9 comments

  • Alex Hazel, almost 4 years ago

    Only when they need to. A workflow involves both divergence and convergence to be successful. You can't be truly innovative constantly setting limits and rules on yourself without exploring ideas that may not be feasible or scale well or be terribly performant.

    But that is only during times of divergence. Once you have your concepts and ideas, you need to mold them, edit them, tweak them and start to converge with the dev team to find ways to make it work. Sometimes it's not feasible, and sometimes you discover it may not be has hard as you initially thought.

    Or, you come up with something brand new to accommodate the new design. It really comes down to the business goals and what your are trying to achieve.

    1 point
  • Andy MerskinAndy Merskin, almost 4 years ago

    Yes. As both, and specific to apps and UI, it's incredibly important to building and understanding a great, usable user interface.

    0 points
  • Mike AbbotMike Abbot, almost 4 years ago

    No! Never. This is the main problem. Designers are so limited with what certain platforms do that they tend to stay inside the box. Designers must have the ability to do something out of ordinary, because that pushes developers to find new solutions to the problems, raises new questions of how the future tools can be created etc...

    And overall this is the problem with Abstract and similar tools. This is the developer way of thinking, not designers. And we should avoid that. Sorry to say, I'm using Abstract daily and it does it job, but it doesn't solve the problem of how designers work. Figma got it, luckily.

    0 points
    • Simon Lind Hansen, almost 4 years ago

      I disagree. Designers using Abstract are not artists. They're working to solve their users' problems by building intuitive and robust user interfaces. That's best done by following common UX patterns and familiar UI components, not with “creative” parallax effects that are hard for developers to implement. Of course designers working with user interfaces should think like engineers – they should know what possibilities and limitations there are when building software.

      We should obviously keep pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with technology. But novelty is almost never the solution to common UI problems that 99% of product designers are working to solve. Product designers are not artists. They’re problem solvers.

      4 points
      • Andrew C, almost 4 years ago

        Yeah — I'd argue you can't push the boundaries further until you know where they are and how they work. Outside of movies no one gets much benefit from falling off a cliff.

        0 points
    • stephen fstephen f, almost 4 years ago

      "No! Never." - come on, really!

      Context is key, if the project is to deliver a user-friendly simple shop for example. You're telling me it's not sometimes best to think a little inside the box (both UX and functionality wise) so it's easier to develop, so delivered on time, be on budget and be something a customer can jump straight into.

      "because that pushes developers to find new solutions to the problems" I'm sorry but this makes you sound kinda arrogant, they're your problems that your making for a dev, you also need to think of the solutions. Limitations are just that, limitation on what can actually be produced. A challenge for dev's is fun but if you keep needlessly pushing, they're gonna end up hating doing your work.

      0 points
    • Art VandelayArt Vandelay, almost 4 years ago

      Go make art...

      3 points
      • Mike AbbotMike Abbot, almost 4 years ago

        Geez, you guys are raging :) I've seen too many product designers letting go of their creative side, plainly because of that reason. And that is a bad thing for the future of product design. The best ideas are always different from the rest. Glad to see the conversation going though :)

        0 points
    • Mattan IngramMattan Ingram, almost 4 years ago

      Show me a complex data web app that has form or input design which is "outside the box". It doesn't really exist because it makes it a lot harder to use.

      Designers work on a wide range of different things. If they are working on a marketing or advertising agency gig, then sure thinking outside-of-the-box might be appropriate (and a design system is not really needed), but for working on a complex product in-house, then you sometimes need to be more conservative in how you implement things and want to stick to a repeatable and documented pattern.

      1 point