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Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977

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Design and Usability: Part 2

Andrei Herasim­chuk left a
very sen­si­ble com­ment on my pre­vi­ous entry, Design
and Usabil­ity: Part 1. He stated that “The aes­thetic qual­ity of some­thing
is intrin­si­cally locked with how func­tional and usable it is”. After think­ing
about this state­ment for a few days I could not think of a sin­gle argu­ment to
refute it. How­ever, after a while, I started to decon­struct his sen­tence and
stum­bled over the spe­cific word aes­thet­ics. Bluntly, look­ing the
word up in a dic­tio­nary yields the fol­low­ing def­i­n­i­tion (among slight variations):

Now, I’ve always learned that:
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, which is a para­phrase of a state­ment
by Plato. To me the beauty or good taste of an object (or sub­ject) is not intrin­si­cally
locked with how func­tional and usable it is.

You wish you owned one!For
exam­ple, an auto­mo­bile is mainly a func­tional object – trans­porta­tion from point
A (ini­tial posi­tion) to point B (final des­ti­na­tion). Nonethe­less most of us
value the aes­thet­ics of a car highly, for some it might even be their main buy­ing
argu­ment. But does the outer shell of a car (thus its beauty or good taste)
define how func­tional or usable it is? I think not. We might expe­ri­ence it as
being more func­tional or usable. But abstract­ing from beauty a car’s func­tion­al­ity
or usabil­ity is defined by how it is designed and not so much by its aes­thetic
value. Aes­thet­ics are subjective.

Return­ing vis­i­tors of Super­flu­ous­Ban­ter might have noticed that Andrei’s blog
Design
by Fire has been added to the Reg­u­lar Vis­its sec­tion in the side­bar. His
blog is an excel­lent des­ti­na­tion to read about top­ics related to inter­face design
and usabil­ity, among oth­ers. Good con­tent, good design, good code. Run and book­mark
that site!

Top­ics which
were ini­tially planned for Part 2 will now move to Part 3. In my next post I will
try to dis­cern some of the fac­tors and ele­ments related to usabil­ity and func­tion­al­ity.
But in the mean time: what do you think about the rela­tion­ship between aes­thet­ics,
design, func­tion­al­ity and usabil­ity? Discuss.

This item was posted by dhilhorst on Wednesday, January 7th, 2004.

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17 comments on “Design and Usability: Part 2”

  1. Posted by Keith on Thursday, January 8th, 2004.

    It’s the old form vs. func­tion argu­ment and you hit the nail right on the head.

    “Aes­thet­ics are sub­jec­tive.” Like I always say, when it comes to Web design (and lots of other design for that mat­ter) there is no such thing as perfect.

    I don’t want to dis­count the value of aes­thet­ics and design in usabil­ity, but

    – “the aes­thetic qual­ity of some­thing is intrin­si­cally locked with how func­tional and usable it is” — is sim­ply not the case.

    To take your auto­mo­bile anal­ogy, if you were to sit me down in front of one of those PT Cruis­ers I’m pretty sure I could “use” it just fine. I could drive to work or what­ever. I’m quite sure it’s a very usable and func­tional car.

    How­ever, I think they’re ugly as home­made sin and I’d never, in a mil­lion years, pur­chase one.

    So based on my opin­ion is the car then use­able? Obvi­ously not — lots of peo­ple love those cars. I don’t know why, but…

    Usable design deci­sions are based on data, not opin­ion. While I do admit the value of aes­thet­ics in mak­ing some­thing usable — a designer would be doing them­selves and, more impor­tantly, their users, a dis­ser­vice if they put the form before the function.

    A user can get by a design they don’t like as long as it’s func­tional, and the fact of the mat­ter is that it’s impos­si­ble to please every­one aesthetically.

    It is pos­si­ble to have a very ugly, yet very usable site. I’m not sug­gest­ing we as design­ers do this, but even the great­est most pop­u­lar designs out there are hated by someone.

    Ok, now I’m rambling.…good topic.

  2. Posted by Andrei Herasimchuk on Thursday, January 8th, 2004.

    I think you have to take the defin­tion one step fur­ther. What is “beautiful?”

    “The qual­ity that gives plea­sure to the mind or senses and is asso­ci­ated with such prop­er­ties as har­mony of form or color, excel­lence of artistry, truth­ful­ness, and originality.”

    That’s pretty broad, and is not spe­cific to the sur­face level look of something.

    As to the pre­vi­ous com­ment, yes it is indeed very pos­si­ble to have a func­tional, usable site that is ugly. Look at Google or Amazon.com. the point I was mak­ing, and one that I believe Paul Rand was also mak­ing to a cer­tain degree, was that aes­thetic is locked into form. It can­not be sep­a­rated from it. The “har­mony of form” or the qual­ity of the form, and in the case of web site or appli­ca­tion design, its use­ful­ness, con­tributes to the over­all aesthetic.

    I stand by my com­ment that aes­thetic is much more than sur­face level look and feel. It is also the expe­ri­ence, the pre­se­n­a­tion, the sat­is­fac­tion in usage, the over­all plea­sure it brings to the mind.

  3. Posted by Keith on Thursday, January 8th, 2004.

    When you put it that way it’s hard to dis­agree with.

    Your very right that “aes­thetic is much more than sur­face level look and feel” but where does that leave us?

    Are you say­ing that Google is beau­ti­ful because it works well? In that case I guess there is no fur­ther argu­ment and this topic is much less inter­est­ing than I’d first thought! ;)

  4. Posted by Dunstan on Thursday, January 8th, 2004.

    I’d agree that sen­tance is far from being correct.

    Aes­thet­ics (as your dic­tio­nary def­i­n­i­tion says) has no rela­tion­ship to func­tion or usabil­ity, unless it is a per­ceived rela­tion­ship (e.g. this is so beau­ti­ful, it _must_ be great), or unless the appre­ci­a­tion is of func­tional characteristics.

    Sit­ting here I can see:

    [1] My flat screen — beau­ti­ful, user-friendly and very functional.

    [2] A pump for my ball-chair — hor­ri­ble, crappy look­ing thing, but amaz­ingly func­tional as it moves air when you push and when you pull.

    [3] My pedome­ter — it looks cool, but it’s com­pletely use­less, and I haven’t a clue how the damn thing works.

    [4] My diary — a plain, cheap (£1) diary which does its job perfectly.

    I think we could all find con­tra­dic­tory exam­ples like that, and if that’s the case, I don’t see how Andrei’s com­ment can be correct.

    (Not to have a dig at him, just to join in the thread.)

  5. Posted by Jeremy Flint on Thursday, January 8th, 2004.

    I tend to agree with Andrei’s com­ment. Even with the point Didier brought up about the car. Yes, peo­ple do put a lot of value into the beauty of a car. But if the most beau­ti­fully designed car (aes­thet­ics) was not usable at all (func­tion­al­ity), would it still be con­sid­ered as a beau­ti­ful car?

    Within the realm of inter­face design/usability/accessiblity, i believe Andrei’s state­ment is accu­rate. If you design the most stun­ning inter­face for a web appli­ca­tion, cre­ate all kinds of fancy but­tons, smooth, intri­cate ani­ma­tions and what not, and the intended audi­ence can­not use it, it is basi­cally a piece of crap.

    I guess it all boils down to the old form vs. func­tion debate, and when you can mix those two with equal parts, you have some­thing beautiful.

  6. Posted by Andrei Herasimchuk on Thursday, January 8th, 2004.

    Keith, re-read my com­ment. I’m say­ing Google is *not* aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing because even though it is use­ful, it’s not well designed at the visual or infor­ma­tion level. Both form and func­tion have to work to make it aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing imo.

  7. Posted by Keith on Thursday, January 8th, 2004.

    Ok, you’re right.…beacuse of the last three let­ters you typed into that comment…IMO. “In My Opinion”

    But I guess I see what your say­ing — it’s not a two way street. For some­thing to be beau­ti­ful it has to be func­tional and aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing. Sure.…problem is what’s aes­thet­ics are subjective.

    Paul Rand, who is a great designer, has designed things that some folks hate. There is some­one out there who hates the IBM logo visu­ally. They’ll never find it beau­ti­ful, but they’ll always iden­tify it with the company.

    What’s more impor­tant here — the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion or the per­cep­tion of beauty?

    I’d be will­ing to bet that some­one out there thinks google is visu­ally pleas­ing, strange as that is. If that is the case then your point, when taken from your opin­ion and placed else­where, is off the mark.

    I agree that Google isn’t aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing — and your point about form and func­tion hav­ing to work to make it so is fine — it’s just that, with Google, I don’t care in the slight­est if it’s aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing as long as it works.

    I like Google. It works just fine. In fact I never think about the design or aes­thet­ics of Google, I just use it and it works. Could that not be per­ceived as beautiful?

    You could make a case that noth­ing is aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing to every­one who uses it right? If that is true, doesn’t it make it more impor­tant that a design “func­tion” well before any “form” is applied to it?

    It’s an age old argu­ment that can’t be won. Func­tion is based on data, form on opin­ion. Show me a per­fectly designed site and I’ll find some­one who hates it. You’d be harder pressed, for exam­ple, to find some­one who couldn’t use a car because they found it to be ugly.

    Form should always fol­low func­tion — IMO. ;)

  8. Posted by Andrei Herasimchuk on Thursday, January 8th, 2004.

    “It’s an age old argu­ment that can’t be won. Func­tion is based on data, form on opin­ion. Show me a per­fectly designed site and I’ll find some­one who hates it. You’d be harder pressed, for exam­ple, to find some­one who couldn’t use a car because they found it to be ugly.” — Keith

    Then why bother being a designer? That’s defeatist think­ing. My ini­tial point you may dis­agree with, fine. That’s obvi­ously your perogative.

    But I also want to make clear that I’m not try­ing to be “right” on my posi­tion here. Read my post on avoid results ori­ented think­ing. I think it applies here. This is one of those cases where the approach and strat­egy taken by the designer is often just as impor­tant as the result.

    I’d make the claim that if you don’t believe that aes­thetic qual­ity, as it per­tains to web site deisgn or inter­face design, includes func­tional and usabil­ity met­rics in con­junc­tion with pleas­ing graphic and infor­ma­tional dis­play, then it’s prob­a­bly a good bet that what you design will reflect that position.

    Now imag­ine every­one tak­ing that posi­tion. Oh wait… most of the web and soft­ware tech­nol­ogy out there already reflects this position.

  9. Posted by Didier Hilhorst on Thursday, January 8th, 2004.

    This is an inter­laced topic which is close to becom­ing a philo­soph­i­cal debate. I think aes­thet­ics are imper­a­tive and I would like to see more good inter­face and web design. The cur­rent state of web sites and (soft­ware) appli­ca­tions is rather deplorable.

    On numer­ous occas­sions I have put form in front of func­tion – and I will con­tinue to do so. First of all because I see it as part of my job to build and design objects that are pleas­ing to the eye. Sec­ondly because it enables me to exper­i­ment and push bound­aries. Putting form in front of func­tion might have ended me up in some tight spots, but in the end it’s all a mat­ter of find­ing the right equilibrium.

    Poor design (or aes­thet­ics) is usu­ally due to bud­get con­traints, tight dead­lines or indif­fer­ence. Another fre­quently (ab)used argu­ment is: “It works, so why change it?”. The lat­ter is most prob­a­bly the case with Google. Some peo­ple are afraid of (dis­rup­tive) change. And to be hon­est, change can be a dis­ori­ent­ing phenomenon.

  10. Posted by Keith on Friday, January 9th, 2004.

    “Why bother being a designer? That’s defeatist thinking.”

    I’ve been design­ing Web sites for over 8 years, and in the design field for much longer so I’ll skip the com­ment on that first part. I hope that wasn’t directed at me personally. ;)

    As far as defeatist think­ing goes all I can say is that I cer­tainly don’t think that way. All I’m try­ing to get across here is that beauty and aes­thet­ics are sub­jec­tive and should come sec­ond to func­tion in most cases. There is no such thing as a per­fect design. Period.

    But I think most of what you are say­ing is cer­tainly true. What I seem to be balk­ing at is the way some design­ers rely on their own, often nar­row, opin­ion of their work and design for aes­thet­ics first.

    Who decides what “poor design” is? Is it you, or me, the client, the users?

    Good debate. I think we’ll have to agree to dis­agree on this for the most part.

  11. Posted by Scrivs on Friday, January 9th, 2004.

    This is start­ing to get kind of deep here (man Dan, this text in this box is really small :)), but I will inter­ject because I think I see some points that every­one is miss­ing that might help join every­thing together.

    First and fore­most, it is quite pos­si­ble for some­thing to be beau­ti­ful and not usable. There are so many exam­ples out there today that I do not think any­more are really needed. Just think of some cool steros and kitchen appli­ances that were made just to look good with­out any sign of usabil­ity within them.

    Sec­ondly, aes­thet­ics (or beauty) is attached to usabil­ity in the sense that I believe you will find many indi­vid­u­als ini­tially believe that some­thing is eas­ily used if it looks good before they even try it. Apple is a good exam­ple. You can just look at their com­put­ers and get a sense that you would know how to work them. On the oppo­site end of the spec­trum is Ebay. Their first inter­faces were very intim­i­dat­ing and they always gave you the sense that you had a lot of work to do just to learn.

    Aes­thet­ics help to ease the com­fort zone with a user and if the user is calm and pos­si­bly happy by the design then it will be eas­ier for them to learn, assum­ing there is some sort of usabil­ity behind it. So I do believe it is pos­si­ble to put form way over func­tion as some peo­ple do and also to marry the two together. It is up to the designer.

  12. Posted by Brian on Tuesday, January 13th, 2004.

    If an object or design, be it a car or a cof­fee mug or a web site, has a nec­es­sary func­tional aspect, then there is no ques­tion that your appre­ci­a­tion of the object is affected by it’s usabil­ity or func­tion­al­ity. Sure, it might be won­der­ful to look at, and there is aes­thetic value at that level, but if the object is meant to be used, then the use of the object is part of the aes­thetic expe­ri­ence– or it should be. Any designer or crafter of usable objects who doesn’t think the use of the object is impor­tant to the aes­thetic expe­ri­ence is a hack.

    Set­ting a high stan­dard for the func­tional suc­cess of your design is tan­ta­mount to crafts­man­ship in mak­ing use­ful objects. I argue that the enjoy­able use of a func­tional object is of first impor­tance to any designer who is truly inter­ested in the aes­thet­ics of her/his design.

  13. Posted by Didier Hilhorst on Tuesday, January 13th, 2004.

    As noticed via v-2 Organ­i­sa­tion:

    What Is Beau­ti­ful Is Usable

    “An exper­i­ment was con­ducted to test the rela­tion­ships between users’ per­cep­tions of a com­put­er­ized system’s beauty and usabil­ity. The exper­i­ment used a com­put­er­ized appli­ca­tion as a sur­ro­gate for an Auto­mated Teller Machine (ATM). Per­cep­tions were elicited before and after the par­tic­i­pants used the sys­tem. Pre-experimental mea­sures indi­cate strong cor­re­la­tions between system’s per­ceived aes­thet­ics and per­ceived usabil­ity. Post-experimental mea­sures indi­cated that the strong cor­re­la­tion remained intact.

    A mul­ti­vari­ate analy­sis of covari­ance revealed that the degree of system’s aes­thet­ics affected the post-use per­cep­tions of both aes­thet­ics and usabil­ity, whereas the degree of actual usabil­ity had no such effect. The results resem­ble those found by social psy­chol­o­gists regard­ing the effect of phys­i­cal attrac­tive­ness on the val­u­a­tion of other per­son­al­ity attrib­utes. The find­ings stress the impor­tance of study­ing the aes­thetic aspect of human–computer inter­ac­tion (HCI) design and its rela­tion­ships to other design dimensions.”

    Most inter­est­ing arti­cle and a must-read in rela­tion to this post. It’s a shame I’ve only dis­cov­ered it now. First thing tom­morow I will invade my uni­ver­sity library to get a copy of that lit­tle gem.

  14. Posted by Scrivs on Wednesday, January 14th, 2004.

    Heck, that’s what Norman’s new book, Emo­tional Design, is all about.

  15. Posted by Brian on Wednesday, January 14th, 2004.

    Wow — that’s a fas­ci­nat­ing quote. While I read it and think “that doesn’t change the actual usabil­ity — just the per­ceived usabil­ity” nev­er­the­less I know it’s true from my own expe­ri­ence in usabil­ity tests. Maybe it relates to the beau­ti­ful peo­ple phe­nom­e­non where beau­ti­ful peo­ple get more breaks, more sec­ond chances, the ben­e­fit of the doubt, etc.

    But while this stresses the impor­tance of the aes­thetic aspect of inter­face design, the beau­ti­ful inter­face that actu­ally does sup­port the user, and that holds up as a solid design over time and use, still must be a more suc­cess­ful and there­fore more aes­thet­i­cally pos­i­tive expe­ri­ence than the beau­ti­ful inter­face that has only a per­ceived usability.

    Over the long haul– when the chips are down — which one does the user turn to? The one that only looks pretty or the one that makes the work pleas­ant as well? Given that both are pleas­ant to look at.

  16. Posted by oli on Sunday, February 1st, 2004.

    Frank Lloyd Wright said “Form fol­lows function-that has been mis­un­der­stood. Form and func­tion should be one, joined in a spir­i­tual union”. No need for them to fight ;-)

  17. Posted by Web Design on Wednesday, March 10th, 2004.

    Oli, I like that. That’s what I think too. Some peo­ple pre­fer form, and some of them pre­fer func­tion. And the way to per­fec­tion is to com­bine both. A design shouldn’t be done for aes­thet­ics only, but it has to be pleas­ing in look and feel to attract users and make them feel more com­fort­able with it. I think it’s a ques­tion of usabil­ity. While it doesn’t make sence to cre­ate just form with lit­tle func­tion, it’s quite pos­si­ble to cre­ate some­thing really func­tional and ugly. But wouldn’t it be just bor­ing? I do stand for harmony.