Don't Do That! Hunting Down Visual Design Smells in Complex UIs against Design Guidelines

Just like code smells in source code, UI design has visual design smells. We study 93 don't-do-that guidelines in the Material Design, a complex design system created by Googly. We find that these don't-guidelines go far beyond UI aesthetics, and involve seven general design dimensions (layout, typography, iconography, navigation, communication, color, and shape) and four component design aspects (anatomy, placement, behavior, and usage). Violating these guidelines results in visual design smells in UIs (or UI design smells). In a study of 60,756 UIs of 9,286 Android apps, we find that 7,497 UIs of 2,587 apps have at least one violation of some Material Design guidelines. This reveals the lack of developer training and tool support to avoid UI design smells. To fill this gap, we design an automated UI design smell detector (UIS-Hunter) that extracts and validates multi-modal UI information (component metadata, typography, iconography, color, and edge) for detecting the violation of diverse don't-guidelines in Material Design. The detection accuracy of UIS-Hunter is high (precision=0.81, recall=0.90) on the 60,756 UIs of 9,286 apps. We build a guideline gallery with real-world UI design smells that UIS-Hunter detects for developers to learn the best Material Design practices. Our user studies show that UIS-Hunter is more effective than manual detection of UI design smells, and the UI design smells that are detected by UIS-Hunter have severely negative impacts on app users.

Automated summary

The study revealed that Material Design guidelines extend beyond UI aesthetics, covering seven general design dimensions and four component design aspects. Violating these guidelines leads to visual design smells in UIs. The automated UI design smell detector UIS-Hunter has high detection accuracy and helps developers learn best practices for Material Design.