Interface Designers’ Principles in the IntelliJ Platform UI Team
summary
Describes six UI design principles used in the IntelliJ Platform UI team and concrete changes guided by them: replacing tiny triangle controls with larger text buttons using Fitts' law, moving the plugin repository onto the main page to reduce targeting steps, reducing toolbar icons after a heatmap showed under 10% clicks on many items, and merging multiple search popups into a single popup with Tab switching and file preview. Decisions weigh discoverability, attention economy, informativeness, user habits, and engineering cost, and are evaluated via heuristics, feedback from 100+ internal users, and an Early Access cohort of thousands.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00IntelliJ designers intro
- 1:05UI design myths
- 2:30Fast interface access
- 5:07User attention economy
- 7:12Informative convenience
- 9:24Feature findability
- 11:34User habit support
- 14:23Complexity trade-offs
- 15:53Applying principles
- 17:56Evaluating solutions
- 18:17Q&A
