[ljoshua]

Refactoring UI (https://www.refactoringui.com) is a fantastic resource, and we’ll worth the price in my opinion. I refer to it again and again. You can also find videos on YouTube of the author doing “live” UI redesigns/refactorings, and those are also very useful.

[soulofmischief]

Is this book the reason I see such bad UX trends across the web?

In many of the visual examples, the recommended approach looks worse than the criticized approach, and in some cases is much less parsable. A phrase like "Use more whitespace" isn't some simple-yet-woke millennial web mantra, it's just crappy advice, too vague to be useful and vague enough to be harmful.

Truly, some of these examples are the antithesis to good design. The chapters of the book seem highly opinionated and forcing a particular set of (unvalidated) opinions upon me instead of generalized, objectively applicable tools.

[ljoshua]

Agreed that it is quite opinionated, and shouldn't be taken for gospel. But I think it's a very good resource for those that are coming from no design background at all and need some strong principles to guide them at the beginning.

Many an engineer-designed page or screen would have benefited from some of the basic principles here, including "use more whitespace."

[dhzhzjsbevs]

I love that the first example suggesting fewer borders looks worse and more confusing than the one they're suggesting not to use.

[soulofmischief]

Yeah, that really stuck out to me as just awful design. Completely unparsable.

[akprasad]

Do you have a resource you recommend instead?

[SebastianKra]

+1 for Refactoring Design. The designs it presents are okay. But it highlights many of the considerations and techniques you can use to find your style.

Also, as a rule, don't listen to HN for design opinions. Many people here talk about design like a bad programmer talks about principles: "Always have 100% unit test coverage" or "Functions should never be longer than 7 lines".

My recent favorite was when an article introduced an unusual, award-winning checkbox design for a very specific use-case, and a number of comments completely missed the context [1].

^[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31783841

[zo1]

Is it just me, or does the first example in that link, the contact search + list form, look much better in the way that the book says is the "Wrong way"?