Interview with Nuno Pinheiro, UI/UX Designer

Could you say something about yourself?

Well, my name Nuno Pinheiro, I'm 34 years old, I'm a designer living in Portugal, I have a degree in Civil Engineering. Throughout my life I have always wanted to understand what made things work, (much at the expense of my parent's patience, and countless broken apart gadgets that always missed pieces on reassembly).

This drive to know how things work led me to a degree in Civil Engendering, which in turn opened my horizons into computers and a brand new set of 'how does it work' questions. Next step: software, and finally UI/Art/UX Design problems...

Over time I became more interested in UI design and, in particular, icon design. In the process of learning more about design I joined the very successful KDE Oxygen project which I currently coordinate.

My quest for new problems to solve led me into trying to understand what makes an UI work or not. What makes a good experience to the end user. So that is what I'm doing now, creating tailored UI/UX experiences.

From the UI design point-of-view, what are the major issues facing software development today?

There are many. The variety of things you do on an electronic device has not grown a lot in the last few years. We still use email, talk to our friends, check our documents, and have fun on them. However, up until recently, we expected to do that in just one platform, one form factor, usually a desktop, nowadays there are many other electronic devices. The user expects the same functionality, but via different interaction methodologies, different UI metaphors that can even have a completely different look and feel.

This poses huge challenges for designers and coders, how can we make software that features a radically different UI experience, reusing as much code as possible across different platforms, but complying with completely different user input, platform expectations, and interaction metaphors? Right now, and for the visible future, to achieve effective UI design the 'form' aspect of software needs to be encapsulated within an independent flexible thin layer which follows on from its functionality. In turn, that functionality needs to be made easily reusable across all form factors.

Another challenge, is that today, many applications are thought of in a radically new way. From a simple placeholder of hierarchically placed actions that fitted users' predefined needs, we now see a bigger focus on creating pleasant, tailored experiences, especially in the end consumer application market...This poses a huge shift in the way we think about UIs as the focus shifts from the “screens” into the “journey”

How do you find working with programmers?

Great fun. The engineer inside me likes to understand how the “clock works”, this saves me time asking for things that can't be coded. Also understanding the basic logic of Qt makes me think in new ways about implementation for specific designs.

I always try to work closely to the implementation part. In design, 'the devil is in the detail', and through working closely with the developer, we save precious time with problems that are easily solved in the embryonic stage. I personally also find that this process works in the other direction with the coders becoming more aware of design issues.

But you are a programmer too these days, are you not?

Well, not really, at least, I don't do C++, all I do is QML with some rather simple javascript, I personally don’t even think I should be a programer. I see QML as a very simple way to make fluent communication between designers and coders, as we can use the same language to communicate.

I became a huge fan of QML, it's great fun to micromanage “pixel and experience perfection” without having to constantly complain to developers about milliseconds differences or pixel alignment problems. Also I believe QML is a great way to make communication much better across designers; you know, not all designers are the same, even amongst designers.

So that's the reason you started to do training courses in QML?

You can say that, when the chance was presented to me to give such training courses, it didn't take long to convince me that it was a great idea.

The concept of 'tailored for designers' QML training that focuses on the UI/UX creation and its adaptability with the Feedback, so far, has been really good.

How does your work on KDE relate to your work at KDAB?

Well, KDE gives me an incredible opportunity to work on an amazing, varied set of design/technical problems, problems that are rare in a day-to-day designer's life. This proved to be very useful when dealing with KDAB clients. Understanding fundamental technical issues and how things worked under the hood has proved to be highly useful for our KDAB work.

How do you see the future of UI design?

Think more and more adaptability, with a constant influx of new interaction methods; UI's need to reflect and adapt to those changes. Think that just as interaction becomes more and more natural and related to everyday object manipulation, so do UI metaphors need to be closer to every day life movement, making what can be simplified more straightforward and intuitive, without losing focus of what has proved itself to work.

I don't think the 'point and click + type' is going away, traditional desktop works and possibly will continue to work for many years. However designers must be able to mix and to adapt themselves to new realities and expectations.

Think that we will increasingly focus on the experience the path a user takes to perform the result of a chain of actions, and less on presenting all of the individual actions...

Nuno, thanks for taking this time to talk to us.

It was my pleasure.