Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by crawrey 3728 days ago
Ugh, can we please stop using "beautiful" to describe user interfaces?

lyk dis if u cringe evrytiem

Seriously though, it's such a cop out and it cheapens whatever you're trying to sell.

1 comments

It's also subjective to the point of being a useless descriptor. One person's "beautiful" is another person's "terrible waste of precious screen real estate". It's fine if "beautiful" is a shorthand design goal among a group of people on a project team, where everyone shares the same design philosophy and assumptions, but it's not a great way to describe a project to the public.

It's up there with "nice" and "interesting" in terms of non-value words, IMO.

Much more useful would be to describe some of the goals that you, if you're the developer, consider beautiful. What, specifically, are you going for? If I'm looking at a project that's what I want to know. Most people don't set out to make ugly projects (well, mostly [1]) so that's the key differentiator: what subjective definition of "beautiful" is operative in the project's design, and what tradeoffs are being made to pursue it?

[1]: Maybe not if you're really into "New Jersey Style" / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better