Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Design and Usability: Part 2

Wednesday, January 7th, 2004

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):

• aes-thet-ic adj. —
  of or con­cern­ing the appre­ci­a­tion of beauty or good taste.

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.

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.

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