It's like gonna have like this tab
It’s easy for us to spot the issues. However, the bit that’s surprised me, though, is that they are…aware of it? Even as a 9 year old. Is this a potential byproduct of growing up in the digital age? They know it doesn’t feel right, and they can’t really say why yet, they just know it feels off.
That’s hardly surprising, as design and user experience are things that take years and years to develop.
Oh, what a fun thing to do with kids!
When I’m working on making an interface simple and easy to use, this “feels off” is something I often find myself bumping into. I know something is wrong, but I have to identify it and work out a solution. Oftentimes, once you figure out the right solution, it feels obvious. Then, when you show it to other folks, it can seem trite or overly simplistic about what the solution was.
You can throw all the skill files you want at an LLM (And you should! They’re great!), but they still have critical limitations. Take text, for example. What would you instinctively do if you have a view whose text was truncated, clipping, or otherwise not fitting into a container?
The layman would say, “Can you make this text not clip?” The hardened iOS veteran might say, “Apply a .minimumScaleFactor modifier to this text, and ensure you’re using a Text style and not hard coding the font size.”
Off the cuff? Visually, you may get the same result at first. But, well — if you know, you know. One is objectively better. And those of us who can speak the language will still be making the best apps.
I don’t fully trust Claude with interaction design (yet?), at least on a high level. Maybe it’s just that it doesn’t really understand the pain-points that humans have to go through when dealing with UX/UI. It seems to be able to tell me that some things are on screen and where they are, but deciding how an interaction feels or how it feels to use it seems less fluent about. We may get there, but at least right now I do a good amount of hand-holding to direct it with design rather than let it do too much of UX. I do, however, often ask it for design ideas, which I work together with Claude when brainstorming solutions.