Min-Maxing Your UI | Part Two: Design

Design is Functional and Aesthetic

Niels Diffrient rethinks the way we sit down | Video on TED.com

Above is a link to a video by Niels Diffrient, who created the Freedom Chair. The part I find the most compelling is the beginning; Diffrient recounts his childhood love of airplanes - the combination of the physical machine, and the aesthetic experience of being a pilot (the clothes, the women, the airplane, and the physical body of the pilot). In an attempt to capture this aesthetic experience, he began to draw airplanes and build models. The models he built from his original drawing wouldn't flay, they lacked the functional characteristic of an airborne body. He turned to technical drawings, combining his aesthetic experience with a functional element of aeronautics. This created a plane he designed, he built, and he piloted.

In many ways, a custom interface is the same as an airplane. There is joy and accomplishment in creating an interface tailor made for your specific needs and desires - not only will it enhance gameplay, but it will also be a standalone work that you can appreciate. Those details, discovered and molded through the process of justification, are important for the user in the same way that the contours of an airplane wing are important to a pilot. Knowing your machine, and knowing in the holistic sense of being its creator AND user, propels the experience to new level.

It's easy to roll on over to a website, download a compilation and call it a day. Diffrient talks about chairs in that video as well, and how a chair should adjust to the individual using it without the individual having to deal with levers or complicated controls. Compilations are not built to suit your needs, they are made to suit someone else's needs. Sure you can fiddle around with addons, make adjustments, and come up with something similar but sufficient for your purposes; but then, why even download the compilation in the first place instead of making something unique to you?

Starting From the Ground Up

Design doesn't necessarily mean embelishments; in fact I tend to find UI's like this, this and this to be nearly impossible to justify.

Adding fancy background art, or a horrific spinning minimap border to your UI is the equivalent of an elementary school girl slapping unicorn stickers on her history text-book; it might make things sparkle, but it only serves as a distraction. Design should be about usability first, aesthetics second - but those aesthetics should never come at the cost of even the smallest bit of utility. If an art-element can't be justified beyond "it looks nice" then it absolutely has no place in a user-interface. If a goal needs to be accomplished (say, utilizing a status bar texture to represent health gain and depletion) then that product can be designed to look good, to be aesthetically pleasing - but functionality must remain the sole goal of the user interface.

After years of playing first person shooters, I've seen UIs become more and more minimalist; health bars disappear when they are full, ammo displays are conditional, and whole menus have become open on demand. Even in a game like Left For Dead, the party UI is small and unobtrusive, UI notifications are mixed in with the environment (think the yellow border around Zoe when you need to help that fine ass up), and the design focus is minimalist. The only information displayed is need to know - and that should be a goal in UI design.

The balance in all of this is that a UI has to be visually appealing in order to be useful. An element could give all the information in the world, but if it's based on a Windows 95 status bar texture and window coloring, folks will shy away from it immediately. The goal in creating any design is to make something functional, and then make it aesthetically pleasing. This doesn't mean ADDING to the design, it means REFINING the design.