Useful Advice From Top User Interface Designers
Two months ago I was asked by an old colleague about what I felt was that x-factor that made me the best user interface designer in Durban. My somewhat naive answer was that I was simply “awesome”. While that was true, it was also extremely vague and vain.
The good thing was that our conversation sparked a deep curiosity in me to really discover the not-so-secret habits of the best designers of top brands in the world and what made them rise to super-stardom while the rest of us floundered in the abyss of obscurity.
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You probably missed: Best user interface designers on Earth
I hope your curiosity antennas are quivering with excitement. Well, let’s get started!
Strive to Have Wisdom & Understanding
Before you rush to change an existing designers’ work, instead try to understand why it was designed the way it was. Try to place yourself in the shoes of the people that designed and work your way from there on how to improve it. While it may seem quite smart to have a billion reasons why something should change, it shows wisdom to have the patience to understand why it was there in the first place.
Aim for Simplicity
Being complicated is expensive, always try to be as simple and as effective as possible. It will help streamline your process and help your product to be understood much easier in the long run.
Collaborate Well
First, try by all means to work with small teams. The more people you invite into a conversation, the less progress you will make – because everyone has their own opinion. Always state before the meeting which slant you will be taking in order to set the mood for your argument. Sometimes a new idea that you have will make you very excited, but it will get rejected. If that happens, you will need to accept it and move on very quickly.
Be Punctual
Determine the check-ins and stick to them very early in the project so that you can focus on this smaller building blocks more efficiently. Break down the larger design into smaller units so that you can build more intuitively versus working on the entirety of it and having disagreement on a grand scale.
Test on Physical Devices
Always view your design on physical devices as you work, that way you can iron out kinks early on and not pile up a to-do-list at the end of design phase.
Persevere
Put in your time and work as hard you can and be respectful of any opportunity that you are given to learn from whoever you are given or put amongst. Designing when you’re starting is pretty hard, so if you’re prepared to fail over and over again then that is ok. Look to work out that exists to not plagiarise but to get a good sense of what you yourself are good at and what you can do which will help you to build your craft.
Be Flexible
When working with a project that is being managed by another company, you need to accept their project management style and work with them on their terms so that you can get the product out with higher agreements on even the smaller things.
Learn to Code
It helps interface designers to know how to code. That way they can actually test out their ideas before pushing them to the development team.
Understand Minimalism
Go through more iterations until you can simply deliver your message in a very concise way. Develop an impulse to ruthlessly pare down designs to their most essential forms.
Trust yourself
Don’t spend your day looking at other’s work in the hope that you will duplicate their work but start to build trust in yourself. Think, think, think and think again until you can start to trust your gut and your ideas
Surround yourself with order
An orderly environment will help reduce the chaos that often ensues during the pixel-battles and flood of ideas that often kick-start any project. Having a distraction-free environment will help you focus better and it will show in your designs.
Try Guerrilla Tactics
Change is hard. Creating design change from the bottom up can feel like being at war or up against giant odds. Make people think, challenge them to think. By being unexpected, you can draw attention to things people take for granted. Acknowledge the existence of rules and then break them. This helps you gain advantages in the marketplace.
Always Put Your Best Foot Forward
Do good work, build an excellent reputation based on your work, get people excited about your ideas, be a champion of more than just what you propose.
Be Enthusiastic
Enthusiasm is more powerful than confidence. Confidence is about yourself and your attempt to state your worth mostly because of past successes of an optimistic outlook on the present and future. But it is about looking and looking at your self and as a designer that can be a disastrous thing. Enthusiasm on the other hand is forever reaching out, exploring new territories and most importantly, it is highly infectious and will affect everyone around in a good way.
Be The Change
Use your ability to imagine how things can look and work better to fuel your designs. The world is short on real breakthroughs in design and your ideas could very well usher in a new way of solving the myriad problems of user interface design.
Adobe, Apple, Facebook and Google
The discussion is built around advice from the top designers that have worked at the highest parapets of the tech world. These four tech giants have the highest risk-factors.
The user interfaces of their digital online homes as well as their applications need to be of stellar quality. Any inferior user interfaces would cost them millions of dissatisfied customers and result in the substantial loss of billions of potential revenue.
Their words inspired this article.
I mean guys like Luke Wroblewski ( Product Director at Google ) an internationally recognized digital product leader who has designed and built software used by more than one billion people worldwide, Andy Gugel (Art Director / Designer) for clients like Adobe, Google and Disney and Bret Victor (Visionery & Product Lead), a User Interface design whiz kid who while at at Apple, designed the initial user interface concepts for iPad, iPod Nano and invented features for Mac OS X Lion and went as far as even winning the Apple Design Award.
Their work inspired me and I hope it inspires you too.
One more thing:
“Art does not begin with imitation, but with discipline.”
- Sun Ra
“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like.- Design is how it works.
- Steve Jobs
“Good design is good business.”
- Thomas J. Watson
To be a great designer, you sometimes have to take on a different set of ideals and implement a different outlook on what you are and how you can change the world.
You probably missed: Best user interface designers on Earth
I believe that you are destined for greatness, all you have to do is reach out and grab it using your mouse and that creative mind that took the time to read this article to the very end.
