columns system, repetitive background patterns… If you have any idea of others elements feel free to share your ideas.
If you don’t know it, download the User interface Design framework here
