Hi Dave,
On 21 Mar 2009, at 18:38, David Malouf wrote:
[snip]
I think people have missed my point.
I think design is not for or against data, but design should always
be for imbuing human expressionism beyond the measurable. A designer
of worth, merit, etc. should always be encouraged to express
themselves in any way that does not break Raskin's 1st law of
interaction design (don't fuck w/ the content, purpose or utility of
what you are designing [paraphrasing]).
[snip]
Do you think there are cases where, from your perspective, a better
"design" is less effective at meeting the business goals of the product?
When I look at a site like google, I see a souless design.
Now, I use
google over Yahoo & Adobe for most things but that has nothing to do
with aesthetics. But Google would never take a risk like adding a
"Liam" (mail spelled backwards) character to their software. They
would never use the iconographic vivid imagery of a Buzzword
interface (Adobe). Because of this, these applications at least
attempt to have soul--connectedness to human expression to the world
around them.
I don't find Google soulless myself... quiet and somewhat reserved
possibly - but not soulless. Buzzword's icons on the other hand I find
annoyingly distracting :-)
I'm sure we could both find folk who would agree/disagree with us.
I think people need to stop lauding Google as a design success story.
I think it hurts us b/c it is clear that it is an engineering success
story.
I think it's both a design and an engineering success. I also think
it's impossible to separate the two in any meaningful way. But that's
just me.
Does that mean that engineering is better than design. I think
looking at Apple, answers that question. It doesn't. There are SOOOO
many ingredients that go into success and we would be fooling
ourselve as designers or engineers to think that any one of us
controls all of them.
Amen.
BTW, the one place funny enough that Google DOES allow for a taste of
humanity is on their most precious search home page (Google.com).
Their use of holiday and historic event treatments is beautiful!!!
And things like http://www.google.com/moon/ and http://www.google.com/mars/
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google's_hoaxes and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google's_hoaxes#Easter_eggs
and ...
Again - I'm sure we could both find folk who would agree/disagree with
us :-)
However, I can count on 1 hand how many times I go to Google.com
(home page) any more. Its in the chrome of my browser or in my
browser's home page, etc.
And that's a bad thing because?
Soul!!! Time to swing the pedullum back from the austere periods
towards the more expressionist. I think we can do that and still
maintain simplicity, clarity, usability, findability, and overall
effectiveness. In fact, I'd like to challenge us to do it!
It's a fantastic challenge and I'd love to see folk going for it with
all guns blazing.
But to meet that challenge we're going to have to listen - and listen
hard - to the feedback on simplicity, clarity, usability, findability,
and overall effectiveness.
Folk can certainly be mislead by data. Led down a path driven by their
own assumptions and bad methodology. I've seen it happen.
I've also seen people discard perfectly valid data because it doesn't
"feel" right. Because they want to do it their way. Because it's their
art. Because they know best. Not just designers - managers, developers
and sales folk too.
You get really bad products out of both camps. I've seen a _lot_ more
of the latter than I have the former. That may be atypical - I don't
know. But at the moment I think the field needs to pay more attention
to data - not less.
Cheers,
Adrian
PS ... and I have to admit my reading of Bowman's blog post wasn't
that Google's data-driven work was necessarily bad - just not what he
wanted to be doing. Which is, of course, perfectly reasonable.
--
delicious.com/adrianh - twitter.com/adrianh - adri...@quietstars.com
________________________________________________________________
Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)!
To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org
Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe
List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines
List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
