Comment by gyomu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gyomu | Hacker News Reader

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Rams’ principles were perhaps noteworthy when he first vocalized them as the state of design discourse was much more primitive back then (not even sure of that actually), but today they ring quite simplistic and hollow, and kind of useless as actual decision making tools.

“Good design is as little design as possible” ok cool but I have 30 different feature requests coming in every week from actual users, that doesn’t really help me make concrete design decisions

“Good design is aesthetic” whose aesthetic? Aesthetic is extremely cultural and arbitrary, my designers are fighting over whether a photorealistic leather texture is more aesthetic than a gradient texture background, how does that help?

“Good design makes a product useful” uh yeah okay I’ve never had a design problem that was solved by someone saying “you know what, we should just make this product useful” “oooh right how did we not think of that”.

I mean these principles all sound good and high falutin’ as abstract statements, but I’ve never found them useful or actionable in my 15+ years working as a designer.

My takes:

“Good design is as little design as possible”

What you create should be a natural flow of what your clients needs to do. Don't go and add lot of options like a plane cockpit. Which usually means try to find the common theme and adding on top, and also clamping down on fantasy wishes

"Good design is aesthetic"

I'd take the definition of pleasing instead of beautiful for the term. When learning to draw, an often given advice is just to focus and detail only a single part of the whole picture, everything else can be left out. So discussion over a single thing is usually meaningless. If it's not going to be the focus point of interaction, as long as it meshes into the whole, no one care about the exact details.

“Good design makes a product useful”

Usability is a whole field, and you can find the whole corpus under the HCI (Human Computer Interaction) keyword. Focus on meeting this baseline, then add your creativity on top.

> I mean these principles all sound good and high falutin’ as abstract statements, but I’ve never found them useful or actionable

It's kinda like Philosophy, you have to understand what it means for yourself. It's not a cake recipe to follow, but more of a framework from where to derive you own methodology.

> Don't go and add lot of options like a plane cockpit.

Or do, because you're designing a plane cockpit :)

Ya but how many of the results of what you're describing as obvious are evaluated critically afterward, based on their intention?

If you're working on a piece of software, how likely is it that people are regularly comparing it to the most effective alternative alternative means to accomplish the same task, and the revert course of it turns out you've actually created a more convoluted and time consuming path to the same outcome? Often times, software just adds gets in the way and makes life less easy than it would have been otherwise.

The opposite of these principles is often easier to reason about. For example, people attempting to make "better" versions of Hacker News seem to rarely be aware of these, and when they post to Show HN, hopefully realize that the way it is is hard to beat because it follows at least some of the principles. To make something better, you'd absolutely need to follow similar principles more effectively.

> If you're working on a piece of software, how likely is it that people are regularly comparing it to the most effective alternative alternative means to accomplish the same task, and the revert course of it turns out you've actually created a more convoluted and time consuming path to the same outcome?

It depends; A/B testing sorta does that at the very granular level. Not so much at a high level.

My impression is that not teams take hallway usability testing at all seriously, and nobody's incentivized to actually measure quality by how effectively it does anything for users, so a tone of ~"obviously we thought of that" rings a little hollow.

The exception is a few of the design studios that have arrays of devices on hand to ensure that whatever they built feels great in as many scenarios as possible, on the web specifically

Edit: "My impression isn't that teams take hallway usability testing at all seriously, and I wouldn't blame them since there don't often seem to be incentives for getting things right."

I'd add that it's often the case that we're building software as software people, not necessarily as people who came from the domain we're building software for, so dogfooding isn't always easy.

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