
We're Better At Design, And That's Not Good - 10char
http://clayallsopp.com/posts/better-at-design
======
davidkatz
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.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
>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).

~~~
davidkatz
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.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
>design is one aspect of quality, and spending effort on it is spending effort
on quality.

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.

~~~
davidkatz
I understand. Generally, we should aim to build tools that address the
greatest gaps in quality. You might say that design is currently not the most
important gap to address, and that may be, although it hasn't been my
experience. Although design has been getting a lot of attention in recent
years, the tools for design are still very much in their infancy.

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.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
I think it turns on the distinction a lot of people have been pointing out
between design as the superficial appearance of the app in the first fifteen
minutes of use, and design as something that goes deep into the stack and
brings everything together into something beautiful.

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.

~~~
davidkatz
Perhaps you're right, but I haven't come across much superficially pretty
junk. Any high profile examples come to mind?

~~~
AnthonyMouse
Most of Zynga's products come to mind. Mindless crap designed to be attractive
and psychologically addictive without teaching the user anything or providing
any intellectual stimulation.

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.

~~~
davidkatz
I'm still not sure there's a real pattern here, beyond the always present
'make a quick buck' style of business, which has probably been around since
business was discovered. Good discussion though. Thanks. You on twitter?

------
duopixel
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>

~~~
dkarl
_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.

~~~
duopixel
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>

~~~
dkarl
In this context, I can't help hating the story of the Rietveld chair. As I
understand it, Rietveld intended to design furniture that would be widely
popular and enjoyed, and the simple design of his chair was influenced by his
anticipation of mass production. If you look at the chair and see a reflection
of his delusion about or indifference to the experience of the masses of
ordinary people he hoped would sit in it, it doesn't look so good. Yet it
became famous because it had value when viewed as art. The story of a designer
who created an uncomfortable chair that none of his intended users wanted, yet
it (and he) ended up being famous design icons... that isn't the story I want
designers to think about as they work on a product I will end up using ;-)

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

~~~
majormajor
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?

------
majormajor
> 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
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.

------
michaelfeathers
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.

------
kirillzubovsky
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.

------
prsutherland
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.

~~~
keithpeter
" _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>

------
levymetal
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.

------
muratmutlu
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

------
georgemcbay
"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
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.

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

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

~~~
AnthonyMouse
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.

------
runawaybottle
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.

------
Zephyrial
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.

------
pirateking
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?

------
freejack
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.

------
kfinley
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"

~~~
AnthonyMouse
>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.

~~~
kfinley
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.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
I read it as the same thing, if you take design to mean superficial design
rather than design as a stand in for overall quality or long-term useability.
(Because it's pretty clearly not even true otherwise, since obviously not all
current products have good "design" in the second sense after deeper
inspection.)

------
lucian303
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.

