threehv

Facebook has had a redesign. There’s more to come. The redesign hasn’t gone down too well.

But what’s more notable is the number of pop-overs that appear on the new Facebook. “Click here to see this”. “Where’s my stuff gone?” “If you want this, then do that”. Surely, that’s the sign of a bad design?

It’s not just Facebook. “New” Twitter is now for everyone. Every time I use it I get slightly confused – how do I do that? Where do I go for this?

I’ve always said that Twitter is proof that user-interface design is hard. All it is is a list of posts in chronological order, plus a text-area to allow you to post. Yet there are a myriad of different twitter clients, all working slightly differently, all with an alternate take on the ideal Twitter UI.

It seems that no matter how simple things are, the current trend is for complexity. More popovers, more boxes, more sliding widgets!

It’s confusing, it’s annoying and it is a massive step backwards.

Apple never had a huge range of different systems, so reducing the variation and streamlining its manufacturing was probably more palatable than it would be for others. The traditional PC OEMs insist on a kind of pointless diversity, which means that they sell relatively low numbers of lots of models. They have no option but to stick with less highly integrated, less efficient processes. And this impacts their entire supply chain; it’s set up to produce commodity parts assembled in standard ways, not specialized custom components.

Read the whole article about Intel’s Ultrabook initiative.

Lately there has been a fair amount of discussion as to what skills/knowledge a designer needs to know. Should a designer know HTML and CSS? Can you make a fantastic design without knowledge of the material that will be used to create the finished article?

For the most part, I’m not too bothered. Design and development are very different skills and I fully understand that you can be good at one without being good at the other. But there is one area where that doesn’t work.

Fonts.

Fonts have licensing and performance issues around them. Get it wrong and your site not only looks awful, but performs slowly and could cost you a fortune in lawsuits.