A big problem with modern interfaces is that they are too dynamic, with widgets appearing and disappearing or changing size, etc. Compare that with the old DOS console or Windows 9x (and later too) where the layout was fixed and inactive widgets were grayed out. There's an increased cognitive load from having to find where the information is displayed. On mobile I often press the wrong button because the UI decided in a split second to change the number of buttons in a row and move what's below my finger.
A spreadsheet-like interface shows a lot of information, but it is not overwhelming because it stays fixed, so after using the software a couple of times you can remember where things are.
The overall effect of Figma is probably net-negative because people start futzing with the visual/aesthetic aspects of an interface instead of working out the functional aspect as you would in a low-fidelity/paper/wireframe prototype.
Figma can work, but you have to restrict yourself to not embellish the wireframe. Choose one font only and use basic shapes only. Use colors only if you must (warning states, primary actions, …)
I really like/use Balsamiq. Although perhaps in a not common use case.
I'm really bad at doing neat pencil sketches and handwriting. Balsamiq easily lets be draw something up on my computer that looks obviously like it's "hand drawn style" and make is clear both to me while creating wireframes and to everyone else when I shard them that it's not intended to be high fidelity. I intentionally use Comic Sans to emphasize that.
If I were better with a pencil, I'd do these in a notepad or on graph paper - and then share phone camera photos of them.
F<or anyone who's ever died a little bit inside when their PM/boss say "Those wireframes are perfect. lets just hand those off to the devs!", I _highly_ recommend using whatever tooling or personal restrictions that workj for you - to generate output that is clearly "interface ideas" instead of being misinterpreted as "finished UI/UX designs".
Maybe Figma needs a prototyping mode that actually looks like rough whiteboard drawings or index cards. Later you can refine the designs, retaining history linking back to early prototypes.
Using rough drawings is useful for user research. Users are less likely to criticize or suggest big changes if you present a polished design, even if it is just a mock up.
Irrelevant but spreadsheets have always struck me as one of the most beautiful pieces of software that we use. Automatically updating calculations, programming logic complex anough for most ERPs, using it is a database, easy organisation of data, graphs -- it has it all. From both a user and developer perspective, they are one of the most diverse tools on a computer. MS may make terrible software sometimes, but damn it, does Excel run the world.
And absolutely unique failure methods that no other languages exhibit.
How often you had a formula like SUM(B1:B20), and then someone added item 21 and suddenly the output is just slightly wrong? Or perhaps someone updated the formula but did not propagate the change to the last few cells?
There are no error messages, no warnings, just an output which is slightly wrong. Wrong enough to break whatever it's going to be used for, but close enough that cursory inspection does not notice it. Basically the worst failure mode an app can have.
Spreadsheets _could_ be beautiful if no one were to use them for tabular data. But people do, so they are a really horrible programming language. I bet people spent thousands of years of their life fixing spreadsheet mistakes that could not have happened in any other language.
Spreadsheets are one of the ugliest pieces of software that we use. Pretty much all of the paradigms spreadsheets enforce would be considered abhorrent in any other context. Excel needs five hundred megabytes of memory just to load a blank sheet. Vendor lock-in is just tolerated as a fact of life, as is the lack of a real way to integrate with version control, and a lack of human-readable source files. If an engineer came to you and said “So for this project, I put all the code, input data, output data and comments scattered about one big two-dimensional array with no type safety, no portability, no scalability, no security, no variable names, no code re-use, no unit tests, no integration tests, no abstractions and no error handling”, you would fire him on the spot, but that’s basically normal for an Excel sheet. There is not an ounce of elegance in MS Excel, and trying to integrate with PowerApps, PowerAutomate or PowerBI only makes things worse.
> If an engineer came to you and said “So for this project, I put all the code, input data, output data and comments scattered about one big two-dimensional array with no type safety, no portability, no scalability, no security, no variable names, no code re-use, no unit tests, no integration tests, no abstractions and no error handling”
So, how is this different from engineers and MATLAB?
Modern UI design is such a colossal nightmare of inconsistent command lists, hidden menus, changing interface behavior, duplicative functionality... My understanding is that many developers now engage in "telemetry-based design" that work to redesign interfaces around user behavior, leading to such excellent decisions as
- W11: emoving directory line tracing from File Explorer and nesting all file locations under "Desktop"
- Spotify: removing the iPod-style sub-locations for Artists, Albums, Playlists, etc. and instead showing them all as a continuous "library" where you filter for content based on buttons that reorder themselves and spill off the right side of the screen
- Google: constantly reordering the "images", "shopping" etc buttons depending on what it thinks you're most likely to click on
And it slows everything down! Every application seems to need to send telemetry back to the hosts. Spotify won't even render your "downloads" section in under 20 seconds if you're not connected to the Internet.
Not only is this modern UI field hell for actually experienced users (where are the function grids? Why is everything a two-color React card now?), I believe it's dumbing down non-technical users.
I sometimes send a picture of a well-ordered woodshop wall and a picture of a Tesla interior to sinternal company designers to ask them to stop turning every functional tool our internal ops people use into a point-and-click iPad program for toddlers. Give us the woodshop, not the white-seat-and-tablet view. Even that doesn't always work! I recently sent some devs an Excel mockup of a very tight, neat "task creation form" menu and they turned it into a disorganized nightmare of React fields with none of the visual justification and sorting enabled by the spreadsheet view. What is going on? Why are people allergic to functional UIs all of a sudden?
From what I've seen, it's because they're trying to reinvent everything because their ideas is that "different". It's like Microsoft full sending on VS Code and Electron, while VLC and Calibre does a better job at being cross platform. VS Code is practically 90% accidental complexity.
We have wayyyyy too many MLEs coming up with these "different" ideas, manipulate AB to show a whooping 1% improvement in (random engagement KPI), get a fat bonus check for the quarter, then rinse and repeat.
The windows 11 dir tree thing is a nightmare especially with one drive added in. Trying to find a file I've downloaded has become strangely difficult. Also word and excel seem hell bent on making it hard to save or find a file in a location you already know
I've just recently downloaded Explorer++ and am not looking back. It doesn't fix the directory tree, but it at least allows it to be navigated and displayed with more proficiency.
I have used spreadsheets for designing floor plans and building elevation etc. I used each cell to represent 3 inch by 3 inch area. In more detail views I used each cell for a square inch area.
Spreadsheets (specifically Excel) are the most general-purpose end-user software I have ever seen. I saw people using it for art/painting. Someone used it for demonstrating graphics shaders and ray-tracing.
I've used it for designing never ending platformer game.
An excel file determines zones where the next platform can be generated relative to the end of the current one.
Blue cell is the current platforms end, green cells are easy places to jump to, yellow medium, red are hard.
Makes it very easy to adjust difficulty. Want hard mode harder? Reduce the amount of red squares to only the hardest jumps. Want it easier? Colour some of the yellows in red. Etc.
Reminds me of somebody discovering their grandma referred to excel as "the knitting program" because she used it to mock up knitting patterns or something like that
As an appellate attorney, when I'm dealing with my own legal writing or someone else's, I similarly break it down into the mental models of layout, structure, content, style, and the tools/software used to work with the documents.
~2008 a friend at a consulting co. showed me how they drafted UIs in Excel.
Having seen that, in 2015 I began working on a UI drafting software for that kind of technical designers. We ended up getting rid of the layout thinking overhead while drafting. They call it Content-First Design.
OP here. This is really cool! For my use cases it is missing the ability to easily expand/contract the working grid area, which is done with spreadsheets by adding/removing columns. So perhaps it is slightly too high fidelity for me? Definitely something I'll try out next time to find out!
Thank you for checking it out. In the past it had an auto-layout and app mode, but I removed all the graphic and layout design features in favor of "Copy for AI".
Your "Driving Game" mockup got me thinking about indicating proportions on the drafts. I don't have a good answer to that, except that Cards can be resized in width. At any rate, to answer "perhaps it is slightly too high fidelity", I would say it's the opposite, too low since there's no layout design involved.
I'm aware it‘s confusing because Cards look like a mobile layout. I tried doing the pencil sketch style but it also gave the impression of a layout design tool.
I love to use spreadsheets for prototyping too!
1) moving around a spreadsheet is very fast and lightweight
2) it forces you to think about layout first, before getting into imagery, colors and design
Readit News
A spreadsheet-like interface shows a lot of information, but it is not overwhelming because it stays fixed, so after using the software a couple of times you can remember where things are.
I'm really bad at doing neat pencil sketches and handwriting. Balsamiq easily lets be draw something up on my computer that looks obviously like it's "hand drawn style" and make is clear both to me while creating wireframes and to everyone else when I shard them that it's not intended to be high fidelity. I intentionally use Comic Sans to emphasize that.
If I were better with a pencil, I'd do these in a notepad or on graph paper - and then share phone camera photos of them.
F<or anyone who's ever died a little bit inside when their PM/boss say "Those wireframes are perfect. lets just hand those off to the devs!", I _highly_ recommend using whatever tooling or personal restrictions that workj for you - to generate output that is clearly "interface ideas" instead of being misinterpreted as "finished UI/UX designs".
Using rough drawings is useful for user research. Users are less likely to criticize or suggest big changes if you present a polished design, even if it is just a mock up.
Esthetics are also an expression of functionality and maturity, better not be flippant about it.
How often you had a formula like SUM(B1:B20), and then someone added item 21 and suddenly the output is just slightly wrong? Or perhaps someone updated the formula but did not propagate the change to the last few cells?
There are no error messages, no warnings, just an output which is slightly wrong. Wrong enough to break whatever it's going to be used for, but close enough that cursory inspection does not notice it. Basically the worst failure mode an app can have.
Spreadsheets _could_ be beautiful if no one were to use them for tabular data. But people do, so they are a really horrible programming language. I bet people spent thousands of years of their life fixing spreadsheet mistakes that could not have happened in any other language.
there are, you get a green corner in the formula cell telling you that adjacent cell isn't included
So, how is this different from engineers and MATLAB?
- W11: emoving directory line tracing from File Explorer and nesting all file locations under "Desktop"
- Spotify: removing the iPod-style sub-locations for Artists, Albums, Playlists, etc. and instead showing them all as a continuous "library" where you filter for content based on buttons that reorder themselves and spill off the right side of the screen
- Google: constantly reordering the "images", "shopping" etc buttons depending on what it thinks you're most likely to click on
And it slows everything down! Every application seems to need to send telemetry back to the hosts. Spotify won't even render your "downloads" section in under 20 seconds if you're not connected to the Internet.
Not only is this modern UI field hell for actually experienced users (where are the function grids? Why is everything a two-color React card now?), I believe it's dumbing down non-technical users.
I sometimes send a picture of a well-ordered woodshop wall and a picture of a Tesla interior to sinternal company designers to ask them to stop turning every functional tool our internal ops people use into a point-and-click iPad program for toddlers. Give us the woodshop, not the white-seat-and-tablet view. Even that doesn't always work! I recently sent some devs an Excel mockup of a very tight, neat "task creation form" menu and they turned it into a disorganized nightmare of React fields with none of the visual justification and sorting enabled by the spreadsheet view. What is going on? Why are people allergic to functional UIs all of a sudden?
Spreadsheets (specifically Excel) are the most general-purpose end-user software I have ever seen. I saw people using it for art/painting. Someone used it for demonstrating graphics shaders and ray-tracing.
Blue cell is the current platforms end, green cells are easy places to jump to, yellow medium, red are hard.
Makes it very easy to adjust difficulty. Want hard mode harder? Reduce the amount of red squares to only the hardest jumps. Want it easier? Colour some of the yellows in red. Etc.
The page [0] doesn't show it, but it can draw with millimeter precision for technical drawings.
[0]: https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle/
You can even play a flight simulator or doom in them.
Having seen that, in 2015 I began working on a UI drafting software for that kind of technical designers. We ended up getting rid of the layout thinking overhead while drafting. They call it Content-First Design.
If you'd like to try it it's free: https://uxtly.com
Your "Driving Game" mockup got me thinking about indicating proportions on the drafts. I don't have a good answer to that, except that Cards can be resized in width. At any rate, to answer "perhaps it is slightly too high fidelity", I would say it's the opposite, too low since there's no layout design involved.
I'm aware it‘s confusing because Cards look like a mobile layout. I tried doing the pencil sketch style but it also gave the impression of a layout design tool.
I watch youtube too so it is not my connection I assume
https://uxtly.com/media/intro-PFXcRizx7hGieOVj96nDdBRNEDo.mp...