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Comment by adverbly | Hacker News Reader

I find it pretty funny when designers have it in their mandate to make a number look as cool as possible.

You see it on dashboards or all kinds of things like this.

I think it would be a good design challenge. Make a decimal number look cool. No other constraints.

See, that’s a real problem with modern day design: it’s all about making things look cool instead of just no-bullshit functional.

False dichotomy, this an advertisement, would it be on the front page if it was just bare HTML instead of a pander-to-your-audience retro look?

Good design can establish identity without totally ruining the UX.

Lots of important info get posted in HN everyday without the fancy design that takes a lot of clicks and waiting times, so how could you assume it won’t make it to the front page?

This is why people need to stop using the “false dichotomy” card in every discussion. It’s so devoid of rigor in thinking and is always used lazily to frame another person’s comment in a paradigm that it wasn’t intended to be framed.

Have you considered that the design is more important than the data in this context? I mean, I sure don't care worth a damn whether there are 100, 1000, or 10000 orders being placed per second. It's a meaningless figure to me.

Your first sentence is exactly what it means to think in terms of form over function. There is exactly nothing unique about the 80s pixellated design but there is about the data being presented, which is actually valuable to many possible parties:

* competitors

* creditors

* investors

* employees

* academics

* journalists

* policymakers in financial services

The design is not valuable to anyone, even to those who have no serious business with the data but who somehow feel the need to defend the design in the comments section, because regardless of the design they would visit the link anyway for the information it contains and because of the clickbaity title, not because of the design.

The design is to make it appeasing/fun to look at. Pure functional design leads to a dull, boring world nobody wants to live in.

All of this may be true, but Stripe's intention with building this is obvious: It's marketing; it's an advertisement showing how much volume Stripe handles during a busy shopping period. A big hint that it's an ad is that the Stripe API Uptime is not only on the first page of the stats, but is the only thing colored green. It's showing that Stripe is easily handling this crazy load, and it's only 13% (right now) of their "current capacity"!

Stripe is not building this to make sure that competitors, creditors, investors, employees, academics, journalists or policy makers have access to important data, that's just not the function of this dashboard.

Those unsure that Stripe will be reliably there for them might be swayed by seeing this during their holiday break. At least that's the marketing theory.

Aesthetics are absolutely a factor on the efficacy of marketing activities, and making it "fun" or "pretty" or "flashy" is part of that.

Not always. Fun and flashy makes sense if you’re selling consumer goods, but not if you’re selling your capability to provide a service and especially a critical one at that.

Who do you think are the customers of Stripe’s API? Are those people going to make business decisions on the basis of theatrics, or does pragmatism, performance, and stability matter more?

Upper funnel/lower funnel, depending. And don't forget the future employees that take notice of a culture that would allow for such an exercise. To me, it communicates good product management, roadmaps, and healthy financials to allow the room to breathe.

> it’s all about making things look cool instead of just no-bullshit functional

It's your dichotomy, "reframe the paradigm" if you'd like. The typical regurgitation of this talking point is "prioritizes form over function."

That’s not a dichotomy. In virtually all of design function is a prerequisite to prioritizing form, otherwise what you’re building might not even be possible and so you might not even be creating design but just art.

> it's all about...instead of

>> That’s not a dichotomy

Oops, yes it is.

> prioritizing form

Thanks for taking my suggestion and changing what you said (from "all about" to "prioritizing"). Doesn't add much to the so-often regurgitated complaint I'm afraid.

Eh, your argument doesn’t really involve thinking and banks purely on semantics, which you are making arbitrarily strict and according to your personal preference. In practice, “just no-bullshit functional” as in my first comment doesn’t mean absolute neglect of form.

I’m sorry but you’re not as clever as you think, and your reasoning signals that you’re not known as a good communicator or collaborator in your organization.

My feelings! Notice how quickly personal attacks come out once an argument has been lost?

Where’s the part where it was lost? Lol

When your only option was to repeat yourself, then change the subject.

Winning arguments stand on their own.

Will this analysis of yours go on my permanent record? What's my MBTI personality type?

Pretty sure no one outside of stripe has any use of real time revenue for only one day on an aggregated level. Doesnt have to be functional because people dont really "use" it. It is just for fun

Doesn’t matter if it’s for fun. The function here is to show information so in that regard the design failed because it makes you go through hoops irrelevant to the goal

with respect, I disagree that the function here is to show information. the (primary) function here is to advertise Stripe, and they obviously believe the aesthetic will increase the chance that viewers of the advert with share it with their friends and coworkers, increasing the effectiveness if the advert.

if this was a page they provided to all their customers, all year round, as their means of monitoring their own sales then I agree that this is a terrible design. but they have a fairly utilitarian dashboard UI for that function.

People are already talking about how this design crashes their browsers so even the function of advertising isn’t being fulfilled.

Also you clicked the link because of the clickbaity title and the info it suggested it contains, not because of the design.

The design isn't crashing their browser, the implementation of the design is. You could argue that the design is simply not implementable with current technology to serve the widest array of users (this is doubtful), and possibly Stripe's marketing team made a judgement that they just didn't care about that - but you seem to be laying quite a lot at a designer's door there. I would guess that they are prioritising standing out to a niche audience of developers with expensive laptops over casting a wide net, which would be reasonable for this kind of campaign. Perhaps what you dislike is the marketing campaign and it's goals, rather than the nebulous "bad design" of the page?

And, for the record, I clicked the link because it was at the top of HN and I was bored. How did it get to the top of HN? because a lot of people saw it and thought it was cool. If they took a more utilitarian approach, would that have happened? I guess we just don't know.

So what if it was a designer who acted on the whims of a marketing team? The criticism was directed at the design not at a person. Regardless of their intended audience the site is still representative of the point I wanted to make about modern day design.

And no, not everyone is clicking on all the front page links of the same score (you included) so your argument is kinda weak and something must have caught your attention about the title.

My point was that it seems you are critiquing the design of the page as if it's purpose is to display sales data, and I was suggesting that it's purpose is not to display sales data, but actually to simply advertise Stripe. When judged by this outcome, the design is (arguably, it seems) more successful.

Regardless, I find no joy or purpose in talking to someone that tells me I'm incorrect when I tell them my motivations for doing something. It betrays a certain ignorance on your part. I think let's just leave the thread there. Have a good rest of your day.

Even if the purpose was to advertise Stripe, the ad has very evident intention to provide value to the viewer of the ad, which is to provide information, so the purpose is not singular; and yet both its intended purposes are not being done very well.

I think that what really happened here is that you are upset because you found yourself arguing for a position that you can’t rationally and convincingly defend, which is a position that no one forced you to maintain in the first place. You should know that there’s also no joy in dealing with someone like that.

Similar to the concept of “user as the product,” when data is made to look cool the purpose of the data is to attract attention, not be the object of attention.

Is any person looking at that “live dashboard” as an actionable data source?

Competitors of stripe would, to set their own targets. Creditors of stripe can use it to get a general idea of whether they made any money to pay their loans with. Investors of stripe for the same purposes but in expectation of dividends or increase of market value of their equity. Academics for research, journalists for reportage… there are plenty of people out there other than design nerds.

The problem that people make quick judgements based on appearance is not modern. I also would like to just make things functional and have people quickly see the value, but unfortunately we're stuck with the need to also make things look cool.

Actually it took a while to make that judgment because the numbers took a while to show up

I wish this were true. I am dying for the late 90s/early 2000s weird web design, as I am so bored of the typical boring website design today.

Your emotional response to the ways things look and feel is a "function" as valid as a button or a slider. Actually, it's more functional in the digital ecosystsm where everything is a symbolic abstraction of light except for your emotional response to their meanings-- it's in fact the only real outcome of the design intent.

So if you see it as a problem and not a strength of modern visual design you are fully clueless, no offense.

"You… go to your closet, and you select… I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back, but what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean.

You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that, in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns, and then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent, wasn’t it?… who showed cerulean military jackets... And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.

However, that blue represents millions of dollars of countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room… from a pile of 'stuff.'"

-Devil Wears Prada

https://artdepartmental.com/blog/devil-wears-prada-cerulean-...

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