We're Better At Design, And That's Not Good
clayallsopp.com
clayallsopp.com
"So what's wrong with [good design]? The problem is we judge books by their covers. We're more likely to pick the prettiest object up first."
Why would you value a shortcut for assessing quality more than an actual improvement in quality? The fact that design is better is a huge all around win for everyone. Does it make every product good? Of course not, but so what?
Not too long ago, you could perhaps have measured the quality of a house by the question: 'does it have running water?'. If the answer was yes, you could assume someone put a lot of effort into the house, and that everything else about it was likely to be better too. Today, all houses have running water. Is that a bad thing? That would be an absurd claim to make. The fact that all houses (even the relatively bad ones) have running water is a huge win.
The point is that running water makes any house better, and good design makes any product better. Claiming that better design is a problem is not something I can make any sense of.
I don't think that's the interesting point. The problem is that the focus on design means that developers spend too much effort on design and not enough on quality. We build tools to make design easier rather than making quality easier for developers, result in a market full of worse software that only appears better on first impression.
In some sense it's an evolutionary necessity: When people make choices based on eye candy, suppliers who provide better eye candy make more sales, and the rational supplier then spends more effort making better eye candy and some of that effort comes out of what could have made a better product in other ways.
But in theory, if there was a way to throw a wrench into that dynamic -- a better, faster, easier way for users to evaluate overall quality rather than relying on superficial aspects of design quality -- then we should welcome it (or work to create it, if you're so inclined).
Your point seems to be:
"The problem is that the focus on design means that developers spend too much effort on design and not enough on quality. We build tools to make design easier rather than making quality easier for developers..."
To that I would say, design is one aspect of quality, and spending effort on it is spending effort on quality. What would it mean to make quality easier for developers, beyond making better tools for design, development, testing, market validation, support, and so forth? All of these tools exist and new tools are consistently released.
In fact, I think the surge in attention to design can largely be seen as a 'catching up effect'. For many years, all the other kids in the party got a lot of attention, now design is getting attention as well, but I'm not at all sure it's getting disproportionate attention.
Finally, new shortcuts for assessing quality always exist, and they're almost by definition at the cutting edge of their field. Maybe that's not 'pretty looks' anymore, and that's ok. Other areas of rare craftsmanship are still alive and kicking - communication quality is a good example. Lousy copy on pretty pixels abound.
I don't mean to say that making something beautiful is not worth doing, but rather that other things are important too.
>What would it mean to make quality easier for developers, beyond making better tools for design, development, testing, market validation, support, and so forth? All of these tools exist and new tools are consistently released.
That's pretty much what I mean. And sure, they exist, but it's a trade off. If we spend more effort on improving UX tools, we spend less time improving other tools, because there are finite resources. The key is to find the right balance, and the argument can be made that the pendulum is now swinging too far toward superficial design considerations as a result of that being (over-)used by users in choosing between products. But certainly reasonable people can disagree.
If you contrast the availability of design tools to say, development tools, I'm pretty sure you'll agree there's a huge gap there. I grant that there has been a recent surge in UX/sketching tools, but so many areas of design are still left untouched. Recently, for example, I was very excited by discovering http://macrabbit.com/slicy/ and http://iconfactory.com/software/xscope - both solve problems many designers have, and they both make my designer life so much easier.
Perhaps to return to your original point - the world is full of people who follow trends blindly. I run an app development company, and if I had a nickel for every time someone asked me to build an app that no one needs, well, you know the end of that saying. Still, if you're going to follow trends without good thinking, 'invest in design' is by far not the worst you could follow.
What you're talking about is more like the second kind, and I agree that the tools to do that are sorely lacking.
The problem as I see it is that the world has been building tools that allow a college freshman to build a superficially professional-looking app in a month (which often turns out to be unusable crap upon close inspection), rather than tools that allow a team of seasoned professionals to build something awe-inspiring in six months instead of two years. Because the current market allows you to get your dollar from millions of suckers selling the superficially pretty junk before they realize what they paid for.
To extend the development tools analogy, it's the UX equivalent of having loosed Visual Basic onto the world and thousands of noobs are happily churning out Visual Basic software, when what we really need is the C family and its toolchain. So the hope is that the incentives can be to produce that rather than just iterating onto the next version of UX VB.
I wouldn't expect many high profile examples though. By its nature junk tends to have a short shelf-life, last years junk just gets replaced with this year's junk.
This is especially noticeable when you distinguish visual design from functional design. Developers seem to be focusing increasingly on the former at the expense of the latter, and it's giving us a lot of software that looks wonderful as a static image, but is really frustrating to use and nearly impossible to customize.
Suppose when you went to the supermarket every, say, can-opener looked perfect, like it was cast out of solid stainless steel. If some were actually much better quality than others - if some would last a week and some ten years - then you'd be in problematic situation. Our judgement depends on, as the article says, to an extent judging a book by its cover. If all covers are amazing, the world is indeed nicer looking but we are in a bit of a quandary.
If you're interested in the durability of a can opener, the weight of the material sounds like a good candidate.
Q: Does design imply the idea of products that are necessarily useful?
Eames: Yes— even though the use might be surely subtle.
Q: It is able to cooperate in the creation of works reserved solely for pleasure?
Eames: Who would say that pleasure is not useful?
I disagree with the author's conclusion where he says that you should "make sure your product doesn't look terrible and move on". An investment in good visual design provides tremendous value which is not very evident at first sight.
That's different from what Eames said, at least in this quote. He said, "Who would say that pleasure is not useful?" Pleasure and beauty are not the same thing. If he limited himself to beauty, he could have designed beautiful, uncomfortable chairs, but that would have resulted in a great deal of resentment from (most) people who had to sit on them. When an object's functionality falls far short of its beauty, the user feels that his or her needs are taken to be superfluous given the beauty of the object. These "narcissistic" objects are nice to have around at first, thanks to the enjoyment of their beauty, but eventually you hate them as much as you would hate a person who felt entitled to be a jerk because of their physical beauty.
In any product, a web site as much as a chair, discomfort combined with beauty is a stick in the eye, because you can tell from the beauty that considerable work went into the design. An ugly, uncomfortable chair is just a bad chair. A beautiful, uncomfortable chair is the result of someone very, very good investing a lot of time, which could have resulted in a comfortable chair, except they didn't give a damn about you or your comfort; they just wanted "their" chair to be beautiful.
> the visuals, it's all about the interactions and the core
> product!" And that's exactly right; but to get a feel for
> those deeper aspects you need to spend time with it, and we
> usually don't have that time.
So if we judge by looks, and the gap between how good products look these days is less pronounced, isn't that good? If the gap was bigger then an otherwise-terrible, but pretty, product could gain a much bigger advantage more easily.
You are right in that startups, for example, should build something useful in order to validate the concept, and useful does not always have to be great looking. But in today's world when everyone is competing on design, you would be doing your product a disservice by not investing sufficient time and money in creating a stunning product.
That is a bit harsh!
"Sapper proposed a design inspired by the Shōkadō bentō, a traditional black-lacquered Japanese lunch box."
> We're more likely to pick the prettiest object up first.
...
> Just make sure your product doesn't look terrible, and then move on.
So if you follow that advice, according to the article you might lose out on customers because they'll be going for the prettier product instead of yours. Which probably _is_ true, so in fact everyone should always be trying to make the absolute best design they can. I fail to see how average design would ever be a good business decision.
It assumes that glossy buttons will keep people in a piece of software that's awful or hard to use. As kirillzubovsky said below, it will entice but not keep you in forever. People will simply move on.
I look to Dribbble for inspiration and I'm continuously learning and trying to improve by looking at the best work on the site.
The thing is someone who is great at visual design also has a great awareness of UX, they just don't define themselves in the same way UX'ers do. The guys and gals designing this stuff are interface designers, they don't just put things in places without thought. So you got stung but a app that looked beautiful in the screenshots, did you read the description and reviews?
What this article doesn't do is list some examples of products with amazing designs but poor user experience.
I think it's easier to find a poorly designed site with bad ux then it is to find a amazing one.
Right now it's a great time to be a designer - interface design is finally becoming important and is seen as a key differentiator. More time, effort and money is spend on UI/UX and this benefits everyone.
Do you know what the real frightening thing is? That so many designers are improving so quickly. Before Dribbble it wasn't really that easy to find them but now talented people so easily accessible. Want someone who's great at shopping cart design? Type in the search term, click on profile, click on the 'hire me' button.
Keeping up is the scary part
Since when did the design of a product ever say anything about privacy-invasiveness? If anything the correlation seems backwards to what he's suggesting; many of the companies who "got" good design early on and are best known for good design are the ones I trust the least when it comes to privacy.
Just take the IOS Youtube app for example. It's simple as shit, looks rather good, and it has a solid UI/UX to switch to fullscreen, scroll through comments, etc. It's not groundbreaking stuff, but it's a notch above.
If we use Google apps as a baseline, then it's fair to say the threshold for what's acceptable is moving up, fast. The Youtube app is more or less just presenting info as basic lists, with image thumbnails. Is that the best way to represent a playlist, comments? Maybe it is, but we're just at the beginning of exploring how to fully present information, create an experience, all of which needs to look and feel good. If you stop at 'it looks good enough', you're going to get outpaced.
Design starts at the most abstract level of creation with intent.
What is your intent, and what do gradients and lickable buttons have to do with it?
I don't think that's the right analogy. It's more like saying "there are too many women who spend too much effort on makeup and plastic surgery and not enough effort cultivating their personalities." The problem is not that too much pretty is bad, the problem is that there is a trade off between pretty and other valuable things, and it's bad if pretty is the only thing that matters.
There is a reason every GUI OS has standard components (windows, buttons, menus, etc). The web badly needs this to let the user focus on the interaction and the app and to allow them to pick up and learn any app easily.
There will be some exceptions, but ideally, we should take a cue from what people worked very hard over the years to built knowing it was the right paradigm (rather than the DOS app whatever goes or game interfaces which are a good example of the exception to the rule).
Mac OS and OS X, Windows, X-Windows (Motif, QT, GTK, etc.), OS2, et al.
The fanciness of sites is indeed, usually a detriment to usability and a detriment to their development, adding useless eye candy rather than useful functionality.