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Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977

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Design and Usability: Part 1

Not sur­pris­ingly, as a designer I value aes­thet­ics highly. How­ever at a cer­tain
point aes­thet­ics clash with func­tion­al­ity – or more specif­i­cally usabil­ity.
Some­times I wish I were a painter. No con­straints, no font size issues, no low
con­trast color com­bi­na­tion prob­lems, no acces­si­bil­ity or usabil­ity con­cerns
and no angry users to face. You either like my work or not, no strings attached.
But I’m not a painter, I design websites.

The dif­fer­ence between a paint­ing and a web­site will be obvi­ous to most. A
paint­ing does not require inter­ac­tion, at least not on a func­tional level. I
can not use a paint­ing. I can nev­er­the­less enjoy or dis­like
a paint­ing (the same anal­ogy is to some extend applic­a­ble
to motion pic­tures). A web­site, on the con­trary, has a func­tion that car­ries
beyond its visual attrac­tive­ness. Web­sites gen­er­ally require (func­tional) inter­ac­tion
of some form. The most feared and tena­cious embod­i­ment of inter­ac­tion being
the homo inter­neti­cus.

You know what? Humans are nasty mam­mals. Humans devel­oped to per­fec­tion their
apti­tude to bitch, whine, moan, com­plain, nit­pick, nag, crit­i­cize, grum­ble,
protest and dis­ap­prove. Iron­i­cally though, with­out users (thus inter­ac­tion) my job
is rather use­less. Design­ing web­sites is (unfor­tu­nately?) not exclu­sively about
visu­ally pleas­ing users, it is also about lim­it­ing inter­fer­ence to effec­tively
deliver con­tent and enable effi­cient inter­ac­tion. The lat­ter is of course a
sim­pli­fied state­ment; the process is more com­plex and con­sti­tuted of more fac­tors
and elements.

In “Design and Usabil­ity: Part 2” I will dig a
lit­tle deeper and try to dis­cern some of the fac­tors and ele­ments related to
usabil­ity and func­tion­al­ity. Last but not least, prov­i­den­tially, humans can
also adore, cher­ish, care, appre­ci­ate, value, under­stand, real­ize and love.
It is with these thoughts that I leave you and wish you a Merry Christ­mas and
a Happy New Year. See you in 2004!

This item was posted by dhilhorst on Wednesday, December 24th, 2003.

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7 comments on “Design and Usability: Part 1”

  1. Posted by Keith on Wednesday, December 24th, 2003.

    Happy Hol­i­days to you as well.

    Some­thing I’m con­stantly hav­ing to explain to peo­ple is that Web design, largely because of the fac­tors you men­tion, is def­i­nitely not the same as graphic design.

    They’re related on some lev­els, but there are very large differences.

  2. Posted by Scrivs on Saturday, December 27th, 2003.

    The won­der­ful thing about design and aes­thet­ics is that it has been sci­en­tif­i­cally proven that prod­ucts with bet­ter look­ing designs are per­ceived to be eas­ier to use.

    A great read on this is Don Norman’s new book, Emo­tional Design. The irony of it all though is every­thing he talks about clashes with his busi­ness part­ner Nielsen.

  3. Posted by Andrei Herasimchuk on Sunday, January 4th, 2004.

    I dis­agree that one’s desire for aes­thetic qual­ity nec­ces­sar­ily inter­feres with usabil­ity or func­tion­al­ity. Paul Rand has a great dis­cus­sion of aes­thet­ics in his last book, From Las­caux to Brook­lyn, where he com­ments on the Quaker’s and their work with fur­ni­ture, along with many other examples.

    The aes­thetic qual­ity of some­thing is intrin­si­cally locked with how func­tional and usable it is. When some­thing lacks usabil­ity but is pretty to look at it, what is miss­ing is really aes­thetic qual­ity. It’s just too many peo­ple don’t relate the con­cept of aes­thetic to any­thing past the sur­face level.

    Take Google as an exam­ple. It’s is very func­tional, but about as poor a ren­der­ing of infor­ma­tion design as there ever was. IMO, it’s has a very poor, even ama­teur­ish, aes­thetic qual­ity to it. Does this need to be the case? No. In fact, if Edward Tufte were given a chance to redesign Google’s Search Results page, I’m sure we would all find that the end result would be more pleas­ing on the eye and more usable in the process.

    By the way, I think your CSS nav­i­ga­tion exam­ple is a case in point. Not only does it look bet­ter than most bor­ing nav­i­ga­tional wid­gets we see on web sites today, I would argue it’s more usable because the visual clues of selec­tion and ani­ma­tion make for a design that works on more levels.

    So, I ask you not don’t back down in you desire for aes­thetic qual­ity! We just need to get the design com­mu­nity push­ing the bound­aries, and bring­ing the level of qual­ity to higher lev­els. We need to stop apol­o­giz­ing for the things we do, and the things we know will improve the expe­ri­ence of the those who live on this planet with us.

    Sorry to ramble…

  4. Posted by Didier Hilhorst on Monday, January 5th, 2004.

    Andrei: first of all you should not apol­o­gize for ram­bling. That was a most excel­lent com­ment. And, hon­estly, I think you expressed some of the opin­ions, feel­ings and ideas I have myself. Instead of elab­o­rat­ing on the mat­ters you dis­cussed in your com­ment here I will ded­i­cate another post to it, which will be a good tran­si­tion to my final post. Because how­ever impor­tant aes­thet­ics are, it is cru­cial to take into account cer­tain fac­tors affect­ing usabil­ity or func­tion­al­ity when design­ing — such as tar­get audi­ence and prod­uct or ser­vice, for exam­ple. But more on that later, in Part 3. So, in Part 2 I will relate some of my own expe­ri­ences to your state­ment that poor usabil­ity or func­tion­al­ity is (or is not) related to poor aes­thet­ics exclusively.

  5. Posted by waylman on Wednesday, January 7th, 2004.

    Here is a chance to prove Andrei’s point (about Google any­way). Cre­ate your own stylesheet for Google, CSS Zend Gar­den style. Cool! Maybe I’ll give this a try when and if I find the time. Still haven’t even started on my Zed gar­den idea. Maybe someday.

  6. Posted by Andrei Herasimchuk on Wednesday, January 14th, 2004.

    I need to cor­rect my com­ment in here, for the record. Rand dis­cusses the Shak­ers, not the Quak­ers, in his book. I always get that mixed up. (And I went to school in Penn­syl­va­nia to boot!)

    As for the Google exer­cise, I’m hop­ing more peo­ple will find the time try it out.

  7. Posted by Web Designer on Wednesday, April 28th, 2004.

    I think func­tion­al­ity is a lit­tle bit more impor­tant but we defitely should con­sider aes­thet­ics as well. I totally agree with Scrivs. It is sci­en­tif­i­cally proven that f.ex. drugs that look attrac­tive have bet­ter effect.

    http://astra-design.com/