Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

make interactions familiar and accepted.
Windows Phone and Android have similar standardized elements, and the web has its
own set of standards. A number of highly detailed frameworks for interface design are also
available now, such as Bootstrap, developed by Twitter, and include predesigned
navigation, alerts, icons, loading indicators, and styles for content. They give you just
about everything you will need to get a project up and running without having to worry
about untested interface elements. They can be customized a bit, but the idea is that their
out-of-the-box state is a tried-and-true model for a usable experience.
I see custom interfaces hailed all the time as great experiences by design blogs and
the Apple App Store because of how well tailored they are to the particular experience
they solve. No question, many of them introduce great innovations, but before you attempt
these yourself I highly recommend that you address why you would move from the
standard to begin with. A clear rationalization can help you get along a whole lot better
with your developers. Once you understand enough about the systems they must work in,
you appreciate the level of effort involved in bringing a custom interface to life. Creating
one can cause all kinds of headaches—perhaps better described as migraines—and if it’s
not polished, that can be your worst nightmare because of the size of its impact on the feel
of a product. Rebuilding things like custom transition animations or touch events
painstakingly polished by other developers can be a huge task. It’s important to
thoughtfully evaluate how much benefit a custom interface might provide users against the
costs in time, money, and developer frustration—as well as your own—involved in
making it. Of course, your developers can apprise you of the hassle involved, and trust me,
they won’t hold back. But it’s much preferable that you be thinking in these terms as
you’re formulating your plans for the product.
Don’t get me wrong, I think custom interfaces are cool. My favorite apps have a look
and feel all their own, and I aspire to make experiences that fit in that category. They can
also be used on multiple platforms because they don’t adhere to a particular platform’s
patterns and thus don’t feel out of place on one device versus another. There’s definitely a
place in the world for them, but you should always keep in mind that for people who don’t
see apps through a designer’s eyes, your and your team’s effort may just not be
appreciated and therefore may not be worthwhile.
Keeping up with the interfaces a system allows for and offers is particularly
important because so much of UX design concerns figuring out which interfaces to
include. I’ve spent a good deal of time exploring the intricacies of user interface elements,
and that familiarity has allowed me to gauge much better how to accomplish a given task,
such as using a picker menu, which organizes options vertically, making them easier to
scan, rather than a slider, which displays them horizontally. The pace of innovation is
incredible, and as I said before, this is one of the things I love about the job. A year ago I
wouldn’t have been able to write that I understand how sensors like an accelerometer are
used in conjunction with an animation that is coded in Core Animation versus OpenGL.
(Translation: Open GL is a web standard, and if you use it for a mobile phone, you may
see slower action in adjusting to users holding the phone one way or the other than if you
use Core Animation, which is iOS specific.)