rich parametric spaces of UI

When I run into inexperienced start-up founders, they usually ask me to have a quick look at their products to see if there are any major UX mistakes. Since I like helping out younger people, I never turn any of these requests down.

But when I sit down with these guys, I quickly lose control and start pointing out every single mistake, rather than just focusing on the major ones. The dialogue degenerates into a monologue with me machine gunning the design and someone intensely scribbling down the casualties.

The whole session usually lasts 1–2 hours. At the end, rather than feeling a creative elevation, I feel like I have turned into a mechanical UX machine spitting out formalisable bits of knowledge distilled from my previous experiences and readings.

No two interfaces are exactly alike and context matters a lot in interface design. Hence, there is a never-ending need for experiments in UX. Nevertheless, most of UX is about check-lists which you can internalise and learn to apply really fast.

In other words, may be not constructive UX, but critical UX can be automated. (It is much easier to spot mistakes then come up with solutions.)

What About UI?

UX is usually regarded as more scientific and rule-based, while UI is perceived as more artistic and hard-to-pin-down. This distinction is probably due to a misconception stemming from our cognitive limitations.

UI too has its own set of rules, they are just harder to articulate than those of UX. Today, computers can distinguish beautiful faces from ugly ones. Via machine learning techniques, they can understand stylistic differences between artists and replicate an individual style to create new works.

But it is hard to articulate a human-comprehensible theory out of these models since there are so many parameters involved!

Practical Concerns

True, UX has a much smaller parametric space than UI, but it requires a semantic understanding of the components of the interface. Hence, the reason why it is a difficult design task for machines at the moment.

In order to make a website good looking, you do not need to know the functionalities of individual components. All you need to do is to make sure that the components look good together. But, to do UX, you need to know what each text means and what each component stands for.