alsomike

There's a joke on the old saying: if it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, don't be deceived, it is a duck. Smart people have a tendency to overcomplicate things and be so suspicious of "superficial" indicators. The assumption is that it really can't be so simple, you can't make snap judgments based on how they run interviews, you need to do some sophisticated analysis or something to really know. They end up being deceived by not wanting to be tripped up by naive conclusions and trying to look deeply, so they miss what's staring them in the face.

I'm a designer by day, but I'd be up to do some freelance work -- altojunk @ gmail.

This is naive. Creation is just the new form of consumerism!

Think about how much money changes hands today based on work of millions of creators all trying to be the latest YouTube star. To cope with the meaningless and alienation of modern life, they're buying attention instead of commodities, using what they create as currency. In that sense, it is a barter economy, except the middle man takes his cut by selling ads on top of the content. And, oh yeah, don't forget about all the actual consumption you have to do in order to be a creator: a nice computer, a video camera, some video editing software, fast internet connection, etc. I guess that doesn't count as consumption if you're a "creator".

It's weird how profitable all this "anti-consumption" is! Is this really liberation? It's certainly marketed that way by the people who profit most from it. What if it's really just exploitation marketed as liberation?

A focus group facilitator doesn't try to influence the audience. And focus groups usually don't even empathize with the customer, they simply write down what the customer wants, if they prefer blue or red, not why they prefer it and what that says about their overall goals.

Infants are at a completely different stage of language acquisition than 3-6 year olds, so there's no reason to think that there's a single best "essentially the same" way of speaking regardless of age.

This seems kind of obvious, but OK. How do you know what a customer needs? How do you know whether your idea meets that need? You have to look at the world from their perspective begin to answer those questions.

That's only because you're created a straw-man definition of design. Don't buy the hype: design is about influencing the subjective state of the audience. Sure, beauty is one kind of experience, and maybe it gets a lot of attention, but it's certainly not the only thing designers care about.

I think the main skill that designers bring to the table is empathy. Unlike traditional artists, who can safely ignore what other people think, designers have to be interested in how something feels to their audience. This is important if you're building things for people who aren't like you and don't think like you, and you want to get their attention, get them to think what they're buying is useful and usable and yes, maybe beautiful if that matters, and the people who made it are trustworthy and reliable.

Design is about communication--it's a kind of language. Who could argue that words don't matter, only function matters?

And sometimes bad usability is what sells too. That's why you have TVs that come with remotes with a million buttons on them, it makes the buyer feel like he's got something powerful, and by extension, makes him feel powerful. If your target audience is interested in feeling powerful and achieving a sense of mastery, there's a way to design for that. If you want the audience to feel like they're getting something for cheap (Amazon, Craigslist, Ebay), there's a design for that.

Ugly design is still design though, it works in one context and fails in another. But that doesn't mean you've freed yourself from the tyranny of aesthetics, you're just using the aesthetic that works.

There's a great temptation for programmers to conclude that if they can't do something by themselves, it must not matter, and anyone who claims otherwise is probably a corporate drone or something. Maybe this works in some cases, but that doesn't mean it's not also a mistake.

It's like that joke about the guy who lost his keys in the alley behind a bar one night. His friend finds him on the sidewalk looking under a street light, and asks him why he's not looking in the alley. The guy says "It's too dark in the alley, I can't see a thing!" The moral of the story: when faced with a difficult real-world problem that you don't know how to solve with your current skillset, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to try to change the problem into a different one that you do know how to solve. Maybe you don't need good design, but if you do, you should get a designer, and ignore blog posts about how pretty things are for girls.