Style, design direction, adjectives... the way typography, spacing, and colors are used to achieve a certain look. This design has roughly 4 stylistic treatments for all of the elements. Predictability is huge in interface design. Things that do certain things, should look a certain way... consistently. When you have too many treatments of too many elements, all of that predictability breaks down. There isn't a wrong or right direction per se, there just needs to be consistency in the styles.

A style would ideally apply to the entire direction of the interface, not just a few pieces of it. Style is definitely the most subjective part of design. I'm not saying a huge button is inherently bad, but when it comes to style, if you're gonna go for it, go for it.

Here's a @shiftnudge style design critique I'd send this designer... --- There are several interesting ideas here, but they don’t yet feel like they belong to the same interface. The oversized day tabs, large amount of negative space, fading cards, light gradient, and massive (+) button are each pushing into different stylistic directions. I’d focus on choosing a clearer style, tight the task list, and remove anything that competes with the focused job of seeing and completing todos. - Today tab is redundant with today labels on all items. Consider removing “Today” from every item - Font size of Today, Tue, Wed, etc. is quite large and a different sort of style than the rest of the layout. This could be an interesting stylistic direction, but the rest of the layout does not point in that same direction. Consider choosing a stylistic direction and going all in OR staying more standard like the todos - The todos themselves are quite large with generous padding all over. Large negative space can be a great tool, but in this instance it is competing with the amount of todos that can be seen on one screen, in this case only 5. - Consider truncating todos to a single line with an ellipsis... - The padding around and in between the check mark circle and the edge of the todo card is inconsistent and causing an odd early wrapping of the text (which may be better as a single line anyways) - The purple gradient is yet another stylistic direction that could be interesting to pursue, but it’s conflicting with the existing interface colors and treatment. Most todos that are “done” would be better off going less prominent, not more prominent - The different color backgrounds on every todo are fading into the background, but the text is not fading at all. The last item in the list looks quite odd floating with no card background. To achieve this similar effect, consider making all cards the same color background but adding a transparent gradient over the top of the cards. More subtle is better. - The icons are not straightforward and understandable. I would guess, todos, comments, inbox, spaces, but those are guesses and my guesses would likely be different from other peoples guess. Do we even need icons here? If so, they should be labeled, or perhaps if not, these items can be list items on the previous screen instead of a horizontal navigation. Often if you’re looking at a task list, it is a very focused activity and you navigating somewhere else could be handled by simply going back only. - The (+) button is MASSIVE. This directionally supports the big TODAY tab style, but it still needs some finessing to work as one cohesive style. It also competes heavily with the floating icon tray, which I don’t think you need. Some stylistic options here are definitely worth exploring further, but the screen will get much better once fewer of them are competing with one another. Pick the visual direction you want to own, then make all the design decisions for typography, spacing, color, etc. all reinforce that same decision.

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Been getting great feedback for the UI Principles workshop yesterday. Posted the replays and the schedule for all of the weekly live critiques coming up for Shift Nudge students. If you want in on the action... → shiftnudge.com