Building on my previous musings about what I called the fittedness of computing environments, I'd like to introduce another, closely-related concept that emphasises just one aspect of the aesthetics of fittedness. For want of a better term, I'm calling it UI charisma or charm. The gist of it: a UI is charming if it feels like all the parts fit with each other.
When someone says a UI "looks good," there are a lot of possible things they could mean. For example, they might be referring to the general beauty of a graphic design; classic media player skins from the 2000s, especially Windows Media Player and Winamp 3 skins, often had this in spades, as did the bevy of skeuomorphic interfaces that followed in the wake of Steve Jobs's mission to turn everything digital into a simulacrum of something analogue. A good clue that a design is merely beautiful, rather than charming, is that it withstands removal of fine detail like the purpose of individual widgets, or even the ablation of the widgets altogether. Beautiful designs often have little to do with their function as interfaces.
The 'Headspace' skin would not lose any of its appeal if the UI elements were removed; indeed, these look tacked on.
Digital audio workstations have long been bastions of skeuomorphic beauty. However, the functional nature of the devices being emulated puts a limit on how frivolous they can be—unless you're Delay Lama, anyway.
Conversely, a pleasing UI might be one that has little distinctive about it when run through a blur filter. These are the charismatic interfaces. (Consider how many charismatic leaders throughout history there have been with middling facial beauty.) Charismatic interfaces are at a local minimum for layout: moving, resizing, or deleting even a single UI element will probably make them less charming.
Limited screen real estate (and obsessive leadership) led to many of the desktop utilities bundled with the early Macintosh to have tight, meticulous designs. Each tool looks so intentionally formed that any changes would require a significant rework.
Charisma can also be found in pixel art, voxel art, or ASCII art, in which case it is the tendency for the medium to be invisible to the viewer without relying on huge scale. If you can look at a spaceship in Empyrion, or a structure in Minecraft, and not notice the limitations of the voxel pattern, then charisma has been achieved. Bringing this idea back to interfaces, we can infer that a good UI does not draw attention to the fact that it was designed by dragging-and-dropping controls or entering lines in a text file; there are some truly atrocious GUIs that do have this problem, such as when elements are misaligned or margins are uneven.
The Rhapsody DR2 Preferences panel was a band-aid design that was later removed. It is immediately obvious that the space on the right is designed to fit any possible content, not the exact content provided by the designer. Other versions of the Mac and NeXT preferences/control/settings application presented a more information-dense overview screen, or skipped one entirely. (It may seem that this layout was a low point for NeXT and Apple, but the Rhapsody DR1 panel was actually even worse.)
The NeXT UI that the Rhapsody Preferences panel replaced. The layout is meticulous and balanced—both interfaces were created with the same drag-and-drop layout tool, but the compositionality of this UI is not apparent. It is capable of loading extensions ("Preferences bundles"), which appear as additional icons in the top portion. User-installed bundles are shown at the start of the list to ensure they are prominently visible.
Charisma in art can be negative; this tends to prevail in so-called "doom cute" art—where punning or misuse of available assets is heavy-handed. "Tiny" ASCII art is the prototype of this, wherein an "O" might stand in for an eye, even though it only looks like an eye when the viewer squints, and is never exactly aligned. "Cuteness" relies on representational iconography to achieve legibility, skipping over the crucial level of cohesion (and often even over beauty) to convey a concept that is usually impossible to render precisely in the available palette.
When someone says a UI "looks good," there are a lot of possible things they could mean. For example, they might be referring to the general beauty of a graphic design; classic media player skins from the 2000s, especially Windows Media Player and Winamp 3 skins, often had this in spades, as did the bevy of skeuomorphic interfaces that followed in the wake of Steve Jobs's mission to turn everything digital into a simulacrum of something analogue. A good clue that a design is merely beautiful, rather than charming, is that it withstands removal of fine detail like the purpose of individual widgets, or even the ablation of the widgets altogether. Beautiful designs often have little to do with their function as interfaces.
The 'Headspace' skin would not lose any of its appeal if the UI elements were removed; indeed, these look tacked on.
Digital audio workstations have long been bastions of skeuomorphic beauty. However, the functional nature of the devices being emulated puts a limit on how frivolous they can be—unless you're Delay Lama, anyway.
Conversely, a pleasing UI might be one that has little distinctive about it when run through a blur filter. These are the charismatic interfaces. (Consider how many charismatic leaders throughout history there have been with middling facial beauty.) Charismatic interfaces are at a local minimum for layout: moving, resizing, or deleting even a single UI element will probably make them less charming.
Limited screen real estate (and obsessive leadership) led to many of the desktop utilities bundled with the early Macintosh to have tight, meticulous designs. Each tool looks so intentionally formed that any changes would require a significant rework.
Charisma can also be found in pixel art, voxel art, or ASCII art, in which case it is the tendency for the medium to be invisible to the viewer without relying on huge scale. If you can look at a spaceship in Empyrion, or a structure in Minecraft, and not notice the limitations of the voxel pattern, then charisma has been achieved. Bringing this idea back to interfaces, we can infer that a good UI does not draw attention to the fact that it was designed by dragging-and-dropping controls or entering lines in a text file; there are some truly atrocious GUIs that do have this problem, such as when elements are misaligned or margins are uneven.
The Rhapsody DR2 Preferences panel was a band-aid design that was later removed. It is immediately obvious that the space on the right is designed to fit any possible content, not the exact content provided by the designer. Other versions of the Mac and NeXT preferences/control/settings application presented a more information-dense overview screen, or skipped one entirely. (It may seem that this layout was a low point for NeXT and Apple, but the Rhapsody DR1 panel was actually even worse.)
The NeXT UI that the Rhapsody Preferences panel replaced. The layout is meticulous and balanced—both interfaces were created with the same drag-and-drop layout tool, but the compositionality of this UI is not apparent. It is capable of loading extensions ("Preferences bundles"), which appear as additional icons in the top portion. User-installed bundles are shown at the start of the list to ensure they are prominently visible.
Charisma in art can be negative; this tends to prevail in so-called "doom cute" art—where punning or misuse of available assets is heavy-handed. "Tiny" ASCII art is the prototype of this, wherein an "O" might stand in for an eye, even though it only looks like an eye when the viewer squints, and is never exactly aligned. "Cuteness" relies on representational iconography to achieve legibility, skipping over the crucial level of cohesion (and often even over beauty) to convey a concept that is usually impossible to render precisely in the available palette.
