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Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977

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The Designer Is Dead, Long Live The Designer!

My first arti­cle, The
Designer Is Dead, Long Live The Designer!, went up over at Dig­i­tal Web today
(or rather yes­ter­day, while I was asleep). This first arti­cle is part of a series
of columns enti­tled Art
of Inter­ac­tion.

Every­one agrees that a good user expe­ri­ence is impor­tant but many miss the
fact that design plays an inte­gral role. In cur­rent and future columns I will
assess the impor­tance of aes­thetic qual­ity (or attrac­tive­ness) in user inter­face
and web design, exam­in­ing an assort­ment of topics.

In this first pub­li­ca­tion I dis­cuss why aes­thet­ics is impor­tant when it comes
to design­ing a web site, or any inter­face for that mat­ter. Some
peo­ple on the web have argued
that “mak­ing things pretty” is irrel­e­vant. Func­tion and usabil­ity
first, design sec­ond, so it seems. I dis­agree. In this col­umn I will go as far
as stat­ing the con­trary: design comes first, usabil­ity second.

It’s about time we put design back on the agenda! Read
more.

This item was posted by dhilhorst on Thursday, April 8th, 2004.

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20 comments on “The Designer Is Dead, Long Live The Designer!”

  1. Posted by Mike on Thursday, April 8th, 2004.

    Wow man, what can I say, I freakin’ love it!

    There some­thing about your lit­tle illustrations/designs that always get me, but you’re def­i­nitely right — first impres­sions are the most impor­tant, and before you ever use the inter­face, you look at it and form your emo­tional attach­ment to the UI right off the bat.

    Which brings me right into the pitch to check out Don Norman’s lat­est book, Emo­tional Design. Just do what feels good, baby!

  2. Posted by Edusilva on Thursday, April 8th, 2004.

    Hm… although I agree with your state­ment ‘… blar­ing ran­dom opin­ions about design…’ and their irri­tat­ing­ness, I kinda feel the same about your arti­cle. A wee bit blaring…

    Sure, you give the only-usability-folks out there a sting, but I for one think all of it should be inte­grated. Maybe because I got taught at Delft Uni­ver­sity, Indus­trial Design Engi­neer­ing, a.k.a. Prod­uct Devel­op­ment, I feel that aes­thet­ics is one of 4. (Inte­grate human aspects — i.e. ergonom­ics, mar­ket, organ­i­sa­tion and aes­thet­ics — with engi­neer­ing, indus­trial pro­duc­tion and sustainability).

    All 4 should be accounted for, or it aint a com­plete expe­ri­ence. Yet, all of them influ­ence expe­ri­ence, some­times one of them is enough, and some­times three’s a crowd.

    Some thoughts:

    - If it aint giv­ing me what it’s pre­tend­ing too, it can be all gor­geous to look at, it still stinks.

    - If it aint attrac­tive, I agree, it’s a place I want to leave as soon as pos­si­ble, YET, if it’s giv­ing me that one cd that I can’t seem to get on ama­zon, it’s can still be a crappy ugly site, the over­all expe­ri­ence I get is sat­is­fac­tory, ‘cos I got my cd (ok, an anti­quated way to get music, still…)

    There­fore, I dis­agree with your visu­al­i­sa­tion (although pretty to look at ;) ) Aes­thet­ics and Usabilty go hand in hand. If one is walk­ing with­out the other… it bet­ter be damn good content.

    For that mat­ter, infor­ma­tive web­sites are all over, and design is many times lame for them, but I am more inter­ested if your rage holds up when you dis­cuss web-applications…

    Sad end­ing: the one thing that mat­ters most on every web-experience is ‘speed’… If I get to wait 10 sec­onds every­time your pretty design is load­ing, I won’t be click to the com­pe­ti­tion, I’ll just get irritated.

    Sad end­ing 2: It’s a design­ers trap to believe the way ‘we’ per­ceive web­sites is the way ‘users’ per­ceive web­sites. We (you have to admit) judge other sites with our eyes, maybe we judge the ‘feel’ of it by click­ing around (inter­ac­tion), but we hardly judge sites by their actual con­tent. I for one will admit that I get led away by beau­ti­full design, but I ain’t there to buy some­thing, I’m just there to steal. ;)

    Regards for stick­ing your neck out with a con­tro­ver­sial arti­cel, did you send it to Christina (www.boxesandarrows.com) allready?

    Edusilva

    MSc Indus­trial Design Engineering

    User inter­face Designer

    Founder of a company_of_four, chicken to not show the url ;)

  3. Posted by Didier Hilhorst on Thursday, April 8th, 2004.

    “A wee bit blar­ing…”, eh? I have to admit you’re prob­a­bly half way right. But this remains a col­umn, some­thing to keep in mind I think. As opposed to some usabil­ity experts out there I do not claim to be right or back my opin­ions or find­ings with sci­en­tific research (or not as if often the case). It’s how I see things. Of course that includes some black and white thoughts, merely to empha­size some of my ideas.I absolutely agree with you that good design accounts for more aspects than only aes­thet­ics. It’s after­all not a mat­ter of “or”, but rather “and.” How­ever my point is not that you should assign more impor­tance to one of them (or what role each should play for that mat­ter), rather my point is that aes­thet­ics play another role than most experts in usabil­ity or user expe­ri­ence claim, a more sig­nif­i­cant role that is. In short: atr­rac­tive­ness pos­i­tively affects ease-of-use, while the oppo­site effect is absent.

    “But I am more inter­ested if your rage holds up when you dis­cuss web-applications…”

    Dig­i­tal Web Mag­a­zine is of course mainly aimed at web sites as such, but my rage defin­i­tively holds up for web-applications. Not so long ago I vis­ited SAP and tested some of their web based ERP sys­tems (not thor­ough test­ing though). At its core it works and has a lot of fun­tion­al­ity, yet it looks like crap and is near impos­si­ble to use. The big issue with busi­ness appli­ca­tion is that soft­ware ven­dors still see design as an option. It’s not. Fail to design it cor­rectly and you’ll find employee reluc­tance all over the place. It has been known for a while that user accep­tance is a crit­i­cal suc­cess fac­tor for ERP imple­men­ta­tions.

    “Sad end­ing: the one thing that mat­ters most on every web-experience is ‘speed’…”

    I think this is an impor­tant point, but not deci­sive in my opin­ion. What’s the point of a fast site if the user expe­ri­ence stinks? It may load fast, but if I take 3 times longer to find what I need (due to poor design) I’ll as eas­ily click to the com­pe­ti­tion. While it may have been a fac­tor of impor­tance in the early days, I think the wait­ing par­a­digm is los­ing sig­nif­i­cance.

    “Sad end­ing 2: It’s a design­ers trap to believe the way ‘we’ per­ceive web­sites is the way ‘users’ per­ceive websites.”

    There is some aca­d­e­mic research out there that shows that attrac­tive­ness and user expe­ri­ence have a pos­i­tive cor­re­la­tion, most notably a reasearch paper by N. Tractin­sky, A. S. Katz and D. Ikar enti­tled “What Is Beau­ti­ful Is Usable”. Don Norman’s lat­est book, “Emo­tional Design” is another inter­est­ing read, as Mike already men­tioned. But yes, design­ers are biased too. Every­one has per­sonal pref­er­ences. Color, style, place­ment, type, size and wid­gets. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, design is very much a sub­jec­tive mat­ter and that’s prob­a­bly why it’s both extremely inter­est­ing and hard to fathom. Nonethe­less, good fun­tion­al­ity should never be an excuse for poor design. If it’s already good, why not make it bet­ter? That’s why I argue design should be put back on the agenda. There’s enough rub­bish in this world as it is.Thanks for your com­ments, very insight­ful and good for debate.

  4. Posted by Edusilva on Thursday, April 8th, 2004.

    With the fear of get­ting a wee bit off topic :)

    “my rage defin­i­tively holds up for web-applications. Not so long ago I vis­ited SAP and tested some of their web based ERP sys­tems (not thor­ough test­ing though). At its core it works and has a lot of fun­tion­al­ity, yet it looks like crap and is near impos­si­ble to use.”

    Thing is, you men­tion both here. For web-applications it’s easy to point out visual design flaws (and quick-wins), it’s a bit more tricky to point ouy usability-flaws (and quick-wins).

    Adding only good visual design (aes­thet­ics) to an unus­able webap­pli­ca­tion won’t enhance it’s expe­ri­ence. It will actu­ally decrease the over­all expe­ri­ence, because in your exam­ple, it then looks good, ánd has the right func­tion­al­ity, but it’s still not usable!… Con­clu­men­dum: sjîteÂ…

    Besides that, a good visual designer shouldn’t even be able to add visual design to a webap­pli­ca­tion of which the user inter­face con­cept doesn’t ‘slide’. A good visual designer seeks with user inter­face objects as well, he/she tries to iden­tify com­po­nents and con­sis­tency, and if that’s lack­ingÂ… it’s like try­ing to paint a wet sur­face, it won’t stick.

    The two of them come in a pack­age, design as a whole if you want to call it that. Yet, your ‘arti­cle’ tried to push aes­thethics to the front as being the more impor­tant oneÂ… Still not agree­ing there ;)

    “The big issue with busi­ness appli­ca­tion is that soft­ware ven­dors still see design as an option. It’s not. Fail to design it cor­rectly and you’ll find employee reluc­tance all over the place. It has been known for a while that user accep­tance is a crit­i­cal suc­cess fac­tor for ERP implementations.”

    Yup. Totally agree­ing here, as a mat­ter of fact, this is what I per­ceived to be the opin­ion of the ‘user expe­ri­ence design’ – cor­ner of the fight, or have I been in the moun­tains for too long?

    User accep­tance is crit­i­cal, there­fore user expe­ri­ence is crit­i­cal, the whole user expe­ri­ence that is:

    - before the app (analysing / informing)

    - intro­duc­ing the app (learning)

    - work­ing the app (using/experiencing tha thing)

    - and fight­ing with the app (supporting/helping)Â…

    arghÂ… back to workÂ….

    Bot­tem line. Design is crit­i­cal. And design is more than than the sum of its parts.

  5. Posted by Gary on Thursday, April 8th, 2004.

    Good arti­cle, very solid. Basi­cally good design is usable. Some­where along the line, even in the com­ments above, the word “design” got equated with heavy graph­ics and self-consciously artsy obfus­ca­tion — this is a mis­ap­pro­pri­a­tion. I want to take back the word design to mean aes­thet­i­cally appeal­ing items that are nev­er­the­less a plea­sure to use (which incor­po­rates down­load speed, usabil­ity, archi­tec­ture etc). The false dichotomy of ‘ugly is good, pretty is bad’ is com­pletely off the mark, as is ‘visu­ally pretty is good at the expense of all other fac­tors’. GOOD design is fast and pretty and under­stand­able. Bad design fails to meet those goals.

  6. Posted by Didier Hilhorst on Thursday, April 8th, 2004.

    “Adding only good visual design (aes­thet­ics) to an unus­able web appli­ca­tion won’t enhance it’s experience.”

    I’m afraid I will have to dis­agree with that state­ment to some degree. I still think get­ting aes­thet­ics and attrac­tive­ness right will even­tu­ally enhance user expe­ri­ence (no mat­ter how bad other fac­tors are imple­mented.) Does it mean it will be good? Prob­a­bly not. As you men­tioned ear­lier (and I acknowl­edge that too) user expe­ri­ence is com­posed of an assort­ment of deci­sive fac­tors. Get­ting one right is nice, but get­ting all right is what we should aim for. What I did in my col­umn was ques­tion­ing the role aes­thet­ics cur­rently play in the high tech­nol­ogy field. I still think it’s a sham so many prod­ucts and web sites alike are pro­duced with­out tak­ing good design into consideration.

    More­over, I think Gary made an impor­tant com­ment. Aes­thet­ics and design are not about gra­tious embell­ish­ment. Sure, I love great design and some­times I will for­give bad usabil­ity prac­tices for the sake of attrac­tive­ness, yet design is much more than that. In inter­ac­tion you can’t have attrac­tive­ness for the sake of attrac­tive­ness alone. In art you’re free to do what­ever you want. Paint­ings for exam­ple don’t have a func­tional level (there’s no inter­ac­tion as with soft­ware). I either enjoy it or not.

  7. Posted by jharr on Thursday, April 8th, 2004.

    Wow, what is this? Your enthu­si­asm is admirable, but your mis­guided anger is not. You really seem to have very lit­tle under­stand­ing of what real, large-scale design is. Design is not just pretty pic­tures! It’s not just cool­ness, it’s not slick CSS tricks. It’s under­stand­ing who’s using the thing you’re build­ing and who’s pay­ing for the thing you’re build­ing. I walk the line every­day between how aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing a prod­uct can be and how peo­ple will use that prod­uct. If we asked devel­op­ers to devote the major­ity of their time to the “aes­thet­ics” and chang­ing whims of brand­ing and mar­ket­ing they would have no time to spend on func­tion­al­ity. I bat­tle every minute of my work day to bal­ance how we effect change that’s pleas­ing to the user and that serves their needs. But I have the per­spec­tive to under­stand how that bal­ance works, in a soft­ware set­ting where peo­ple are pay­ing money to USE what I design. You really should take a look at the work of usability/user expe­ri­ence design con­sul­tan­cies out there, and focus less on their web­sites, but on prod­ucts they’ve been paid to create.

    How dare you assume that usabil­ity folks are anti-design. Design is what we do. Our focus just goes beyond CSS and pretty graph­ics (not that we dis­count them) we just under­stand the bal­ance that is required to serve our users; not our­selves. I am proudly a usabil­ity engi­neer & visual designer.

  8. Posted by Damon on Thursday, April 8th, 2004.

    Inter­est­ing arti­cle and com­ments. I think jharr said it well. Usabil­ity folk design too. Usabil­ity and visual folk both con­tribute to mak­ing the prod­uct work. (At least they should. There’s prob­a­bly bad, anti-visual usabil­ity folk out there, just as there are bad, style-is-everything visual design­ers.) DH, you make a lot of good points about the value of visual design for improv­ing user con­fi­dence and thereby user/product suc­cess, but I think head­ings such as “Bet­ter usabil­ity through design” just encour­ages the mis­con­cep­tion that usabil­ity is not design!

  9. Posted by Lee on Thursday, April 8th, 2004.

    It seems to me that much of this dis­cus­sion rests(incorrectly) on the assump­tion that web design can be divided between the esthetic and the usable. I think this divi­sion is arti­fi­cial. Good web design incor­po­rates from many dis­ci­plines and approaches, as pre­vi­ously artic­u­lated by Edusilva. (see also Web Design is Web Design by D. Keith Robin­son )

    I think it is unfor­tu­nate that a major premise of the arti­cle depends on usabil­ity being reduced to the total lack of esthetic. Given that straw man, of course the only rea­son­able rem­edy is more esthet­ics. This is the equiv­a­lent of a usabil­ity cri­tique of

    The notion (put for­ward by Gary) that good design is usable design cuts right the core (though my con­clu­sion my dif­fer from Garys). There is no either-or. There is no one-over-the-other. They are not mutu­ally exclu­sive. One can­not suc­ceed with­out the other. Pre­tend­ing oth­er­wise leads only to folly. I think the real art in web design comes when one discovers/creates a solu­tion that max­i­mizes user expe­ri­ence by includ­ing usable con­trols and esthet­i­cally pleas­ing interfaces.

  10. Posted by Didier Hilhorst on Thursday, April 8th, 2004.

    jharr:

    ‘Wow, what is this? Your enthu­si­asm is admirable, but your mis­guided anger is not.’

    First, it’s not anger, rather sar­casm. What you seem to miss is that I don’t favor aes­thet­ics over usabil­ity (in absolute terms), nor do I claim usabil­ity experts are poor design­ers, or that usabil­ity experts are use­less, on the con­trary. I’m just say­ing that the role of (per­ceived) aes­thet­ics has been very much underestimated.

    “You really seem to have very lit­tle under­stand­ing of what real, large-scale design is. Design is not just pretty pic­tures! It’s not just cool­ness, it’s not slick CSS tricks.”

    Do I claim that design is just pretty pic­tures, cool­ness or CSS trick­ery? Reread my col­umn, because from your com­ment I can only con­clude that you missed my point. I used some exam­ples to back up my state­ments, and those are a whole lot more than just pretty pic­tures. More­over stat­ing that I lack real world design expe­ri­ence is an extremely poor argu­ment (and unfounded at that).

    “If we asked devel­op­ers to devote the major­ity of their time to the “aes­thet­ics” and chang­ing whims of brand­ing and mar­ket­ing they would have no time to spend on functionality.”

    Now it’s my turn to say “Wow, what is this?” Devel­op­ers shouldn’t spend time on aes­thet­ics. More impor­tantly they should never devote time to brand­ing or mar­ket­ing. Get the right spe­cial­ist for the job. An archi­tect doesn’t build houses he designed. An engi­neer is not in charge of the design (appere­ance, aes­thet­ics or style) of a product.

    “How dare you assume that usabil­ity folks are anti-design. We just under­stand the bal­ance that is required to serve our users; not our­selves. I am proudly a usabil­ity engi­neer and visual designer.”

    Again, I do not say all usabil­ity folks are anti-design. Yet I still think some promi­nent fig­ures are unwill­ing to find a bal­ance, or just don’t care about bal­anc­ing. More­over I doubt if usabil­ity experts truly under­stand user needs and wants. What about emo­tion, what about plea­sure or enjoy­ment? I rarely hear them about that, it’s all about goal ori­ented and task ori­ented sys­tems and flows. How we use and per­ceive prod­ucts or web sites is much more than just being able to effec­tively use it. I think it’s great you are both a usabil­ity engi­neer and visual designer, and frankly I would love to see more usabil­ity experts who under­stand the role of design. My col­umn is not a frontal attack on usabil­ity experts, I just think we would end up with bet­ter inter­faces if we try to under­stand each oth­ers role. If peo­ple start telling me design doesn’t mat­ter you can be sure I’ll open my mouth.

  11. Posted by Andrei Herasimchuk on Thursday, April 8th, 2004.

    “How dare you assume that usabil­ity folks are anti-design. Design is what we do.”

    While there are plenty of usabil­ity folk who value aes­thet­ics in design, and see the pur­pose of a holis­tic approach to design to cre­ate qual­ity prod­ucts, until the usabil­ity field en masse start to vocally reject many of the things that the likes of Jakob Nielsen has been say­ing pub­licly in the past ten years — espe­cially as it speaks to aesthics and design — there will con­tinue to be animosity.

    Whose fault is that? Prob­a­bly enough blame to go around, but I think every­one in the usabil­ity pro­fes­sion has take a bur­den a large por­tion of the neg­a­tiv­ity that occurs in this field and aim it squarely at the kind of tone one of the most vocal in the field has used. In other words, usbil­ity pro­fes­sion­als need to make it clear to some­one like Nielsen that he needs to change his pub­lic per­sona. Quickly, before it reaches a point of no return.

    I know if one of my heroes, like a Paul Rand or Edward Tufte spoke about about usabil­ity folk the way Nielsen has spo­ken about design­ers, I might still respect their work, but in no uncer­tain terms would I tol­er­ate their pub­lic appear­ance as rep­re­sen­ta­tive in my field. I would vocally request they stop it.

    I checked out your site Jeremy, and it’s quite well done. I don’t think Didier’s col­umn was aimed at any­one spe­cific, espe­cially some­one like you who seems to get it.

    But the pro­fes­sion is some­what at a cross­roads. I think it’s time for many of those in the trenches start ask­ing far much more of the lead­ers and experts in the field about how they speak. Then we can all get beyond it and focus on what it takes to get qual­ity design into all of our lives.

  12. Posted by Hasan on Thursday, April 8th, 2004.

    Excel­lent arti­cle, I fol­lowed your points eas­ily as they were pre­sented with great clarity.

    Sweet irony, jharr, it seems you agree with the thrust of the arti­cle after all, as you redesign(s) for the upamn.org site show! What they have up now looks like useit.com, those you came up with are elegant!

  13. Posted by Sunny on Thursday, April 8th, 2004.

    The issue with most usabil­ity experts in the mould of Nielsen is that they per­ceive design as super­flu­ous graph­ics. One can’t really blame them since most early design­ers pushed the new medium and pro­duced graph­ics over­loaded which were nightmarish.

    A good design, an aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing inter­face takes into account what is nec­es­sary and what is not. The shop­ping cart for instance. No need to write “shop­ping cart”, web users get the idea behind. The func­tion is clear. That to me is usability.

    I may be accused of over-simplification, but I think this is what you are say­ing — when you have user-focused design, usabil­ity comes free.

  14. Posted by Dan Rubin on Friday, April 9th, 2004.

    I think you hit it right on the mark Sunny, a very user-friendly sum­mary of Didier’s column :-)

    This doesn’t count as me post­ing to SB by the way — I have some ideas which, as my free time increases over the next few weeks, I will begin to post. My goal is to return to a reg­u­lar post­ing sched­ule, after dig­ging out from under the insanely huge back­log of projects and oblig­a­tions out­side of the blogging/design world that has swal­lowed me whole over the last few months. I shall refrain from call­ing it a res­ur­rec­tion in light of the pend­ing Chris­t­ian hol­i­day, though I’m sure at least Didier would appre­ci­ate such a reference.

  15. Posted by Mindaugas on Friday, April 9th, 2004.

    Good arti­cle. I liked the most the thought that Web is still imma­ture indus­try. Com­ments show that too ;o).

    On a big­ger pic­ture I tend to agree with Edusilva. In industrial/product design there is a think­ing (the­o­reth­i­cal at least) that aes­thetic design (styling) peo­ple and engi­neers should work on prod­uct design project together from the very beginning–simultaneously. Only then can be designed a prod­uct in all its entirety (not rel­a­tive, but absolute entirety in given circumstances)

    Why it can’t be the same in web design with design­ers, usabil­ity experts and inforam­tion archi­tects? I think we can write it down to human nature–it’s not the truth that stands between two opinions–it is a prob­lem there.

  16. Posted by Michael on Friday, April 9th, 2004.

    Very thought pro­vok­ing. I try to walk the line between down and dirty func­tion and a pleas­ing design. Like all things in life, there is a give and take. There is no cook­book answer which fits all sit­u­a­tions. This is the rea­son we design­ers get paid the big? bucks to find the appro­pri­ate mix for a situation.

    If func­tion only were king, the pack­ag­ing indus­try would be down the tubes. Every­thing would be in a plain drab box with the prod­uct name stamped on the front of the box in a plain font.

    I believe a pleas­ing design will add to a users expe­ri­ence even if only on a sub­lim­i­nal basis. But with­out good func­tion­al­ity, it will prob­a­bly not serve the pur­pose of the site.

    I have seen really pleas­ing to the eye sites which I have left after being left with­out know­ing how to accom­plish what I wanted at the site.

    I look for­ward to read­ing some more of your thoughts

  17. Posted by Andrew on Tuesday, April 13th, 2004.

    Hey Didier, one sug­ges­tion for future arti­cles like this: when you go up againest Nielsen and the oth­ers, you go up against rather a lot of data, research, and often prov­able facts. You need to be able to argue against Nielsen with other demon­stra­bly true facts. You shouldn’t expect the “design is sub­jec­tive” ratio­nale applies to rhetor­i­cal argu­ments *about* design just because your topic hap­pens to *be* design.

    Your arti­cle, while well-argued and good, kind of just comes across as your opin­ion. Now, it’s an opin­ion that say, Paul Rand, agree with on many lev­els, there’s no evi­dence to back up your asser­tions. Smil­ing faces inspire con­fi­dence and trust? Accord­ing to whom? It sould be sim­ple to find stud­ies that prove this; you should cite them.

    Also, I think it’s a red her­ring to claim “usabil­ity experts dis­re­gard the role of attrac­tive­ness.” Many peo­ple think this for no rea­son other than Nielsen main­tains an ass-ugly web­site. I mean, Don Nor­man did write an entire book on this topic after all.

  18. Posted by Didier Hilhorst on Tuesday, April 13th, 2004.

    Andrew: I agree with the point you are mak­ing. How­ever I think peo­ple should remem­ber that it’s a col­umn. It is my opin­ion. Noth­ing more, noth­ing less. If I decide to seri­ously take on Nielsen or any other estab­lished name in the indus­try I would cer­tainly think twice. I have nor the rep­u­ta­tion or expe­ri­ence to be able to that at the moment.

    I have an aca­d­e­mic back­ground and very well know which method­olo­gies to use when I need to make a point and back it up with research or data. But a col­umn is not the medium of choice in such a case. More­over it’s obvi­ous that “usabil­ity experts dis­re­gard the role of attrac­tive­ness” is a red her­ring, it’s meant to be just that.

    In my opin­ion (there we go again) I think a col­umn is mainly about stim­u­lat­ing debate rather than to sci­en­tif­i­cally prove a point. If it looks as if I was try­ing to back up my opin­ions with data I did some­thing wrong and maybe I was try­ing to hard. Some peo­ple might argue that hid­ing behind the term col­umn is weak, but I beg to differ.

    Some of my state­ments are to be taken with a grain of salt. I think my inter­view con­ducted by Justin Goodlett is a bet­ter place to read about what I think about the sub­ject, with­out the bold and some­what unbal­anced state­ments. Side­note: I’m cur­rently doing research in the area which should be done in a few months. If every­thing goes as planned I will make it avail­able to the public.

  19. Posted by Steven Streight on Thursday, April 15th, 2004.

    Sorry: you know very lit­tle about design and almost noth­ing about usability.

    “Good design is de facto usable”? Want to buy a lovely car with no engine?

    Usabil­ity pros pro­claim “ran­dom opin­ions”? The good ones base their guide­lines on User Obser­va­tion Tests.

    “But­tons make users click”? Have you any idea of what you’re speak­ing of? I con­duct User Obser­va­tion Tests, and the vast major­ity of users ignore graphic nav but­tons in favor of main menu left col­umn text links or top of page navbars.

    “I deter­mined that…” based on what? Oh, I see: ran­dom opin­ion. The shop­ping cart I can barely see.

    Your “per­fect read­abil­ity” is untrue: reverse white text on gray back­ground is not “high contrast.”

    Study more design the­ory and practice…study more usabil­ity research (www.useit.com)…get some more expe­ri­ence, then write an arti­cle for a web design magazine.

    “Design speaks for itself” is only good for Picasso paint­ings that don’t have to do any­thing for a client. Web sites are to be usable, not adorable. While imme­di­ate visual impres­sion is what users base cred­i­bil­ity on at first, the con­tent is what retains users and brings them back to the site for more infor­ma­tion, enter­tain­ment, or task accomplishments.

  20. Posted by Didier Hilhorst on Thursday, April 15th, 2004.

    Steven:

    You should not be sorry. You have the right to think I’m wrong. I reply to this mes­sage because, as opposed to the first one, it gives me some room for debate.

    If a lovely car has no engine the over­all design is flawed. It’s that sim­ple really. Design is much more than just appearance.

    I agree about user obser­va­tion tests. User test­ing is a very impor­tant, if not cru­cial, aspect of usabil­ity and inter­ac­tion design in gen­eral. In an ideal world every web site would have been user tested before going live. If you read my com­ments above (blog) you would con­clude that I do not claim all usabil­ity experts blare ran­dom opin­ions. Add a lit­tle sar­casm and irony and I think you will get my point

    I sug­gest you take a closer look at “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug. Search but­tons, nav­i­ga­tion but­tons, shop­ping cart but­tons etc. are ubiq­ui­tous on the web and not with­out rea­son. I agree that a web site is more than an assort­ment of but­tons, but they defin­i­tively are pow­er­ful visual cues.

    If, after exten­sive user test­ing, it would appear that the shop­ping cart but­ton is indeed a prob­lem and that the main nav­i­ga­tion text has insuf­fi­cient con­trast, the con­clu­sion is sim­ple: change it and improve it. I included exam­ples not because they are per­fect, but because they illus­trate my point to some extend. Design is a trial and error process. Will I get it right the first time around? Unprobable.

    I think you mis­un­der­stand (or atleast under­es­ti­mate) the role of design in gen­eral. I’ll end with a quote from Paul Rand’s book “From Las­caux to Brooklyn”:

    “There is no such thing as bad con­tent, only bad form. This explains the place of form in art.”*

    *with few exceptions