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> > Design is how it works, not how it looks.

> I’ve gotta push back: Design is also how things look

To synthesize these two comments: How it looks is a huge part of how it works.

There's even a name for that effect: Emotional Design

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_Design

More specifically there can be no separation between how something looks and how it works, they're bonded (and for good reason). There is no scenario where you can actually fully break the two apart. Any attempt to try harms one side or the other or both sides. How it works and how it looks go in tandem in all cases, they heavily influence eachother, either making the whole better or worse depending on how you go about creating for that reality.

Anybody telling you different is arguing from a pretty severe bias. If you're designing on the basis of how something works, and not also on how it looks at the same time, you're going to create a subpar outcome.

I'd also note that despite Jakob Nielsen's prominence nobody designs like he suggests. We should be open to the idea that beauty and delight may be more important than usability or features.

Respectfully, fuck that. Beauty matters the first time you use it, whereas functionality matters every single time.

Or, in business terms, beauty has terrible ROI.

This reminds me of expert systems where use is so intense that discoverability is trumped by speed of input. Old DOS/ASCII based retail systems were often optimized for speed.

The data entry speed on an old fashioned cash register, compared to a modern pos of a pos is insane.

It feels like a variation of learned helplessness, watching someone fumble with a Stripe terminal.

I imagine that because of the churn of people doing cashier jobs, there is little incentive for businesses to design pos systems that reward expertise over getting someone up to speed quickly.

> Or, in business terms, beauty has terrible ROI.

Must be a complete and unfortunate coincidence then, that the richest tech company on the frickin planet rose to that prominence through "beauty", at least as their critics still like to call out.

Where do you get the idea beauty has terrible ROI?

Look at almost any premium product and the premium that is being paid for is in the beauty. Rarely is it in the actual quality of the product.

If you’re selling a premium produce, then beauty can be justified by the premium price. But us should never be more important than the functionality. Never.

Even a Rolls Royce is a vehicle (and a damned fine one to boot) before it’s an art piece.

Depends what product. A toaster has very similar functionality to its competitors, so it needs to attract buyers with style and design elements.

When functionality is a given like it is for a kitchen toaster, we can argue the presentation and style is more important.

Most toasters are shit so there is definitely room to compete on functionality - it's just harder to convey that to buyers than a pretty design.

In B2C aesthetics are important. In B2B it's usually ease and speed of operation that's more important

In B2B it's usually ease and speed of operation that's more important

SAP (everything), Workday (HR), Service Now (help desk), Archer (compliance), SailPoint (compliance), and other applications that have been inflicted on my miserable existence over the last 25 years of corporate IT; all B2B enterprise applications that I guarantee did not consider either speed or ease of use to be remotely important.

Your pain only proves my point. You know it is supposed to be better, regardless of how it looks. There are outliers who neglect the end users, usually because they are too big or well connected to be replaced.

I don't know if it actually does, maybe in theory, we would assume these companies would be incentivized to optimize for speed and experience but you can't use "the exception that proves the rule" when the majority would fall into the exception category. There have been countless diatribes about how in B2B the purchaser is not the user, so speed, user experience, and functionality are all at best second order priorities. The apps I name checked above all probably provide the base level required amount of functionality that covers the needs of a lot of large privately held and all publicly held US companies, they are looking for the corp equivalent of Wal-Mart shoppers not Nordstrom shoppers (this dove tails into penny wise/pound foolish quarterly earning mindset, corporate America is dumb AF.)

I wish more businesses would treat beauty as a function of a product just like all other “actual” functions of it, a valid part of the whole package. I know it won’t probably happen anytime soon, because “ROI when???”, just been thinking about it a lot after reading Beauty by Sagmeister and Walsh.

How much of a premium are you, as a customer, willing to pay for the beauty? How much functionality will you give up for the shinies?

These are two separate questions.

> How much of a premium are you, as a customer, willing to pay for the beauty?

Depends on the category of goods, but if I can afford it then I will probably choose something aesthetically pleasing to me most of the time. I can easily get by with an ugly screwdriver if it works well, but I would not like wearing bad-looking shoes.

Generally if I use something often, be it tools, clothes, guitars, utensils and whatnot, I try to find something appealing to my eye. Some people seemingly don’t care much about that, but it just so happens that I do. Paying a premium for the beauty relieves me from being very irritated about something I might not like.

Also, in my opinion, aesthetics, ergonomics and beauty sometimes all are side products of working hard on one of them. Beauty in tools and architecture and interfaces is not to be discarded since it makes our life more pleasing and tolerable. We could live in the holes in the ground, you know, if pure application of things to their intended purpose was all that mattered to us.

> How much functionality will you give up for the shinies?

I’m not sure something has to be given up at all, that’s the point.

If you've visited factories or other work places dominated by men, many of them go by the philosophy of zero attendance to neatness and cleanliness. Those are miserable places to work and even visit. Everybody working there are usually grumpy and miserable, including the boss.

Working all day in ugly software is like a mini version of this.

I don't think anybody considers beautiful software ad a premium, more that ugly software will not be considered at all because it can't be trusted.

Feel free to tease apart beauty and functionality to a roomful of engineers. I'm always up for the debate because everyone has their own perspective and it's usually interesting.

Everything has terrible ROI if you don't understand the "I" and aren't tracking the "R".

Alternatively, functionally doesn't matter if you miss a sale due to someone not liking the design. The first time someone uses/sees something is the most important time for them to like it.

It depends. For typical software and websites, beauty matters every single time: when you like something more and more and more every time you use it, to the point of increasing usage, recommending it, spending money and so on; and when you hate something so much that functionality is effectively reduced by avoidance, distraction, fatigue, rage quitting etc.

Tell it to Apple.

In all of this it's a matter of scale. Products with 100 million users can amortize the costs over a much larger number of deployments. Even the smallest details become valuable at that point. Conversely, at a certain level of deployment, usability is not worth the time investment. Machine Learning researchers can frequently get away with a loose collection of Python scripts with a basic set of instructions that probably worked on their local setup.

No disrespect to you or Apple, but Apple is an outlier. If everything was like Apple then it wouldn't be Apple.

Are they really an outlier, or just the best at what they're trying to do? I mean I guess you could always say that the best is an outlier since only one can be the best.

They're the best at what they aim to do. Again, if everyone did it or they were less unique then it would be less exceptional.

The point is, it's hard and rare to get into such a position. Yes, eventually there will be a new Apple, but not yet. So anyone *today* looking to perform well should probably be more practical.

Apple devices are functional. I’m using one right now. I’ll be able to use it for the next 2-3 years, at least.

Beautiful, not in the least. Thanks to the cameras (a functional feature) I need to have a fugly case wrapping the entire thing.

How long is it since any vendor cared about usability and features? HCI is dead. The only thing that matters now is UX: optimising the software to maximise sales. And you're right. Beauty sells. But this is not an insight. It's been standard practice for years. And as an end user it sucks.

> UX: optimising the software to maximise sales

That’s not the definition of UX.

UX is multi disciplinary, an umbrella term for many things, eg design research, IA, HCI, UI Design, …

This is the first time I’ve seen someone on HN argue against usability in favor of aesthetics the form vs function design debate.

There is so much to say on the topic, books have been written arguing at length even. I would never argue for worse UX if I had a choice, there should be a baseline “good” visual design, but poor UX can and will sink your product in most metrics that matter in the business world.

> We should be open to the idea that beauty and delight may be more important than usability or features.

Oh, please no. We already have more than enough of that line of thinking. In software, especially, we see far too much pretty stuff that is horrendous to actually use.

I'll take the ugly thing that makes my life easier over the pretty thing that does the opposite every single time.

It was a long time I looked in that book but I hated it. Not because it was ugly, I like ugly. But the advice didn’t make sense. It’s been years sincy I thought of Nielsen, maybe I should give at a peek again.

Design like most words has a definition that’s generic so it can be applied as needed. There is no immutable rule when to use it.

The cone of shame my dog has right now “looks cool”; very sleek and streamline for a disposable thing, the designer surely was paid a premium, but the fasteners mechanics were poorly designed; vet tech said even she struggles with them and she puts them on dogs all week.

Design is how it looks and works as “designers” come up with both. The whole idea we can just put our foot down regarding definitions is not at all how reality works since nothing works on divine mandate. It’s relative.

"We talk about design often. At some point during any human lifetime, they will use the word design, and that's a big deal. Aside from 'the' and the 'a' and the 'an' in various languages, design is the fourth most popular word used. Before design was constructed we had the Mesopotamian era, and we all know how that was." -Reggie Watts, 2011

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABm7DuBwJd8

Conversely, A lot of time something looks good "because" it works well.

I had one old structural engineer spend a great deal of time trying to convince me that beautiful bridges were stronger than than ugly bridges. because our ideas of beauty are so tied to what works well. I am not entirely convinced, I have seen the sins some of these so called designers do in the name of "looking good" but I do see his point.

Many people (including me mostly) don't understand why their eyes feel something as "good-looking" or "beauty". It boils down to symmetry being a big part of it, and sometimes symmetry creates working solution. A bridge being the perfect example for that since you need to balance the weight between both sides of the bridge it's easy to get this while also "looking good". But I believe symmetry is not the only thing our brain accounts to beauty. I would love to know more about that topic.

I’d argue that the elegance of a design solution—engineers design things—is what the structural engineer was referring to. The next question is what is elegance in regards to a solution to a problem? Simplicity? Economy, both financial and technical? Aesthetic? The difficulty we have is that few people agree. When I studied industrial design in the early nineties, we were taught that design is merely the process of solving a problem. In fact, when dissecting a brief, the first goal is to establish the problem that needs solving is. The aim of a designer (or indeed an engineer) should be to incorporate all three elements that I mentioned. Sadly, those that struggle with the aesthetic, dismiss it’s importance out of hand.

Even beautiful bridges shouldn't be trusted too much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponte_Morandi

People tend to take care of things that are both well put together and beautiful.

I think this era of thinking is over.

People judge apps by how they look more than how they work.

If it looks professional and good looking they give it more credit and chances than it deserves. If UX is good but looks are not airbnb/apple wannabe they tend to distrust it.

I hold out hope that when the tool is in a market that delivers actual value functionality and usability still tend to win out.

I think that a lot of software is inherently low (or even negative) value and thats why shiny wins.

Could easily be dreaming tho

There is a market for good things anyways, but not sure how niche. I’m on your team tho

I've worked as both a designer and developer and for the life of me I can't help but gravitate towards prettier looking applications even at times over more functional ugly ones.

It's a contradiction to what I "should" want as a developer and I'm very aware of this.

Form and function. The intersection is the qualitative property of subjective taste, an intelligence quality of designers who must balance engineering with art.