
Design is losing its seat at the table - hakkasan
http://mokriya.quora.com/Designer-Duds-Losing-Our-Seat-at-the-Table?share=1
======
killerdhmo
Design is not how something looks. It's not pastel colors, and slick
animations and cutesy UI. Design is intrinsically tied to function. Design is
how you think about and solve a problem.

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...](http://www.archdaily.com/198583/dieter-rams-10-principles-
of-%E2%80%9Cgood-design%E2%80%9D/)

~~~
ryanSrich
> Design is not how something looks

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.

~~~
carrotleads
>> You also can't have a functioning site that looks like shit and still have
a great product.

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...](http://darrennix.com/our-homegrown-ab-
testing-framework-at-42floors)

~~~
ryanSrich
Success != a great product.

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.

~~~
carrotleads
Why is craigslist still popular when there are better looking sites around?

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.

~~~
ryanSrich
Because all of those sites are established and have unparalleled content.
There are no competitors to those websites.

~~~
carrotleads
established sites with good content go out of business day in and day out...
that happens when they don't have a good functional design and when better
options come along.

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.

------
RickS
When your product is a solution without a real problem (which all the listed
companies are, IMO), no amount of "design" will get you there. There isn't
enough problem surface area to eliminate, which is where the value gets
created.

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.

------
megablast
Programming has been an important part of the world over the last 40 years,
creating value in almost all aspects of life. But is programming losing a seat
the table?

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.

~~~
Nemcue
Surely the programs a good programmer creates should be immediate successes?
These are thought leader programmers!

------
vinceguidry
Design never had a seat at the table to begin with. The very idea of having
design goals is largely anathema to most companies, they could never imagine
actually letting a product dictate organizational proceedings.

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.

~~~
bshoemaker
"It has to be the only voice"... what?

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

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Program managers* make poor designers, at least in my large company. They
often have no training in UX, and all their UX experience is mixed with other
stuff that tends to cloud it. Having real UXDs doing the product design is
much much better than "design by PM" (its like, do you want your PM to write
code for the product also? of course not!)

* 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).

~~~
olegious
If you think the only difference between project and product managers is "the
latter being more focused on marketing," you must work with some terrible
product managers...

~~~
seanmcdirmid
At my company this is true [1]. I personally don't get to work with product
managers (who work in biz dev mostly and do not work with
developers/researchers/etc...), only program managers.

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](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](https://www.linkedin.com/grp/post/42629-100151081)

[1] [http://www.quora.com/What-does-a-Microsoft-Product-
Manager-d...](http://www.quora.com/What-does-a-Microsoft-Product-Manager-do)

------
pbreit
I'm increasingly of the impression that the most important aspect of product
conception is figuring out how it is going to obtain users. Without a
distribution strategy you don't really have a product.

~~~
JacobJans
Oddly, you can have absolutely no product at all, and still acheive wide
'distribution.' Think about that for a minute!

------
tosh
""" Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like.
That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels
like. Design is how it works. """

— Steve Jobs

~~~
cbd1984
Ironic, coming from a company with such a terrible approach to design.

"You're holding it wrong."

~~~
nextos
Or aluminium plus glass, such a brittle combination just for the sake of
aesthetics.

~~~
raphael_l
The quote from Jobs gets thrown around pretty heavily, but I also think it is
interpreted very narrow sometimes. For me, "(...) how it works" isn't just
about functionality, but about "how it works on the user". Yeah, aluminium
plus glass may be a brittle combination, but if people like it, it just works.
And this isn't on the same level as the "how it looks", because that can be
quite different. Facebook Paper for example. It looks good, it "works" well
(in functionality and purpose of the app), but it just doesn't work well on
the user, because the concept is all wrong.

~~~
pluma
It only "works" in the sense that users buy it because it's shiny.

Unless you're saying the only point of the iPhone is that people buy it, that
isn't sufficient.

~~~
raphael_l
It works for Apple and how they want it to work. That's why it is designed
well.

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.

------
NTDF9
IMHO, what this article boils down to is that "Design" cannot be your
product's key differentiator.

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.

------
joemaller1
Regarding Carousel: it was only in the past few weeks that they finally got
around to letting users exempt content.

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.

------
sbov
Success is complicated.

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.

------
rohunati
The service Magic is an instance of excellent design imo. It's scrappy,
clever, simple, and most importantly, there is a very clear reason to use. I
can't say the same about the many of the products he listed.

------
mbesto
Interesting note is how pedantic the author is about the marketing speak of
the companies he's analyzing. I find this situation all too common in early
stage products -- the copy associated with the product should be very concrete
and not abstract. In later stages when your users do the "concrete talking"
for you, then you can start using abstract.

------
ilaksh
Popularity or usage isn't the same as merit. Redesigns of apps may be
absolutely amazing and objectively better but that doesn't mean they will see
a lot of adoption. People don't automatically adopt things that are better.
People flock to apps or interfaces like birds. That behavior doesn't tell you
which things are better.

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.

------
fungi
In all my time building websites the over emphasis on design has had a
negative impact on the majority of projects i have encountered.

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.

------
peterarmstrong
I don't think design is losing its seat at the table: most new apps are
nothing _but_ design. But it would be nice if pretentiousness lost its seat at
the table.

------
lotsofmangos
" _If you gathered some of the world’s best designers and gave them
significant organizational support and all the resources they need, is an app
which at best matches the functionality of bundled OS features from a few
years ago what you’d expect?_ "

If I read an article by a professional writer, I expect sentences I can parse.

------
anigbrowl
The original title 'Designer Duds: Losing Our Seat at the Table' was more
insightful and less clickbaity.

~~~
no_flags
To me the original title is confusing. I wouldn't have known what was meant by
"Designer Duds." Duds can be used to mean clothes, so it almost sounds like an
article about designer clothing... haha.

------
chvid
"Design is how it works". Maybe. But engineering and software development is
also about "how it works".

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.

~~~
qznc
> "Design is how it works". Maybe. But engineering and software development is
> also about "how it works".

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".

------
Stratoscope
Design _should_ lose its seat at the table if it keeps chasing fads without
thinking.

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.

~~~
conradfr
You got the refresh / circle only if you scroll when you're already at the top
of the page though.

------
danenania
I don't know. Aren't there are also plenty of recent successes that owe a lot
of their success to good design? This feels like an attempt to slap on a grand
narrative when it's really nothing more than "most new products fail". More
relevant would be a study of the exceptional cases--successes--to see if
there's a correlation with an improving standard of design.

------
nubizus
Design never loses. Write it down. Remember it. Simple truth is that in
digital age, some computer operators with a little bit more of a visual
culture are perceived as a designers. Nope. I am learning visual artistry from
6 years old. First started at school, then from old masters by serving them
like a dog, then when digital era started i learned more about the medium,
then learned about the business by risking it all, than learned about the
psychology of perception, culture impact, age differentiation, then learned to
think from user perspective, to measure reaction and get critical design data
from it.... Now when i am almost 40 years old i can say that i can make a good
design. Not only because of a talent, intuition or experience. Mostly because
my life is a direct result of my design. And when i am designing i am a
servant of people's needs. And i always learn. Write it down. Design always
wins. Vanity always loses.

------
LiweiZ
Design is always among one of dimensions. Like others, commoditization and its
limit in certain context could make it looks powerless. Even if so, when
context changes, things will be on the other side of cycle again.

------
killwhitey
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7677031](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7677031)

------
gfodor
I don't think it's fair to judge Paper too harshly based upon download metrics
-- if I had to guess, Paper was an experiment designed to produce two things:
a working prototype of a modernized Facebook UX as "something to point at" for
further thinking, and tooling/processes that would allow the wider company to
iterate towards that vision in their main app. The idea that Paper was
intended to be a popular app, potentially outstripping the downloads, etc of
the primary branded Facebook app seems far-fetched.

------
Animats
User interaction and industrial design are two different things. Here are some
of the icons of industrial 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/](http://www.theelectroluxman.com/) [2]
[http://yourhome.honeywell.com/home/Products/Thermostats/Manu...](http://yourhome.honeywell.com/home/Products/Thermostats/Manual-
Non-Programmable/T87+Round.htm) [3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti_Lettera_32](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti_Lettera_32)
[4]
[http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2013/nov/05/...](http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2013/nov/05/raymond-
loewy-timeless-designs-in-pictures) [5] [http://www.american-
rails.com/gp7.html](http://www.american-rails.com/gp7.html)

