What i read from Bowman's blog is not about data or not, it's about trust between design and engineering. If he had better argument(and sure there is), he could/should show the evidence instead of complain, else the design cant find feet in the product development process. More common, it's a result from long trivial conflicts between different mind-set, which triggered by what ever it is. At most, what we can know is, we can only know something that happened there, but that need not be the full ( even true ) story.
Cheers, -- Jarod On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 7:47 PM, Adrian Howard <adri...@quietstars.com>wrote: > 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<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_hoaxes>and > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google's_hoaxes#Easter_eggs<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_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 > -- http://designforuse.blogspot.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
