Design is losing its seat at the table
mokriya.quora.com
mokriya.quora.com
I go back to Dieter Rams' 10 Principles of Good Design often. [0] I've highlighted a few key ones here:
Good Design Makes a Product Useful : A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product while disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.
Good Design Makes A Product Understandable : It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product clearly express its function by making use of the user’s intuition. At best, it is self-explanatory.
The post mentions this: 'For those of us who believe in the power of design thinking to solve human problems, and to a lesser extent in the power of markets to reward solutions when the interests of consumers and businesses are correctly aligned, this was invigorating news. "
What problems are Carousel, Paper, or Jelly solving? He mentions theses question but I think he conflates pretty UI with good design when choosing these products as examples. Maybe that's a failure of the community who heralded these three as "design led apps"... but for me, these are not "well designed apps", they're pretty apps. How about Inbox, Dropbox (prime?), Periscope, Slack, IFTTT, the plethora of calendar replacements like Fantastical or Sunrise? There are so many apps that are functional as well as beautiful, why choose three objective failures?
I think design is just as important today as it has been for the past few years. We just need to be more sensitive to what counts as good design and not be distracted by rounded rectangles, lightboxes, and animations.
[0] http://www.archdaily.com/198583/dieter-rams-10-principles-of...
That's exactly the point he's making. He chose these apps because they are high-profile products made by people who are ostensibly industry leaders in design, yet they are not well-designed. He's saying those apps don't solve any problems, they are mostly just "pretty," and he believes that is indicative of a worrying trend in the designer community.
What makes Medium or Path design led? Can I just state that my app is design led?
>> "It’s now 2014, and I doubt seriously whether I’m alone in feeling a sense of anxiety about how “design” is using its seat at the table."
Why? Look at all the other amazing work that others are doing. Slack is a great call out by RickS. Design has never been more relevant. I'm more optimistic about the role of design today than ever before.
Paper sole existence is an original, better interface to Facebook.
Design, as in usability has always been important. The question is, who is able to provide this? Are people who studied design at school good at providing usable designs or pretty designs?
One of the major problems in this debate is that a designers role is sometimes the person who comes in at the end and paints everything to look pretty, and sometimes it's a person who designs the entire user experience.
The danger is if too many desginers can only make it look pretty then management might start to rely on engineers ability to design instead of having an actual, dedicated focus on the design.
Engineers would be the ones to develop the product's functionality.
What would be the kind of title for someone who "comes in at the end and paints everything to look pretty"?
Like how this designer chose to post on Quora, where the fixed-width header means when I hit page-down on my keyboard, I miss the first two lines of text on the next page?
That is not even off-topic, he mentions it in the article and links to an answer (https://www.quora.com/Why-should-or-shouldnt-you-migrate-you...) on why people should move content from Blogs to Quora, as a counter example to Medium. But that answer is not convincing at all, there is not much in Quora that makes it more likely old content gets seen, nothing at least that beats Google's long tail for blog articles, notwithstanding that the linked article is not new. I have a blog, it is not popular, but I get so many visitors via Google on old articles that I could be quite happy about that, if it were anything to be happy about.
http://metaismurder.com/post/84199748362/designer-duds-losin...
You're right. But it certainly includes how it looks.
You can't silo off certain aspects of interaction between products and users. The visual aesthetics of a product are subjectively at the front of the line when it comes to design.
Design is a "why not both" profession. You can't have a pretty looking site that doesn't function properly and still have a great product. You also can't have a functioning site that looks like shit and still have a great product. You need all aspects of design; visual, experience, functionality, etc. to come together at the same time to deliver a great product to the end user.
Designers are really analogous programmers in the sense that there are tons of specializations and skills to consider from within.
I personally self identify as a programming language designer...which is a completely different rabbit hole.
> You're right. But it certainly includes how it looks.
I hate to use this example because it was so hyped at the time but... Pinch-zoom is awesome functionality and has NO look, only function and feel. There is no visible UI, you just grab the image/map with 2 fingers and resize it. It's one of the best UI concepts in ages. The only thing it may not be is discoverable. This is what IMO sets Apple apart - they want you to interact with your stuff, not their app. Microsoft basically builds an industrial control panel where you push buttons to get something to happen to your stuff. The difference can be stunning when done correctly and has little to do with looks, but rather how it works.
I don't think you really made the case for this. How exactly do you equate using pinch-zoom to "interacting with my stuff" rather than "interacting with Apple's software"?
I feel like I own my Microsoft products way more than my Apple products. Whenever I use Apple's stuff, I feel just like an apartment renter who isn't even allowed to control my own thermostat.
craigslist will beg to differ
and is an example of why functioning site with shit look is better than great look with bad function
the guys at 42 floors figured this out by testing. http://darrennix.com/our-homegrown-ab-testing-framework-at-4...
I know of designers who rail against that look though. I think HN follows most of the same craigslist principles.
Often times users have no choice but to use the only choice. That's like saying people choose Comcast because it's a great product. No. People choose Comcast because it's the only product.
Craigslist became popular at a time when thoughtful UI design wasn't repeated or regarded as necessary.
Sure looks like good design though. Pity about the functionality. :P
Why are sites like HN and the one linked earlier following a similar style.
Cause core of design != look which is how the 3 apps mentioned above seemed to be looking at.
Function needs to be the core of design.
If they are the only game in town, then I will put up with bad functional design and if needed crawl on my knees to solve a problem of mine.
I remember years back trawling through multiple expertsexchange pages to solve some coding issues.. Now I don't as better options have come along...
Why is the same not happening with craigslist, cause they do the basic job well.. have a functional designed site which solves peoples problem easily.
It's also not clear to me that the appearance of even most bad apps reach repelling depths. My experience is that utility failures are a lot more common than complete aesthetic failures.
But design doesn't always have to be useful. For example the work that a game designer does is all about distraction and entertainment, and has little to do with making things understandable. In fact game design is about creating problems for people more than anything else at times.
I'd also be wary of the fashion to bash fashion and the decorative arts: A good knowledge of the decorative arts and art history are critical if you want to be a good designer. And I would also add to that a good designer should be a well rounded person as well: You should know a little bit about theater, literature, music and many other things.
The real failure I see is that many lesser engineers think that they can sprinkle some design on what they're doing. Another sin I see is that while hacker culture is a great thing, design isn't something that you can learn in 48 hours from courseware. In fact I've spent my entire career doing design and I'm still learning new things every day.
"Their campaigns find favour in cocktail parties in New York, San Francisco and London but are taken less seriously in Chicago. In the days when I specialized in posh campaigns for the New Yorker, I was the hero of this coterie, but when I graduated to advertising in mass media and wrote a book that extolled the value of research, I became its devil. I comfort myself with the idea that I've sold more merchandise than all of them put together."
"A few years ago, Harry McMahan drew attention to the kind of commercials which were winning the famous Clio awards for creativity: [...] of 81 television classics picked by the Clio festival in the previous year, 36 of the agencies involved had either lost the account or gone out of business."
- Ogilvy on Advertising, David Ogilvy
A product will be useful if it is needed, if it is poorly designed, like craiglist. I would say good design makes a product more pleasant and relatable, however, the usability of a product still defines by its core functionality.
If you are not convinced, paste that quote in google and add "Steve Jobs". Yeah, that's right. He said it.
I do agree with you however. I (usually try to) "design" my software before I start writing it (unlike the "agile / schemaless/ latest-fad" developers). It works well for me. Usually saves a lot of work in the medium to long term.
The problem is that design is an ambiguous word that can cover every aspect of building an application. We need to be able to differentiate between "pretty looking design" and a "well architected, thought through database / software design", and all of the "design" elements in between.
Design is still killing it in a lot of places. Slack and snapchat come to mind. People want to do those things really badly, and the entire value-add of their services can be described as "get the software out of the way". That's design.
I will look at 3 apps that were programmed by programmers, and have failed. This should be enough to prove to anyone that programming is on the way out, and the future is bleak for us all.
This paragraph contains some more waffle that has nothing to do with anything. Thx for listening.
The goal is to make money, not make a product. To make money, you figure out where to jam a lever in, then pry as much cash flow as you can from it. This is why people are worried about SEO rather than UX.
Design does not work as a competing voice in a cacaphony. It has to be the only voice, the main voice. Design is the table. That was what Jobs understood, that's what he built into his company, that's why Apple is still killing it.
There's this trend amongst big companies these days, particularly Google and Amazon, to come up with products that don't solve any of their customer's problems. The way these products happen is business requirements gain priority over design ideals. Someone looking at a spreadsheet looking for places to jam a lever in is choosing product direction.
To me, solving a problem really well is what makes a product great. Making money is certainly related, but it's a distinct challenge.
You're speaking as if the open-source movement never existed.
Separately, this is a troubling view of the world in a moral sense.
I'm a product manager at a tech company, and the job is listening to that cacophony & prioritizing. Sometimes that's design, sometimes not. It's not black and white
* I know there is a difference between program and product mangers, the latter being more focused on marketing.
Edit: keeping it classy with the downvotes, clearly I struck a nerve (more citations in child post).
From wiki:
> Diverse interpretations regarding the role of the product manager are the norm. The product manager title is often used in many ways to describe drastically different duties and responsibilities. Even within the high-tech industry where product management is better defined, the product manager's job description varies widely among companies. This is due to tradition and intuitive interpretations by different individuals.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_manager
I only mentioned it because I was intentionally talking about project managers, who are often confused with product managers anyways, e.g. see:
https://www.linkedin.com/grp/post/42629-100151081
[1] http://www.quora.com/What-does-a-Microsoft-Product-Manager-d...
— Steve Jobs
"You're holding it wrong."
Unless you're saying the only point of the iPhone is that people buy it, that isn't sufficient.
Design is very much depending on the intended outcome. Apple wants to sell devices -> design them so that they get bought (make them "shiny", as you put it ;)). Of course this is not the only point of what Apple wants, but it certainly is the biggest one.
Design doesn't really solve a "real problem" for the user.
Design ONLY solves an important problem FOR THE COMPANY. It enables users to navigate the product the way the company wants them to.
So does it deserve a seat at the table? Yes Does it deserve to be the king? Nope. Sorry. No really big problem solved.
I really wanted to like Carousel. I've tried several times, but somewhere in my Dropbox are a mess of backed up websites, most of which aren't even mine. Scrolling through the very lovely Carousel views wasn't quite as rewarding as the demos when the photos I cared about were mixed up with stock photo thumbnails, web graphics and other junk.
Dropbox bought cloud photo services SnapJoy and Loom, they've got good people. But the letting the ability to filter content fall by the wayside for years was a terrible failure of design and likely contributed to Carousel's foundering.
Expecting to do well because you champion design because that's what Steve Jobs did is like expecting to do well because you yell at your workers like Steve Jobs did.
Of course, you can do a good UX design and good graphic design (both together, but they are two different aspects) and then use psychology and network effects to your advantage. Or just switch interfaces on a certain part of the users and then the rest may be jealous. Or other tricks.
Marketers want you to believe something fancy and trendy and expensive is better and so people want that status. That isn't the same as being actually better.
Non-design stake holders will obsess over design to the detriment of other less interesting issues, vendors are selected on the quality of mock up not their ability to deliver or technical expertise. Designer will go for gold and disregard best practice, what the user/product actually needs and what can be delivered on time and budget.
But I (like most people) do not work for apple/dropbox/megacorp... so my anecdotes are not exactly relevant to the article.
If I read an article by a professional writer, I expect sentences I can parse.
That Steve Jobs quote seems to have propelled a lot of people doing graphics into a broader field; if it is entirely fair and on whose expense I am not sure.
Secondly. Graphical design today is much more a commidity than it used to be.
Libraries such as Twitter Bootstrap puts professional high quality (albeit generic) graphical design into any boring old webapp. And for 90% it is good enough.
Mind you the reason d'etre for most software developed today is a set of specific tasks not aestethics, not branding or marketing. Good aesthetics may be a nice touch to add and I found that it often helps boring internal IT-projects that they look good and conway an immediate sense of quality. Luckily today it is in within the reach of the average programmer.
Yes, engineering and software development include design. For example the Waterfall process explicitly has a "design phase". That phase is not only about the GUI, but about the internal architecture aka "how it works".
Here's my latest pet peeve...
Remember when the Android Gmail client first got the feature where you would drag the inbox or any list view down as if you were trying to scroll past the top of the page, and it would put a little colorful horizontal animation bar at the top of the screen while it checked for new messages, and then the messages would show up there?
This was brilliant. After all, when a list of messages is sorted with the newest on top, if you want to see an even newer message you'll naturally try to look at what's above the topmost message. There's no real difference between scrolling somewhere in the midst of the list and scrolling when you're already at the top: if you drag the list down, you want to see something newer than what is currently displayed.
Then Material Design came along and turned that unobtrusive animated bar at the top into a circle thing that follows you and spins as you drag down and then spins back when you let go. Unlike the animation bar which was displayed exactly where any new messages would appear, the circle jumps up and down saying "Look at me! Look at me!" In fact, the spinning circle obstructs your view of the messages in the list: "Don't look at those messages! I, the spinning circle, am much more important!" A far cry from the previous unobtrusive animated bar.
But even though the visual appearance became annoying, at least the gesture still did the right thing.
Part of what made this gesture work is the fact that it's non-destructive: Checking for new messages has no effect on the messages already in the list on your screen.
But then things went very wrong.
The Chrome team for Android saw this and said, "Wow! Dragging down is the new way to refresh. And it has such a cool animation. We'll make that gesture refresh in Chrome too!"
So try to scroll to the top of a page and you'll get the spinning circle unless you stop just in time. If you're a very fast thinker, you may see the circle and realize you can cancel that pending reload by dragging back up a bit. (Don't let go!)
This is pure stupidity. Reloading a web page is a destructive operation. You may end up with a whole new version of a dynamically generated page. It may blank out the entire page if it can't connect.
This doesn't in any way resemble the nondestructive act of checking for new messages at the top of a Gmail list. It's something you're very likely to do by mistake - I've done it hundreds of times since this change rolled out.
Refreshing a web page should be something you explicitly request, not something that happens to you when you were just trying to scroll to the top of the page and accidentally dragged a little too far.
This chasing of fads is why I am fed up with Design.
- The Electrolux Model 30 vacuum, 1937, by Lurelle Guild.[1] This is the iconic vacuum cleaner of the 1930s-1950s. The streamlining dates it. It was a good vacuum cleaner; many survive and parts and bags are available. The computer equivalent is Pac-Man in console form.
- The Honeywell Round thermostat, 1953, by Henry Dreyfuss.[2] Still for sale, and the world's largest selling thermostat. The Nest is a clear derivative of the classic Round.
- The Olivetti Lettera typewriter, 1963, by Marcello Nizzoli. This is a classic in portable typewriters. Olivetti in the 1960s produced some beautiful typewriters, calculators, and computers. They didn't keep up on the electronics side, but their machines looked great. The computer equivalent is the original Macintosh.
Now, all of those were good, working products. There are other design icons that didn't.
- The S1 locomotive, 1938, by Raymond Loewy.[4] This was a case mod for a steam locomotive, apparently based on spaceship designs from Buck Rogers comics. The link shows locomotives with and without the decorative sheet metal. As an add-on, it was a huge maintenance headache, making access to the working parts harder. It ushered in a whole era of "streamlined" steam locomotives, many of which lost their non-functional sheet metal during WWII. The software equivalent might be console video game user interfaces with lots of pretty but marginally functional shiny things.
Loewy did better with the GG-1 electric locomotive. His main contribution was to insist on welded seams rather than rivets, providing a smooth exterior. This worked better on an electric locomotive, where all the important parts are inside, not outside. The software equivalent might be the Windows Aero theme. As it turned out, though, the future of locomotive design was to ignore aesthetics entirely.
- The GP7 locomotive, 1952, by Richard Dilworth and John Markestein.[5] This is a classic for a completely different reason. It's an ugly locomotive. It was designed to be ugly. Dilworth: "I wanted to make a locomotive so ugly in appearance that no railroad would want it on its main line or anywhere near their headquarters. But they would want it out as far as possible in the back country, where it could really do useful work." The GP7 is a long narrow box with walkways on both sides and a bigger box for the cab. Everything important is easily accessible from doors all along those walkways. No need for ladders, no need for lifts, easy access for maintenance. The GP7 looked like no locomotive before it. Every Diesel freight locomotive since looks a lot like a GP7. Like Craigslist, it's brutally functional and works.
[1] http://www.theelectroluxman.com/ [2] http://yourhome.honeywell.com/home/Products/Thermostats/Manu... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti_Lettera_32 [4] http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2013/nov/05/... [5] http://www.american-rails.com/gp7.html