We're Better At Design, And That's Not Good

http://clayallsopp.com/posts/better-at-design

by 10char • 14 years ago

49 43 14 years ago

clayallsopp.com

majormajor2• 14 years ago

> I know someone might shout, "No! The important part isn't

> 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.

pretoriusB• 14 years ago

Exactly. The hidden premise of the article is that in the past it was (mostly or solely) good products that had good looks, something which just is not true.

sgaither• 14 years ago

The upside is that a poor product with an entrenched position does not automatically win just because its backers could afford polished design

mgkimsal• 14 years ago

The notion that something is 'entrenched' would indicate it 'won' something already, no?

AnthonyMouse7• 14 years ago

The battle is not the war. You can be entrenched because you started 20+ years ago when nothing better was available and haven't improved since, but when new competition springs up to replace your anachronistic dung, you've got a whole new fight for the future on your hands.

endtwist• 14 years ago

We're better at making things look good. That is not design.

majormajor2• 14 years ago

Taking another step from there: are we getting better at making things look good, or are libraries, display technology, and computing power reducing previously-imposed artificial difficulties to making things look good?

jdlegg• 14 years ago

"It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” – Steve Jobs

MisterBastahrd• 14 years ago

There are people who are fantastically talented at organization and software development who are mediocre at design. This article is written by a guy who somehow can't see past the lipstick on the pig.

levymetal• 14 years ago

I understand what he's trying to get at, but it's a moot point. Also the article painfully contradicts itself..

> 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.

duopixel2• 14 years ago

This reminds me of a an interview with Charles Eames. Eames was an industrial designer who is well known for his furniture. Even if you don't know his name his work will be familiar.

  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?

The point is—and perhaps I'm astronauting a bit—beauty is functional in it's own right. There has been some exploration into the relation between aesthetics and usability[1] that supports the intuitive notion that something visually attractive will be perceived as easier to use.

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.

[1] http://www.sigchi.org/chi97/proceedings/paper/nt.htm

dkarl2• 14 years ago

The point is—and perhaps I'm astronauting a bit—beauty is functional in it's own right.

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.

duopixel2• 14 years ago

Yes, many uncomfortable objects are designed as statements of form (the Reitveild Chair or the Juicy Salif).But I consider these examples of art, not design. The main use of a chair is sitting down, and thus a well designed chair will always be comfortable. This, of course, doesn't preclude it from being beautiful, as in Eames own work: http://www.visualphotos.com/photo/2x3218172/.jpg

prsutherland• 14 years ago

It used to be the opposite. You could tell which was the "better" product by choosing the one with the worst appearance. The train of thought went something like, assuming the companies paid the similar amount to develop the products and the design and engineering cost a significant amount of money, then the company that didn't put the money in design put it in engineering. So uglier products were better engineered, prettier products were crap. Lenovo/IBM laptops are one of my favorite surviving examples of this phenomenon.

davidism• 14 years ago

The split second decision for me is, "Does it look really nice or does it look really plain/bad." If it's somewhere in between then it takes a bit longer to evaluate.

keithpeter• 14 years ago

"Lenovo/IBM laptops are one of my favorite surviving examples of this phenomenon."

That is a bit harsh!

"Sapper proposed a design inspired by the Shōkadō bentō, a traditional black-lacquered Japanese lunch box."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad#Industrial_design

kirillzubovsky• 14 years ago

Great visual design will get your attention, entice you to give something a try, but it sure won't make you use it forever. The product and the user experience still has to be designed well enough to make you want to use something. If the whole package works well, then who is to say you are not using the best product?

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.

Zephyrial• 14 years ago

Funny, this exact same thing happened to music. You used to be able to listen to a band's demo CD and immediately tell if they were any good by listening to the drummer, because a good drummer wouldn't play with a crappy group. Now with drum loops and better recording technology, even a crummy group could (on the surface) make a good-sounding demo. The underlying talent may or may not be good, but as the article says, it just takes more time to figure that out.

kfinley2• 14 years ago

As a visual person I'm fine with this. I would gladly trade a little bit of insight for a better living environment. Think if someone where to say "There are too many beautiful women in this world, we can't accurately judge their personalities"

AnthonyMouse7• 14 years ago

>Think if someone where to say "There are too many beautiful women in this world, we can't accurately judge their personalities"

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.

kfinley2• 14 years ago

I, could, agree with that. I must have misinterpreted the article; I read it as good design has become the new baseline, so it can no longer be used as an indicator of quality.

davidkatz6• 14 years ago

The whole argument here seems broken. The OPs main point seems to be:

"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.

AnthonyMouse7• 14 years ago

>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.

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).

davidkatz6• 14 years ago

The article clearly laments the fact that you can't use design anymore as a quick quality shortcut, and that's the point I attacked.

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.

Gormo• 14 years ago

> 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.

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.

joe_the_user• 14 years ago

The problem is that good design actually increases the desirability of a lousy product proportionately more.

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.

davidkatz6• 14 years ago

I understand the point, but I'm not convinced. Looks factor into quality, and are not merely an indicator of it. If I can have a market trend which increases quality across the board, I fail to see that that can be a bad thing because it took away a shortcut for assessing quality. It just means we need new shortcuts.

If you're interested in the durability of a can opener, the weight of the material sounds like a good candidate.

georgemcbay• 14 years ago

"We could be looking at a dangerous, privacy-invasive service and still have some trust because it's wrapped in lickable buttons and subtle gradients. "

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.

paulgb• 14 years ago

It's the same reason old banks look so nice (and expensive): someone who has obviously invested in appearance is sending signals that they're sticking around for a while, which implies they won't take your money and run. I think it was Tim Hartford who wrote about this in a book, but I can't find the reference now.

runawaybottle• 14 years ago

I think the OP is underestimating the sheer speed at which our expectations for design/functionality have been going up. A good looking static page is really a problem of the past at this point. We're moving much faster into the realm of high standards for more innovative UI/data presentation.

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.

michaelfeathers• 14 years ago

It's funny. I think that as a software developer I was disabused of the notion that visual appeal is an indicator of quality a long time ago. Software looks entirely different on the inside. A nice visual facade can front frightening internals and vice versa.

lucian303• 14 years ago

The advent of Twitter Bootstrap is 19 years overdue. To have a common framework for UI and UX finally that's widely adopted, I should hope people would learn their lessons now and build a more standard interface for their sites as these lessons were already learned on the desktop the hard way.

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.

muratmutlu• 14 years ago

I'm a designer and I don't really understand this article. Should design be bad so we can judge the crap from the good?

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

freejack• 14 years ago

I think the original article sort of falls short of making its point. No one ever designed their way to global domination. The market buys the entire package, not just the gloss. Pretty stuff that doesn't work well doesn't meet with success, its that simple. Design is just one piece of the puzzle.

pirateking• 14 years ago

This is retarded. We aren't better at "design". We are for the most part just as ignorant of its true nature. What we are good at as humans is mimicry of what we can sense, and thats what passes as good design these days.

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?

We're Better At Design, And That's Not Good

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