From Steve Jobs’s Best Quotes. I wonder if SJ amended this philosophy at all when he re-joined Apple.
Recently, in our industry, I’ve noticed a disturbing increase of the term ‘Visual Design’. It’s often used to describe a job title, or a step in a UX design process; ‘we’ve done the strategy, the product definition, the prototyping… now, let’s make it pretty with some visual design. We need a Visual Designer to do that’. This confuses and bothers me. So, rather than have a weekly debate about it on Twitter, I thought I’d pen a few words here to make my point.
…honestly, I don’t know a single good designer who would call themselves a visual designer, or what they do as ‘Visual Design’.
Mark Boulton, Visual Design is not a thing. I couldn’t agree more. This quote’s final sentence is exactly the conclusion I’ve come to recently, which is that every great designer I know would never simply call themselves a visual designer, or a UX designer.
‘Read about the agonizing yet glorious creative process for creating the cover’ of Information is beautiful.
Intuitive behavior is not an objective standard. It’s a slow-moving target. If something becomes the default way of doing something, then it has become the intuitive way of doing it. You don’t need to test for that; you use design patterns. They are the product of the norm.
Some of the most successful products weren’t intuitive to begin with. They became intuitive after the product gained sufficient popularity. So, even if a product fails the intuitive test, it does not impact whether or not it becomes a success.
Gall’s law, from John Gall’s Systemantics
…Posterous is an engineered product, while Tumblr is a designed product.
…everything about Tumblr is better designed. I used the landing page as one example, but there are tons of features where Tumblr shines by its gorgeous design.
Meanwhile Posterous is typical of the Silicon Valley engineering mindset where everything is measured, ranked, weighted. It’s like Google. And having terrible design like Google is great if you have a technology edge. But if you’re in a market where what matters is design edge, that’s not enough. There needs to be great design, by which I don’t mean looks (though they’re important), but how it works for the end user.
Meanwhile, Tumblr is typical of the new New York startups, that have great engineering talent, but care about design, UI and UX.
—Why Tumblr is kicking Posterous’s ass, by PEG on Tech, via Daring Fireball
I don’t necessarily agree with Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry that the divide between engineering and design is strictly SF/NYC, but I do agree that the there certainly are two different philosophies for product design that are as immediately apparent, looking at a website, as comparing the difference between Apple and Dell hardware.
Scribd (my last company) is a very engineering-based company, and I am a very user-focused designer. Both focuses are legitimate ways to build a product, but as you can imagine, working for a company or hiring employees whose product-building philosophies don’t match your own is usually frustrating. Compare this random Scribd doc page to my proposed redesigns and you’ll see what I mean.
Gobry’s closing remarks:
…for consumer web apps today, design matters more than technology. Much has been written about how the cloud, accessible web frameworks, etc. have dramatically lowered the cost of getting a startup to market, and that’s certainly true, but it also means that since everyone is on EC2 and Ruby on Rails, technology is no longer what differentiates most consumer web apps. What does is design. UI/UX design. Social design…To be sure, technology is and always will be very important. I don’t want to go back to the startup where the MBA bosses around engineers. And some of the best designers will be engineers (like David Karp, or Mark Zuckerberg). But you can’t just engineer anymore. You have to design.
This is absolutely true, but he doesn’t mention the major trump card of social media sharing sites: having the most content. I don’t know anyone that really loves YouTube or considers it a favorite site. It is, frankly, way too ugly to love. But it is tremendously popular, and has an extraordinarily high brand recognition, because it has the most good content. In terms of design, Vimeo blows YouTube out of the water, but because Vimeo has chosen to focus on higher-quality indie videos, YouTube is still the first place people think of when they want to watch kittens falling asleep in hilarious ways.
—Timoni
Bob Iger: We recently decided to revamp our Disney stores, and his contribution, very early in the process, was to ask that we create a statement — in other words, ask ourselves, “What do you want the stores to say to people when they walk in?”
He didn’t tell us what it would be, but he told us it was necessary that we have one.
8 stars speak out on Steve Jobs - Bob Iger, from FORTUNE, via superamit
I could not agree more. Products need to speak to consumers. This is why Best Made Company blew me away so much yesterday; it’s clear they know exactly what their product message is, and everything they say and do on their website is designed to support that message.
