No, designers aren't crazy. You just don't understand a very fundamental concept of design. It even applies to engineering. It's okay—many people have the same frustrations as you do.
But those who care about the details achieve truly high quality results overall. It extends to all areas of the design, not just to the parts you can't see.
In the movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," there's a scene in a dark room where Roger Rabbit (an animated character) flies across the room, knocks a hanging lamp around, and the lighting becomes so dynamic that all the shadows move around including the animated character's shadow. Here's the scene in question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EUPwsD64GI
This was such a small detail that it would have been forgivable if the animators had left it out entirely: if they had not moved the lamp, kept the shadow steady, no one would have really noticed the difference. It would have been 100 times easier to animate and the effect wouldn't really have been that different.
But they did it anyway. The term was later coined, and "bump the lamp" is used throughout Disney (and probably other organizations) to mean something akin to "go the extra mile"—but I see it as having a special significance to design.
You're right, most people won't notice. By that logic, you could cut corners a lot of other places too. You could be lax about button colors matching exactly, or per-pixel sharpness on the map and buttons. No one would probably notice.
But if you go for every detail like it was the most important detail, you have the possibility of reaching a level of design quality that is superlative, and some people will notice. Others will not notice directly, but will see that the piece exudes style and quality subconsciously, due to the attention to small details. If you carry this into other areas of your work—programming, customer service, market strategy, marketing, and more—then you have a chance to create something of true quality.
If you don't pay attention to detail at that level, well, you might have the chance to actually get something done. Yes, it's a balance, like everything else. But you have to know that it won't be quite as good, and understand that yes, you are sacrificing something, even if you can't see it.
In my experience, the assumption that "most people won't notice" is usually incorrect.
The fact of the matter is that people usually do notice, if only subconsciously. If you show someone a clip from a Disney movie and a clip from a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, they will be able to tell that the animation quality is much crappier in the latter. They won't be able to tell you why, but on a visceral level they will be able to feel the difference. [1]
This visceral feeling of "quality" is what gives Apple's brand such cachet. Sure, their skeumorphism can be tacky, but it's never slapdash. Their apps always run at the highest framerates, and their touch interactions and animations have always been tweaked to a level that their competitors can't match.
Now, if you asked someone what the difference was between Mobile Safari on an iPad Mini and Chrome on a Nexus 7, no one would say "the scrolling is much smoother on the iPad, and the variance in framerate is much lower as well, which contributes to a feeling of responsiveness and playfulness", but those features still contribute dramatically to the "feeling" you get when using one of the two devices.
Now, sometimes it really doesn't matter. The example in the OP seems particularly silly. However, don't underestimate the value of "bumping the lamp" when it comes to design or interaction development. People will notice.
[1] The answer to the "why" has many parts, but mostly involves the fact that Disney animation runs at 24fps while HB cartoons ran at 12fps or even 6fps. Disney animation involves characters that are carefully articulated and that move realistically and with a sense of weight behind them. Also, the general quality of animation and camera work was just better -- look, there are a lot of reasons. They all add up to the difference between Scooby Doo and The Little Mermaid.
But for all its lazy repeated backgrounds and bongo-drum running Scooby Doo has lasting cultural relevance and The Little Mermaid is all but forgotten, despite being decades newer?
It sounds like they optimized for the wrong thing.
If we're going to be pedantic here, lets at least attribute the continued success of Disney's vintage films to their appropriate source: Disney's relentless marketing.
I'd argue that Disney's animated works as a whole is much more culturally relevant than Hanna-Barbera's portfolio. But I do agree that quality of animation is not the deciding factor in that determination.
Forgive me, the argument that people notice but only subconsciously strides dangerously close to arguments for things like God, at least insofar as being a hypothesis which in principle cannot be tested.
You can take your Hannah Barbara example as proof that some intangible things have an aesthetic impact, but you still can say when you see the two cartoons that one seems to be of better quality -- I hardly thing that is 'subconscious'. I think this article is intended to focus on the things designers do that are stylish yet unremarkable or wholly unnoticed, which any sensible designer must agree is something of a problem for web designers.
Hana Barbara has an iconic style. It's kind of offensive to use that as an example of "crappy" animation. That's like saying Jackson Pollock's "crappy," slapdash paintings could never compare to the intricate detail of the Mona Lisa.
HB does have a very iconic style, but that style was deliberately chosen to make it easier to get away with low-quality animation techniques [1][2]. The HB shop needed to run on a shoe-string budget, and they had to cut corners wherever they could.
Now, it works because of the HB cartoons' light-hearted style and premises, but would seem tacky and ridiculous for a film or episode attempting something grander (i.e. a feature film like The Little Mermaid or Toy Story).
[1] For example, many HB characters don't have necks, or have extremely thick necklaces or collars where a neck would normally be. This allows you to swap out head and face animations with much greater freedom, and makes it harder to detect camera errors when the head and the body don't quite line up correctly. Is that bad? Not necessarily, but if you rely on too many of these tricks you end up painting yourself into a corner.
[2] Also, some HB characters don't even walk correctly. Their torsos and upper bodies stay perfectly motionless while their legs flail about beneath them. It looks cute and storybook-like in certain applications, but completely ridiculous in most others.
I see where you're coming from, but to me all you're writing is an excuse for unlimited perfectionism. Perfectionism rocks of you're among the lucky few who're in a situation where you can get away with it. In most circumstances, however, there's a product to ship, with the end of the money in sight.
I mean, in terms of the 80/20 rule (the last 20% of quality costs 80% of the time), we're not talking about turning an 80% thing (i.e. typical in-house enterprise software) into a 90% thing here. Hell, even going for 95% is something I believe we should all go for, and fight our colleagues, bosses and project managers, and customers for. But the OP's example is more like turning 99.5% into 99.8%.
Probably very true, hence my final sentence on balance (admittedly a feeble nod to rationality, but still).
Personally, I believe that much of the value created lies in the final 20% that takes 80% of the time. If what you say is true, near anyone can create something that's 80% of the way there. It's your job to get as close to 100% as you can realistically, while balancing time and money and value. It's not an argument for unlimited perfectionism; it's an argument for quality. The higher you can get, the better you will produce, and the more you will succeed. And don't just limit this to product quality; extend it to everything you do (including customer service, including planning and resource management, including hiring and culture) and you'll create a company that has a chance of being better than the others.
Perfect? No. But if you're not striving for creating something of quality (in other words, of value) then what are you doing, exactly?
Edit: There's a caveat here, I think. It may not be your job to worry about every design detail down to the pixel. It doesn't have to be. You can find someone who can help you produce what you need at the level of quality you desire (like the designer the OP is talking about, presumably) and you can worry about all the little details of running your company. Details that I'm guessing a designer might not understand or care about, but you do.
Why do you believe the value created lies in the final 20%? Very few (though some exceptions are notable) derive their earnings from the value at the 'long tail'
I feel the same way. When you have a designer who strives for perfection, they seem to think of the edge cases. And when they push you for pixel perfection, it only makes you that much better. Makes me remember how it is not to be "the best" or the one who cares the most in the office
Quantifying gains is beside the point. I don't think anyone became a great designer or a great programmer by only ever striving for "good enough". Yes, at the end of the day you are worthless if you don't ship, but you are half-worthless if everything you do is a hack.
Maybe for this case in isolation going the extra mile to this level of perfection is not justifiable, but if the designer is doing good work and meeting deadlines then you should keep your bean-counting micro-managers far far away. To attempt to quantify everything (even in programming) is to take the human element out of creation, and that runs a severe risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Keep in mind that your angle on this is the design equivalent of "who cares about [source control/code reviews/proper architecture], it works right?"
There are coders out there who strive for absolute, unlimited technical perfection. They rarely if ever ship - and ditto for designers in that boat.
In reality most designers, and programmers, walk a balance between the bottom-line functionality of their work and less concrete (and more subjective) qualifiers like code quality or sub-pixel scaling.
There are many analogues between design and code here. Most people here would agree that sloppy coding standards aren't deadly, but encourage sloppiness on a larger scale over time. Ditto, sloppy design is insignificant in the individual case, but have the tendency to accumulate and lower the bar.
The example OP chose was particularly bad, mostly because as an iOS dev I know for a fact that getting 1x assets right doesn't take that much time. The usability improvement over time invested is not atrocious - certainly nobody spent an extra week just to get some pixels to line up just right.
The major problem with scaling 2x assets down to 1x devices is that thin features become muddy and blurry, while code-wise UI elements may become aligned against half-pixels, resulting in filtering that produces blurriness. Both the design and code elements of this are easy fixes for any competent iOS developer/designer duo, and takes no more than an hour or two at the extreme most. You get a pretty clear legibility improvement for not a lot of man hours.
Not to mention the very noticeable blurriness of the buttons in the "unfixed" versions - things that users do notice. So much so that some of them can actually articulate it (as opposed to merely being a subconscious annoyance).
One of the best ways to balance this is deadlines + a perfectionist mentality. Be obsessively perfectionist while working but commit yourself to shipping. That'll ensure that you also get outside feedback, which in turn will help you produce higher quality work in the long run.
Thats the point. Design is all about unlimited perfectionism according to some imagined idea... and its also the reason that most artists and designers are broke. The pursuit has little to do with the rationality of time management and efficiency, rather, design is about pursuing an idea of perfection that cannot be achieved.
You are confusing art with design (formerly known, perhaps more accurately, as commercial art).
If you are creating "unlimited idealistic perfection" you are creating art. If you are selling soap it's design.
While soap may not bring about intense discussions about its design, and one might say that it is less designed than the UI of the app the article talked about, the ideals that art and design revolve around are wholly intertwined. Art and design talk about things that would seem ridiculous and esoteric from an engineering standpoint (thus the primary argument of the article that none of the changes made any difference to the usefulness of the app). These are things that hold little value outside of the face that they communicate the purpose and intent of the app or button better than a different size or proportion. There is a reason that design schools have such a close relationship with the art community, while designers don't always maker art, and a bar of soap may not seem to be art at all, disconnected from its purpose, the design of a simple bar of soap can be put in a gallery and be viewed as art. (see the toilet that started the Dada art movement).
Design is not art in and of itself, but you can't talk about one, without talking about the other.
I'd say that Nokia is in a predicament partly because their software sucked for a long time, not because they "weren't perfectionist" - their hardware has been very good for a long time, better than most Android manufacturers' and not so far behind Apple.
Nokia has thought for a long time that they were a software company. They have been repeating this back in 2005 or 6 (when I was there). I had a colleague who kept saying that this wasn't the case. Me, I don't know. I think it's a different issue. To me, it's about big corp middle and upper management: nobody dares to do big changes. They had a linux based OS back in 2004 or something. But went on with Symbian and NOS, because nobody dared to declare that they should drop Symbian and focus on Linux. So they released a single phone (after 3 series of mini tablets) with their linux based os.
And tried polishing symbian. Which had a number of terrible design decisions at the core (which may or may not have been good ones 15 years ago, when they were introduced into EPOC, the ancestor of Symbian). And those decisions affected everyone who worked with it, both internal Nokia developers and external app developers. It made developing for Symbian a pain. It was natural, that iOS and android (and Windows) passed by.
I read this article and immediately jumped into the comments, praying that there would be a comment like this - thank you. Very well put -- details are what separate an amateur from a master.
To add what little I can to this, the reason that drives me to go to these lengths is the craft. Design, like code, is a craft. A good craftsman just does not leave mistakes in their work purposely. Whenever I do this it slowly drives me crazy until I either go back and fix it, or drop the project entirely (if there are a lot of mistakes and/or things I don't really like), usually citing some reason like 'it's too messy' or 'i lost interest'.
For me, design and programming are not all about a/b testing, 100% time efficiency, etc. A lot of it is about art -- making something you know is great and shipping it. When you know something is wrong with your work as an artist, it will bother you until it's fixed.
I don't understand where people are getting the idea that we are to ignore balance, constraints, and reality in deciding how to complete a project.
Absolutely not the case. We're talking about quality specifically, and why someone might choose to pay attention to finer details versus ignoring them.
Your reasons for ignoring details might be perfectly valid and entirely appropriate. The project may not call for artistry and mastery. All very good points for a different discussion.
Don't think for a moment that those who believe high quality is an important factor are implying that it is absolutely necessary. That is simply a false dilemma.
My answer to the parent comment is more or less exactly this. If you're just trying to ship a mediocre quality product, that's fine. I know there's a place for that and let's face it, sometimes it ends up happening at work because of contraints. But that is never, ever my goal.
I'd venture to say that it takes much more then just details to separate an amateur from a master. Knowledge of theory, an eye for errors big and small, etc. Maybe the details separate the good from the best?
My point was that the ONLY thing that was listed was details being the separating point, and that there is more to it then that. It wasn't meant as a quip just a clarification, if anything a question even, not requiring a snarky answer but maybe a genuine one. But, I forget, I'm on the internet and snarky is everyone's default for whatever reason.
As a coder & semi-pro-designer I reached the conclusion that little bad/ugly things add up (or even multiply!), eventually resulting in something that looks bad/ugly even to average-joe on a greasy sunlit screen. If a badly scaled rounded rectangle is mixed with bad font scaling/rendering and on the next iteration a bad color-scheme decision, the ugliness of the whole is more than the ugliness of the parts added up. It sounds vague and artsy but that's how I find it: "harmless" little ugly things add up to an aesthetic carnage. Yes, it's "premature optimization" if you look at things like a programmer, but the "designer mind" can't really separate "optimization" from "just getting things to work".
> It sounds vague and artsy but that's how I find it: "harmless" little ugly things add up to an aesthetic carnage. Yes, it's "premature optimization" if you look at things like a programmer, but the "designer mind" can't really separate "optimization" from "just getting things to work".
The same sort of technical ugliness and lack of optimization happens in plenty of programs.
In theory, one should never optimise prematurely, and get the application working first. Only at the end profile the speed, find the one single slow loop or algorithm, and optimise that.
But plenty of applications acquire slowness not due to one core slow algorithm, but a lack of concern for even trivial optimisations everywhere. You end up with something like Eclipse where a keypress can take multiple seconds to appear, or a "cancel" button might take minutes to stop whatever task. And there is no place to optimise, because the inefficiencies are spread out by tiny bits everywhere.
A fundamental point IMO that you are missing is that there are a few differences between a work of art and a programs UI.
1. A work of art is created by definition to be beautiful. While a beautiful UI is awesome and definitely something to strive for, it is not the end goal.
2. A UI can be changed after its release. Unlike art, you can release a UI and then later change details that are important.
3. Most companies do not have the manpower or time to actually get to the place where the entire product is pixel-perfect. pg's mantra is: "release early." This means that not everything is going to be perfect and you have to decide what corners can be cut and which cannot. (You cannot simply state, I am going to cut NO corners).
4. A UI is likely to change. When you first release a UI you dont really know how it is going to be used. Therefore, as the OP suggests the improvement from 95%-98% really does seem like a pre-optimization.
That said, the UI should make the experience easier in that it aids the function. I would take it a little beyond that where you want something attractive to look at, but it doesnt necessarily need to be in the v1. As the UI matures over time beauty in design becomes a more important goal.
"A work of art is created by definition to be beautiful."
Why is the always treated as truth whenever non-artists discuss art? This is a backwards, 19th century era concept. Art broke out of this generalization over a hundred years ago.
Awesome comment. And thanks for the info on the Roger Rabbit bit, that's fancinating. I agree with you that pixel-perfection seems like a waste of time to a non-designer ("who the heck is going to notice?!?!" is the common refrain), but I think of it like this: no, people probably won't notice one, maybe two deviations from an ideal asthetic or consistancy. But those add up fast, and pretty soon you have an interface that's a mishmash of font sizes, colors, textures/no textures, etc., and people do notice. They notice because a competitor has gone the extra mile and paid attention to detail, and now they're crushing it and you're looking like a second-rate, half-baked wannabe. Design quality is every bit a competitive advantage in not only consumer software, but even enterprise software now.
When I inspect a cathedral, that is perfectly considered at every level of detail, I know more powerfully than at any other time that life is worth living.
But those who care about the details achieve truly high quality results overall. It extends to all areas of the design, not just to the parts you can't see.
In the movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," there's a scene in a dark room where Roger Rabbit (an animated character) flies across the room, knocks a hanging lamp around, and the lighting becomes so dynamic that all the shadows move around including the animated character's shadow. Here's the scene in question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EUPwsD64GI
This was such a small detail that it would have been forgivable if the animators had left it out entirely: if they had not moved the lamp, kept the shadow steady, no one would have really noticed the difference. It would have been 100 times easier to animate and the effect wouldn't really have been that different.
But they did it anyway. The term was later coined, and "bump the lamp" is used throughout Disney (and probably other organizations) to mean something akin to "go the extra mile"—but I see it as having a special significance to design.
You're right, most people won't notice. By that logic, you could cut corners a lot of other places too. You could be lax about button colors matching exactly, or per-pixel sharpness on the map and buttons. No one would probably notice.
But if you go for every detail like it was the most important detail, you have the possibility of reaching a level of design quality that is superlative, and some people will notice. Others will not notice directly, but will see that the piece exudes style and quality subconsciously, due to the attention to small details. If you carry this into other areas of your work—programming, customer service, market strategy, marketing, and more—then you have a chance to create something of true quality.
If you don't pay attention to detail at that level, well, you might have the chance to actually get something done. Yes, it's a balance, like everything else. But you have to know that it won't be quite as good, and understand that yes, you are sacrificing something, even if you can't see it.