16 ms·

Much of the “science” used in design is bullshit (2014)

330 points by spking 8y ago

layoutIfNeeded 8y ago
No surprise. Much of the "science" used to support business decisions is bullshit, made up long after a decision was made by someone powerful.
- mathieubordere 8y ago
  Humans seem to be comforted when there's an explanation for something, even if it's just plain wrong, it seems we don't care that much.
  - moccachino 8y ago
    Our whole lives consist of rationalizing after-the-fact what we observe ourselves to be doing.
    - BaronSamedi 8y ago
      And rationalizing because we actually have no idea why we are doing it.
  - noxToken 8y ago
    There are also two other things at play. Media hype over small scientific announcements that need more study[0], and misrepresentation of scientific findings by researchers or their sponsoring party (e.g. a university's PR department). [0]: https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/
- captainbland 8y ago
  I'm reminded of this The Thick of It quote: "The thing is, you’ve been listening to the wrong expert. You need to listen to the right expert. And you need to know what an expert is going to advise you before he advises you." Which is about politics, but I think high level business decisions are often as political as anything else.
- westoncb 8y ago
  There's a David Foster Wallace short story on this subject. It's called "Mister Squishy". Here's an especially relevant excerpt from an overview/interpretation of it that I wrote[1]: Now it seems that the purpose of the focus group, rather than gathering information about consumer response to the snack-cake, is to improve the design of future focus groups. Schmidt, however, informs the reader through glimpses we are given to his thoughts during the session, that the focus groups have no material impact: rather than using the collected data to make inferences about consumer preferences, it is desirable to end with a nebulous analysis which could conclude one outcome or another based on which direction the client company is already planning on moving in: the focus groups can only confirm a decision which has already been made: a deviation on this will result in the termination of the marketing firm. [1] http://westoncb.blogspot.com/2012/12/interpretation-of-david-foster-wallaces.html http://westoncb.blogspot.com/2012/12/interpretation-of-david...
  - hopler 8y ago
    Focus groups are the "Uber" of management consulting -- low wage independent contractors doing the same work
- BaronSamedi 8y ago
  Science still carries significant cultural cachet. It may be the only remaining sources of authority that does. How much longer that cachet can be abused before it is lost is a concern of mine. The replication crisis and general low quality of academic journal articles are especially worrisome in this regard.
  - beenBoutIT 8y ago
    Unscientific people are repulsive and serve as tragic human reminders that there is no alternative to science.
andybak 8y ago
I will never tire of reminding people of this: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesign-document-1-million-for-this/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesig...
- 99052882514569 8y ago
  It still amazes me that they're persisting with the fat-belly logo. It looks like a fat dude with his belly hanging out. It's not something that, once seen, can ever be unseen, even years later. Makes me chuckle on the inside, every time, and plays its part in reminding me of dangers of pop over-consumption.
  - spking 8y ago
    https://www.utne.com/arts/new-pepsi-logo-is-a-joke https://www.utne.com/arts/new-pepsi-logo-is-a-joke
  - hopler 8y ago
    Every abstract logo can be interpreted in many ways if people culture jams it.
  - rchaud 8y ago
    I never thought of it as a fat-belly logo, the mockup is pretty funny. I always thought of the logo as similar to a tennis ball. In my country, I remember Pepsi giving away blue/red coloured 3x tennis ball packs with a cases of Pepsi.
- Toine 8y ago
  Thanks for sharing, didn't know the story. Absolutely astonishing.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
  Apparently that branding company is also active on the Wikipedia page for the logo: > The subliminal advertising involved with the Pepsi Globe logo is also extensive. The different logos and packaging designs are purported to represent the human body, rediscovery of the Vitruvian principles and their publication, Chinese art of placement and spatial arrangement and many other representations that may not seem clear or obvious from just a glance at a Pepsi Bottle. The most famous visual representation is the Pepsi Globe logo’s representation of The Earth. The swirling horizontal stripe running through the center of the globe is claimed to provide a visual representation of the earth’s constant movement around its own axis and around the sun. The stripe also represents a naturally occurring electric generator in fluid motion generating and sustaining the magnetic field of the Earth. This marketing has resulted in an extremely recognizable logo and an aid to a profitable venture.
captainbland 8y ago
Pretty interesting article. The only bit I'd have something to say about it is: > Indeed, it would mean that the designers would have to add a bad experience in for every three good ones in order to get the positivity ratio right! Which appears to be incorrect as the positivity ratio was supposed to be a minimum as according to that same article. Presumably having more positive experiences doesn't make the situation somehow worse. Nevertheless, maybe it's an interesting or even useful heuristic that you could get away with one bad moment for every three good moments you provide, even if it is about as scientific as an analysis of unicorns on a flat earth.
de_Selby 8y ago
"the minimum ratio of positive-to-negative emotions humans need over time to “flourish” to be 2.9013" "It reflects the highest positivity ratio (observed ratio = 5.6) and the broadest range of inquiry and advocacy. It is also the most generative and flexible. Mathematically, its trajectory in phase space never duplicates itself, representing maximal degrees of freedom and behavioral flexibility. In the terms of physics and mathematics, this is a chaotic attractor.”" They needed someone to write a paper to point out this was pseudoscientific BS? Not only that, but the paper was cited over 1000 times?! Absolutely terrifying.
- 99052882514569 8y ago
  Some people will read this and say to themselves: "I'm in the wrong field". Others will say to themselves: "I'm sure glad I'm not in that field".
- luckylion 8y ago
  > Not only that, but the paper was cited over 1000 times?! With a bit of mining, you could probably identify other likely BS papers by looking at what they cite. Has that been done before?
  - richmarr 8y ago
    > With a bit of mining, you could probably identify other likely BS papers by looking at what they cite. Has that been done before? Yep. http://www.citnetexplorer.nl/ http://www.citnetexplorer.nl/
- bartread 8y ago
  > Absolutely terrifying. Indeed. We seem to be increasingly awash with evidence that the standards of rigour in academic journals across a number of fields are... quite poor. Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose set out to demonstrate this in the field of grievance studies by submitting and, in some cases, successfully publishing a series of fake papers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZZNvT1vaJg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZZNvT1vaJg I mean, in some sense this is highly entertaining for the rest of us, but it is also utterly horrifying.
oedmarap 8y ago
> Everyone bullshits at some point, but there seems to me to be a particular desire to show design decisions as being based in some empirical facts. In some ways this is admirable, and forces designers to justify their design decisions. Analytics have certainly been one cause of this. As a designer I've always felt that the larger and more important chunk of design work is purely intuitive. Analytics implies time-dependence which is counterproductive to design when included upfront. The only time quantifiable metrics are used is when a design is married to user experience in the context of a user interface (in the end product). At that point, patterns and practices dictate the baseline from which feedback takes place. This is commonly referred to as a design system and is done on a larger horizontal scale across interfaces (web, mobile, print, and so on). Company branding, medium | message, target audience, color schemes/themes and other aspects of functional design are comprised more of intuition than raw analytics, in my opinion. Apple provides a great example of design choices that focus on the human aspect first. [0] Added to that, the fact that market share is happily split amongst vastly different UI approaches is testament to the non-linear nature of design. While designers are plenty, good design is not. Science based models as cited in the article are there to bring up the rear in a standardized manner but don't provide avenues to true "novelty" that defines great design. Just my two cents. [0] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/ios/overview/themes/ https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
- TuringTest 8y ago
  > As a designer I've always felt that the larger and more important chunk of design work is purely intuitive. Quite true. However there is some value in applying rational analysis to design, and doing it can help to be a good professional: If your design is (partially) based on rules (like following exact ratios in proportions, applying color palette increments and color complements...), these rules create a design space that you can explore by changing the parameters to those rules in a systematic way. This exploration allows you to generate * a lot * of slightly different possible solutions for the design, many of which you wouldn't have created spontaneously. Ultimately, you select the right choice by intuition; but seeing a lot of possibilities can help you to find details that you wouldn't have considered otherwise.
- 8y ago
Causality1 8y ago
Does this explain why Google went from the tasteful white-on-black status bar of Android 8 to the enormous blue balloon PlaySkool buttons on Android 9?
- discreditable 8y ago
  It wouldn't be an android release without Google making random nonsensical to the status bar.
wayneftw 8y ago
This reminds me of how Apple fans used to love to quote Fitts Law to convince themselves that the Macintosh OS UI was any good. Meanwhile, Apple never really followed Fitts Law very well with the Mac OS or iOS and they quite obviously can't even get the most basic functionality right, like Window or File management.
- thatgerhard 8y ago
  I switched to Mac a year ago after more than 25 years using only using windows.. there are some glaring holes in mac os, but it's 1000x better than windows (and I'm not even going to get into the Linux argument).
  - wayneftw 8y ago
    So I've used Mac, Windows and Linux since the late 90s. With the amount of experience that I have, I'd bet real money that you're not very familiar with any of them since you have that opinion. I'd love to hold a contest where we test people's productivity on each platform because whenever I watch someone who "likes it better than anything else" and supposedly knows even how to use a Mac, they're obviously incompetent when you watch them try to use it. It's absolutely hilarious watching someone trying to quickly find the application window that they want to switch to on a Mac, especially if they've full-screened some windows. (You aren't even allowed to have a real maximize function that always works the way you expect it to in every application lmao!)
- pndy 8y ago
  While I can't tell Apple they did the same for classic MacOS, for the latter they did provide guidelines for developers about their design philosophy and while OSX changed visually over the years, for most of the part it works in same way - controls, widgets, buttons do the same. Microsoft tried doing same thing around Vista but they never managed to keep following own rules and OS, Office, Windows Live software releases were always split apart in terms of how they look and work; this still happens even today - Metro interface still shares the ground with classic elements. Not mention that deep beneath all visual changes they made in last 18 years there are still resources dating 9x/NT times.
thanatropism 8y ago
Most knowledge is inarticulable. It’s not only learned by doing, it’s intimately indexed by our lived relationship with tools. A culture of evidence and objectivity, well exhibited by this very blog post, has had two implications: (I) actual knowledge that was not based on explicit, technically appealing principles, has been demoted — witness the come-and-go of architecture, for example and (II) people where explicit and technically appealing principles didn’t exist fell for “objectivity strawmen” or, where they were able to socially impose their deeper inarticulable knowledge, they have used strawmen to get the culture of objectivity off their sense. What’s perverse about this is that people who are cynical about the socially inflated need for objectivity end up making other, more naive, people buy bullshit like the 3:1 ratio; and people who debunk bullshit like this blogger further perpetuate the misconception that insufficient objectivity and bibliographical references are a relevant problem, even while going about the motions of disavowing the role of science (a heightened mode of objectivity discourse) on lowly design-engineering. Is design even engineering discipline? To its core? Is the world better off when Google does some ersatz research and we start trusting “Material Design” more than the deep civilizational background that artists (industrial or not) are supposed to have at their disposal?
edgarvaldes 8y ago
Just a few hours ago in the frontpage: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19749130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19749130
human20190310 8y ago
> [I]t’s better for us to accept that we don’t always have good reasons for our design decisions and that much of our work is intuitive. My intuition tells me that designers wish they could do that without having their designs rejected. If the absence of bullshit empiricism is punished, who can complain when people start providing it?
- ianstallings 8y ago
  Agreed and I I think a lot of it comes down to financial factors. In other words, why are we paying someone so much to make design decisions and how can we be assured they are doing it correctly? Because of science.
dictum 8y ago
This is a consequence of subjective choices (even when beneficial) being perceived as easy to perform (hence, cheap and unworthy of value) and likely to be incorrect, whereas choices borne out of systematic processes are seen as reliable and accurate. A hunch isn't always a trustworthy source, but too often it is taken as an always untrustworthy source.
_pmf_ 8y ago
"Yea, can you just give it a bit more 'zing'?"
asark 8y ago
My experience is that most people in business are 1) terrible at constructing trials, tests, or experiments, of any sort whatsoever, 2) terrible at interpreting the results of same, and 3) have a very limited tolerance for discussion of how bad they are at it and why their various tests are meaningless, no matter how gently it's presented. I've not seen a place where this isn't broadly true, no matter where the business folks come from (top-tier B-school analysts, Bob's discount MBA emporium, doesn't matter) or how good the reputation of the firm they're at. This also extends to management and administration in the public sector—schools are rife with obvious pseudo-science bullshit, bad attempts to replicate results while skipping half the measures that were taken, et c., but dumb-ass superintendents (you would not believe it, seriously, "dumb-ass" was not chosen lightly) and principals eat it up. [EDIT] which is to say I'm not at all surprised design "science" is full of BS, because it's sold to people who almost all suck at evaluating those kinds of things. Any "science" that largely exists to sell stuff to middle- and upper-management or "stakeholders" probably tends to be awful, because it doesn't need to be good.
- abacadaba 8y ago
  a depressingly accurate assessment. > Any "science" that largely exists to sell stuff to middle- and upper-management or "stakeholders" probably tends to be awful, because it doesn't need to be good. as long as it's reeaally expensive. that's really the only way to asses the accuracy and importance of these things.
- kadendogthing 8y ago
  What are one-dimensional business people actually good at? Besides just being a piece in the system that soaks up resources?
  - EForEndeavour 8y ago
    Learning and exploiting unwritten rules of a game referred to as business.
    - dredmorbius 8y ago
cptskippy 8y ago
Speaking of bullshit designs... Why does that blog have a load screen that takes about 15 seconds to disappear? If you open up debug tools and delete the overlay, the blog entry is perfectly readable underneath it. There's no network activity during those 15 seconds of "loading". It's just ... bullshit.
morley 8y ago
I'm a little confused by the thesis of the article, and how it relates to the title. Unless I'm reading it wrong, this is the thrust of the facts: * The Android design team describes their design process. * In their description, they cite a paper that suggests giving people at least 3 positive experiences for every negative experience they have. * That paper was debunked. How does that translate to "much of the 'science' used in design is bullshit"? That bogus paper they cited doesn't affect the actual content of Android's design; it just influenced the team's design process. How is that bad? How does that discredit all the other things they talk about? The FastCompany article[1] linked from this blog post says: > the CliffsNotes version is that Google creates design mantras from the point of view of the user, like “keep it brief,” “delight me in surprising ways,” and “it’s not my fault.” Each time an Android feature lives up to these expectations, they get a single marble in the good emotion jar. But every time they fail, that bad feature produces three marbles in the bad emotion jar. The marbles illustrate that bad ideas stack up quickly. Even if this heuristic isn't scientifically proven, does it really result in worse UX than if you don't use the heuristic? I just don't get the vitriol. [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/1672657/google-s-dead-simple-tool-for-making-ux-decisions-2-jars-of-marbles https://www.fastcompany.com/1672657/google-s-dead-simple-too...
- snegu 8y ago
  Later in the article the writer discusses how the "science" the designers say they were using probably had little to no effect on their design. The design is good, but not because of this principle. What the writer takes issue with is the attempts to justify design decisions (which may be fine on their own) with bullshit science.
- DenisM 8y ago
  Wrong premises are still wrong even if they lead to correct result. The habit of relying on dubious techniques is under question here, as is our collective ability to find better guidance.
tabtab 8y ago
The article is short of specific examples. But as far as UI's, unless you really are genius of design, keep it mostly the same and only do incremental improvements. I get used to most bad UI's by shere memorization of where and how to go. Move the cheese, and I'm lost and cussing. The MS Ribbon comes to mind. It still don't think it's notably better than the original toolbar. But the problem is that shuffling everything around confused many for roughly a year as they had to re-learn where everything is. MS traded one randomness for a different randomness. Maybe they were thinking a 5% to 10% improvement is worth it over the long run even if they piss off existing customers during the learning curve. So, either they are idiots, or they actually sat around and did "piss off accounting": intentional jerks who willingly sock existing customers in exchange for future news ones. So we have the idiots theory and the jerks theory. Another thing, redundancy is not necessarily bad in UI's. Some get caught up in the "keep the tree clean" mantra. However, having more than one way to do or find an option often improves the UI. Perhaps an ideally designed UI could avoid the need for repetition, but most designers are not good (or constrained by other factors) such that they should indeed fall back on some redundancy. Rules for ideal conditions (such as great UI) often don't apply to typical conditions (average UI). For bigger applications, perhaps put all the options in a table(s) and let the users search for options Google-style. That may be faster than digging around in menu trees. You still have menu trees, but ultimately they are tied to the table. Use synonyms and allow bookmarks to improve look-ups. I'd like to see more experiments in Table Oriented Programming. To me, that looks the future. OOP can't handle complex relationships well.
- charleslmunger 8y ago
  I disagree - the ribbon was a massive improvement for feature discoverability and usability. 1. Lots of options visible up front. Instead of reading tons of text, or guessing at hieroglyphics, you could find the tool to accomplish your desired task visually - if you want to change text color, look for the color picker. 1. Big improvement to mouse navigation. Navigating nested menus is a bit like playing Operation - you position your cursor on the item you want, then slide it horizontally to the next menu that expanded. But if you drift too far vertically, which was easy to do of you had a disability or a crappy trackpad, you have to start again. With the ribbon, there was no destructive effect to moving the mouse around without clicking. You could always take the shortest path to whatever you wanted to click on. 1. Big improvement to keyboard navigation. Tap the alt key, and every affordance in the ribbon displays its keyboard shortcut. This allowed the same exploratory navigation as the mouse, but in a way that built muscle memory and avoided RSI. Of course it was a large change, but the ribbon was an amazing improvement.
rangersanger 8y ago
As a field, I think UI/UX has a ton of anxiety about it's place in the cannon of design. There's a pretty clear path from that anxiety to these hollow attempts to justify itself as a "serious discipline." Look at the other paths that visual designers could take, from "pure art" illustration to a much "harder science" like architecture, UI/UX sits pretty square in the middle. So many of the people I've worked with want it desperately to be both art and science. I'm sure we've all had conversations with a UX/UI designer who will ping-pong between space "feeling better" with different padding, and something like Millers Law, or perhaps a misapplied statistical inference from Optimizely. I'd love to see UI/UX split into a more art focused design field and a more science focused HCI field. This might stop the navel-gazing and impulse toward faux-science, and publications like this: https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/why-designers-should-be-shaping-business-strategy/ https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/why-designers-shou...
intrasight 8y ago
I've been involved in UX design for nuclear power plants, air traffic control systems, gambling machines, and more recently lots of web sites. None was "science" but all were very important for their intended audience. I the case of the nuclear power plants and air traffic control systems, there was much more thought and analysis put in by user interface specialists, but I doubt that any of those specialists would consider themselves scientists or their practice a "science".
- arithma 8y ago
  I would definitely call that engineering though.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
guelo 8y ago
Once after I had a bad experience with adding a "FAB" button to an app I got the chance to ask a Google Material Design designer if they had AB tested or user tested the design and they said no, obviously, because users don't know what they want. So. Much. Bullshit. in design.
- snegu 8y ago
  That's just a bad designer. The foundation of UX is doing actual user research.
  - guelo 8y ago
    No, I'm talking about the Material Design guidelines that Google has been pushing for years. They publish their design system without testing.
alanaut24 8y ago
Someone needs to explain to me what is gender neutral typography: https://visme.co/blog/feminine-design-masculine-design/ https://visme.co/blog/feminine-design-masculine-design/
- syockit 8y ago
  Wow. That somehow explains why we end up having very dull monotonous icons in many things today. One of the GUI desktop applications in my company had a redesign for a new release, and they opt to go for the Material Design[1] icons. I remember that being a Google thing for their Android UX, so I thought it couldn't be that bad. When the icons are actually used in the application, they look so... bland. They also look mostly similar to each other, basically being rectangular outlines with rounded corners, that it takes slightly longer to recognise which one is which, compared to the more traditional, colourful icons. (I wonder if colour blind people have always felt this way) I should've prefaced that our application uses Qt5 Widgets as the UI, with hardly any styling. That may have contributed to the icons looking so out of place. If we had used a more metro-looking theme (like the ones used in Adobe PS) they would be a better fit. But our main users are engineers and scientists, who I assume would prefer more traditional-looking UI (see for example Paraview). Meanwhile, I have no problems with the same icons being used on my smartphone. I guess this is because on smartphones, icons are larger and more easily distinguished even if they're monochrome. And they can afford to be larger because they're mostly used in main menus or swipe menus. In contrast, in desktop applications they always appear on screen (in the toolbar), and monitors are usually further from your eyes compared to smartphones, and you can't afford to sacrifice precious screen estate just to accommodate distinguishable icons. [1] https://material.io/design/iconography/system-icons.html#design-principles https://material.io/design/iconography/system-icons.html#des...
rajekas 8y ago
Except that you don't need to publish journal articles anymore. Instead, combine 1 cup pseudo-psychology, 1 cup vague design principles and 1 cup quotes from Donald Norman and Massimo Vignelli. Sprinkle with Kahnemann on thinking fast and Pinker on evolutionary strategies. Publish it on Medium and watch it go viral - pop design science and Medium's business model being perfectly aligned right now.
sizzle 8y ago
"The veneer of mathematics and complexity science – a culturally-powerful yet poorly-understood science – allowed many people to believe a very improbable thing: that a simple model from fluid dynamics could explain the influence of love, hate, anger, sadness, grief, joy, culture, time, geography, war, famine, birth, etc. etc. on human behaviour. It also suggests a degree of gullibility in the academy: researchers were willing to accept the claims of the papers because they didn’t understand the maths. Worse, of course, is the implication that people simply don’t critically read the papers that they cite." Pretty much sums up the reproducibility problem of studies in the field of Psychology.
- steakknife 8y ago
  No, it doesn't at all. The reproducibility issue in psychology has mostly to do with p-hacking, which is a very specific abuse of legitimate statistical analysis in which statistical significance is brute-forced and cherry-picked (rendering it no longer significant), and is often applied to otherwise sound experiments and hypotheses. The paper in question is literally gibberish.
wozer 8y ago
I find it somewhat difficult to work at a company with a UX team. It is just another stakeholder you have to take care of. One more obstacle to get anything done as a developer.
m3kw9 8y ago
The problem with Android and UX is that they think human experience can be treated like a stat.
- beenBoutIT 8y ago
  The fact that there is no better mobile UX than that provided by Google's Android 9 (Pixel phones, not Samsung) suggests that whatever they're doing is working.
  - thirdsun 8y ago
    Seems like an opinion rather than a fact.
byset 8y ago
It's noteworthy that Alan Sokal was involved in debunking the paper discussed in the article. He's the guy who caused an uproar in academic circles (in mainstream media too) with his notorious 1996 hoax in which he submitted a paper loaded with comically absurd assertions to a postmodern journal called Social Text and it got published. Google "Sokal hoax" for a good laugh.
byset 8y ago
While I have no problem with the linked article I think the headline is a bit unfair. How often is BS-ey pseudoscience like this really used and cited by UX designers in the field? It would seem to be mainly an issue among the most bloated, coddled, and self-important UX teams. And was the BS paper in question really used to design the Android UI rather than justify the design decisions? (The article's author basically makes this same point.)
Razengan 8y ago
“Design by committee” is always a bland, sterile and soulless experience.

330 points by spking 8y ago

No surprise. Much of the "science" used to support business decisions is bullshit, made up long after a decision was made by someone powerful.

mathieubordere 8y ago
Humans seem to be comforted when there's an explanation for something, even if it's just plain wrong, it seems we don't care that much.
- moccachino 8y ago
  Our whole lives consist of rationalizing after-the-fact what we observe ourselves to be doing.
  - BaronSamedi 8y ago
    And rationalizing because we actually have no idea why we are doing it.
- noxToken 8y ago
  There are also two other things at play. Media hype over small scientific announcements that need more study[0], and misrepresentation of scientific findings by researchers or their sponsoring party (e.g. a university's PR department). [0]: https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/
captainbland 8y ago
I'm reminded of this The Thick of It quote: "The thing is, you’ve been listening to the wrong expert. You need to listen to the right expert. And you need to know what an expert is going to advise you before he advises you." Which is about politics, but I think high level business decisions are often as political as anything else.
westoncb 8y ago
There's a David Foster Wallace short story on this subject. It's called "Mister Squishy". Here's an especially relevant excerpt from an overview/interpretation of it that I wrote[1]: Now it seems that the purpose of the focus group, rather than gathering information about consumer response to the snack-cake, is to improve the design of future focus groups. Schmidt, however, informs the reader through glimpses we are given to his thoughts during the session, that the focus groups have no material impact: rather than using the collected data to make inferences about consumer preferences, it is desirable to end with a nebulous analysis which could conclude one outcome or another based on which direction the client company is already planning on moving in: the focus groups can only confirm a decision which has already been made: a deviation on this will result in the termination of the marketing firm. [1] http://westoncb.blogspot.com/2012/12/interpretation-of-david-foster-wallaces.html http://westoncb.blogspot.com/2012/12/interpretation-of-david...
- hopler 8y ago
  Focus groups are the "Uber" of management consulting -- low wage independent contractors doing the same work
BaronSamedi 8y ago
Science still carries significant cultural cachet. It may be the only remaining sources of authority that does. How much longer that cachet can be abused before it is lost is a concern of mine. The replication crisis and general low quality of academic journal articles are especially worrisome in this regard.
- beenBoutIT 8y ago
  Unscientific people are repulsive and serve as tragic human reminders that there is no alternative to science.

andybak 8y ago

I will never tire of reminding people of this: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesign-document-1-million-for-this/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesig...

99052882514569 8y ago
It still amazes me that they're persisting with the fat-belly logo. It looks like a fat dude with his belly hanging out. It's not something that, once seen, can ever be unseen, even years later. Makes me chuckle on the inside, every time, and plays its part in reminding me of dangers of pop over-consumption.
- spking 8y ago
  https://www.utne.com/arts/new-pepsi-logo-is-a-joke https://www.utne.com/arts/new-pepsi-logo-is-a-joke
- hopler 8y ago
  Every abstract logo can be interpreted in many ways if people culture jams it.
- rchaud 8y ago
  I never thought of it as a fat-belly logo, the mockup is pretty funny. I always thought of the logo as similar to a tennis ball. In my country, I remember Pepsi giving away blue/red coloured 3x tennis ball packs with a cases of Pepsi.
Toine 8y ago
Thanks for sharing, didn't know the story. Absolutely astonishing.
hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
Apparently that branding company is also active on the Wikipedia page for the logo: > The subliminal advertising involved with the Pepsi Globe logo is also extensive. The different logos and packaging designs are purported to represent the human body, rediscovery of the Vitruvian principles and their publication, Chinese art of placement and spatial arrangement and many other representations that may not seem clear or obvious from just a glance at a Pepsi Bottle. The most famous visual representation is the Pepsi Globe logo’s representation of The Earth. The swirling horizontal stripe running through the center of the globe is claimed to provide a visual representation of the earth’s constant movement around its own axis and around the sun. The stripe also represents a naturally occurring electric generator in fluid motion generating and sustaining the magnetic field of the Earth. This marketing has resulted in an extremely recognizable logo and an aid to a profitable venture.

captainbland 8y ago

Pretty interesting article. The only bit I'd have something to say about it is: > Indeed, it would mean that the designers would have to add a bad experience in for every three good ones in order to get the positivity ratio right! Which appears to be incorrect as the positivity ratio was supposed to be a minimum as according to that same article. Presumably having more positive experiences doesn't make the situation somehow worse. Nevertheless, maybe it's an interesting or even useful heuristic that you could get away with one bad moment for every three good moments you provide, even if it is about as scientific as an analysis of unicorns on a flat earth.

de_Selby 8y ago

"the minimum ratio of positive-to-negative emotions humans need over time to “flourish” to be 2.9013" "It reflects the highest positivity ratio (observed ratio = 5.6) and the broadest range of inquiry and advocacy. It is also the most generative and flexible. Mathematically, its trajectory in phase space never duplicates itself, representing maximal degrees of freedom and behavioral flexibility. In the terms of physics and mathematics, this is a chaotic attractor.”" They needed someone to write a paper to point out this was pseudoscientific BS? Not only that, but the paper was cited over 1000 times?! Absolutely terrifying.

99052882514569 8y ago
Some people will read this and say to themselves: "I'm in the wrong field". Others will say to themselves: "I'm sure glad I'm not in that field".
luckylion 8y ago
> Not only that, but the paper was cited over 1000 times?! With a bit of mining, you could probably identify other likely BS papers by looking at what they cite. Has that been done before?
- richmarr 8y ago
  > With a bit of mining, you could probably identify other likely BS papers by looking at what they cite. Has that been done before? Yep. http://www.citnetexplorer.nl/ http://www.citnetexplorer.nl/
bartread 8y ago
> Absolutely terrifying. Indeed. We seem to be increasingly awash with evidence that the standards of rigour in academic journals across a number of fields are... quite poor. Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose set out to demonstrate this in the field of grievance studies by submitting and, in some cases, successfully publishing a series of fake papers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZZNvT1vaJg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZZNvT1vaJg I mean, in some sense this is highly entertaining for the rest of us, but it is also utterly horrifying.

oedmarap 8y ago

> Everyone bullshits at some point, but there seems to me to be a particular desire to show design decisions as being based in some empirical facts. In some ways this is admirable, and forces designers to justify their design decisions. Analytics have certainly been one cause of this. As a designer I've always felt that the larger and more important chunk of design work is purely intuitive. Analytics implies time-dependence which is counterproductive to design when included upfront. The only time quantifiable metrics are used is when a design is married to user experience in the context of a user interface (in the end product). At that point, patterns and practices dictate the baseline from which feedback takes place. This is commonly referred to as a design system and is done on a larger horizontal scale across interfaces (web, mobile, print, and so on). Company branding, medium | message, target audience, color schemes/themes and other aspects of functional design are comprised more of intuition than raw analytics, in my opinion. Apple provides a great example of design choices that focus on the human aspect first. [0] Added to that, the fact that market share is happily split amongst vastly different UI approaches is testament to the non-linear nature of design. While designers are plenty, good design is not. Science based models as cited in the article are there to bring up the rear in a standardized manner but don't provide avenues to true "novelty" that defines great design. Just my two cents. [0] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/ios/overview/themes/ https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

TuringTest 8y ago
> As a designer I've always felt that the larger and more important chunk of design work is purely intuitive. Quite true. However there is some value in applying rational analysis to design, and doing it can help to be a good professional: If your design is (partially) based on rules (like following exact ratios in proportions, applying color palette increments and color complements...), these rules create a design space that you can explore by changing the parameters to those rules in a systematic way. This exploration allows you to generate * a lot * of slightly different possible solutions for the design, many of which you wouldn't have created spontaneously. Ultimately, you select the right choice by intuition; but seeing a lot of possibilities can help you to find details that you wouldn't have considered otherwise.
8y ago

Causality1 8y ago

Does this explain why Google went from the tasteful white-on-black status bar of Android 8 to the enormous blue balloon PlaySkool buttons on Android 9?

discreditable 8y ago
It wouldn't be an android release without Google making random nonsensical to the status bar.

wayneftw 8y ago

This reminds me of how Apple fans used to love to quote Fitts Law to convince themselves that the Macintosh OS UI was any good. Meanwhile, Apple never really followed Fitts Law very well with the Mac OS or iOS and they quite obviously can't even get the most basic functionality right, like Window or File management.

thatgerhard 8y ago
I switched to Mac a year ago after more than 25 years using only using windows.. there are some glaring holes in mac os, but it's 1000x better than windows (and I'm not even going to get into the Linux argument).
- wayneftw 8y ago
  So I've used Mac, Windows and Linux since the late 90s. With the amount of experience that I have, I'd bet real money that you're not very familiar with any of them since you have that opinion. I'd love to hold a contest where we test people's productivity on each platform because whenever I watch someone who "likes it better than anything else" and supposedly knows even how to use a Mac, they're obviously incompetent when you watch them try to use it. It's absolutely hilarious watching someone trying to quickly find the application window that they want to switch to on a Mac, especially if they've full-screened some windows. (You aren't even allowed to have a real maximize function that always works the way you expect it to in every application lmao!)
pndy 8y ago
While I can't tell Apple they did the same for classic MacOS, for the latter they did provide guidelines for developers about their design philosophy and while OSX changed visually over the years, for most of the part it works in same way - controls, widgets, buttons do the same. Microsoft tried doing same thing around Vista but they never managed to keep following own rules and OS, Office, Windows Live software releases were always split apart in terms of how they look and work; this still happens even today - Metro interface still shares the ground with classic elements. Not mention that deep beneath all visual changes they made in last 18 years there are still resources dating 9x/NT times.

thanatropism 8y ago

Most knowledge is inarticulable. It’s not only learned by doing, it’s intimately indexed by our lived relationship with tools. A culture of evidence and objectivity, well exhibited by this very blog post, has had two implications: (I) actual knowledge that was not based on explicit, technically appealing principles, has been demoted — witness the come-and-go of architecture, for example and (II) people where explicit and technically appealing principles didn’t exist fell for “objectivity strawmen” or, where they were able to socially impose their deeper inarticulable knowledge, they have used strawmen to get the culture of objectivity off their sense. What’s perverse about this is that people who are cynical about the socially inflated need for objectivity end up making other, more naive, people buy bullshit like the 3:1 ratio; and people who debunk bullshit like this blogger further perpetuate the misconception that insufficient objectivity and bibliographical references are a relevant problem, even while going about the motions of disavowing the role of science (a heightened mode of objectivity discourse) on lowly design-engineering. Is design even engineering discipline? To its core? Is the world better off when Google does some ersatz research and we start trusting “Material Design” more than the deep civilizational background that artists (industrial or not) are supposed to have at their disposal?

edgarvaldes 8y ago

Just a few hours ago in the frontpage: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19749130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19749130

human20190310 8y ago

> [I]t’s better for us to accept that we don’t always have good reasons for our design decisions and that much of our work is intuitive. My intuition tells me that designers wish they could do that without having their designs rejected. If the absence of bullshit empiricism is punished, who can complain when people start providing it?

ianstallings 8y ago
Agreed and I I think a lot of it comes down to financial factors. In other words, why are we paying someone so much to make design decisions and how can we be assured they are doing it correctly? Because of science.

dictum 8y ago

This is a consequence of subjective choices (even when beneficial) being perceived as easy to perform (hence, cheap and unworthy of value) and likely to be incorrect, whereas choices borne out of systematic processes are seen as reliable and accurate. A hunch isn't always a trustworthy source, but too often it is taken as an always untrustworthy source.

_pmf_ 8y ago

"Yea, can you just give it a bit more 'zing'?"

asark 8y ago

My experience is that most people in business are 1) terrible at constructing trials, tests, or experiments, of any sort whatsoever, 2) terrible at interpreting the results of same, and 3) have a very limited tolerance for discussion of how bad they are at it and why their various tests are meaningless, no matter how gently it's presented. I've not seen a place where this isn't broadly true, no matter where the business folks come from (top-tier B-school analysts, Bob's discount MBA emporium, doesn't matter) or how good the reputation of the firm they're at. This also extends to management and administration in the public sector—schools are rife with obvious pseudo-science bullshit, bad attempts to replicate results while skipping half the measures that were taken, et c., but dumb-ass superintendents (you would not believe it, seriously, "dumb-ass" was not chosen lightly) and principals eat it up. [EDIT] which is to say I'm not at all surprised design "science" is full of BS, because it's sold to people who almost all suck at evaluating those kinds of things. Any "science" that largely exists to sell stuff to middle- and upper-management or "stakeholders" probably tends to be awful, because it doesn't need to be good.

abacadaba 8y ago
a depressingly accurate assessment. > Any "science" that largely exists to sell stuff to middle- and upper-management or "stakeholders" probably tends to be awful, because it doesn't need to be good. as long as it's reeaally expensive. that's really the only way to asses the accuracy and importance of these things.
kadendogthing 8y ago
What are one-dimensional business people actually good at? Besides just being a piece in the system that soaks up resources?
- EForEndeavour 8y ago
  Learning and exploiting unwritten rules of a game referred to as business.
  - dredmorbius 8y ago

cptskippy 8y ago

Speaking of bullshit designs... Why does that blog have a load screen that takes about 15 seconds to disappear? If you open up debug tools and delete the overlay, the blog entry is perfectly readable underneath it. There's no network activity during those 15 seconds of "loading". It's just ... bullshit.

morley 8y ago

I'm a little confused by the thesis of the article, and how it relates to the title. Unless I'm reading it wrong, this is the thrust of the facts: * The Android design team describes their design process. * In their description, they cite a paper that suggests giving people at least 3 positive experiences for every negative experience they have. * That paper was debunked. How does that translate to "much of the 'science' used in design is bullshit"? That bogus paper they cited doesn't affect the actual content of Android's design; it just influenced the team's design process. How is that bad? How does that discredit all the other things they talk about? The FastCompany article[1] linked from this blog post says: > the CliffsNotes version is that Google creates design mantras from the point of view of the user, like “keep it brief,” “delight me in surprising ways,” and “it’s not my fault.” Each time an Android feature lives up to these expectations, they get a single marble in the good emotion jar. But every time they fail, that bad feature produces three marbles in the bad emotion jar. The marbles illustrate that bad ideas stack up quickly. Even if this heuristic isn't scientifically proven, does it really result in worse UX than if you don't use the heuristic? I just don't get the vitriol. [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/1672657/google-s-dead-simple-tool-for-making-ux-decisions-2-jars-of-marbles https://www.fastcompany.com/1672657/google-s-dead-simple-too...

snegu 8y ago
Later in the article the writer discusses how the "science" the designers say they were using probably had little to no effect on their design. The design is good, but not because of this principle. What the writer takes issue with is the attempts to justify design decisions (which may be fine on their own) with bullshit science.
DenisM 8y ago
Wrong premises are still wrong even if they lead to correct result. The habit of relying on dubious techniques is under question here, as is our collective ability to find better guidance.

tabtab 8y ago

The article is short of specific examples. But as far as UI's, unless you really are genius of design, keep it mostly the same and only do incremental improvements. I get used to most bad UI's by shere memorization of where and how to go. Move the cheese, and I'm lost and cussing. The MS Ribbon comes to mind. It still don't think it's notably better than the original toolbar. But the problem is that shuffling everything around confused many for roughly a year as they had to re-learn where everything is. MS traded one randomness for a different randomness. Maybe they were thinking a 5% to 10% improvement is worth it over the long run even if they piss off existing customers during the learning curve. So, either they are idiots, or they actually sat around and did "piss off accounting": intentional jerks who willingly sock existing customers in exchange for future news ones. So we have the idiots theory and the jerks theory. Another thing, redundancy is not necessarily bad in UI's. Some get caught up in the "keep the tree clean" mantra. However, having more than one way to do or find an option often improves the UI. Perhaps an ideally designed UI could avoid the need for repetition, but most designers are not good (or constrained by other factors) such that they should indeed fall back on some redundancy. Rules for ideal conditions (such as great UI) often don't apply to typical conditions (average UI). For bigger applications, perhaps put all the options in a table(s) and let the users search for options Google-style. That may be faster than digging around in menu trees. You still have menu trees, but ultimately they are tied to the table. Use synonyms and allow bookmarks to improve look-ups. I'd like to see more experiments in Table Oriented Programming. To me, that looks the future. OOP can't handle complex relationships well.

charleslmunger 8y ago
I disagree - the ribbon was a massive improvement for feature discoverability and usability. 1. Lots of options visible up front. Instead of reading tons of text, or guessing at hieroglyphics, you could find the tool to accomplish your desired task visually - if you want to change text color, look for the color picker. 1. Big improvement to mouse navigation. Navigating nested menus is a bit like playing Operation - you position your cursor on the item you want, then slide it horizontally to the next menu that expanded. But if you drift too far vertically, which was easy to do of you had a disability or a crappy trackpad, you have to start again. With the ribbon, there was no destructive effect to moving the mouse around without clicking. You could always take the shortest path to whatever you wanted to click on. 1. Big improvement to keyboard navigation. Tap the alt key, and every affordance in the ribbon displays its keyboard shortcut. This allowed the same exploratory navigation as the mouse, but in a way that built muscle memory and avoided RSI. Of course it was a large change, but the ribbon was an amazing improvement.

rangersanger 8y ago

As a field, I think UI/UX has a ton of anxiety about it's place in the cannon of design. There's a pretty clear path from that anxiety to these hollow attempts to justify itself as a "serious discipline." Look at the other paths that visual designers could take, from "pure art" illustration to a much "harder science" like architecture, UI/UX sits pretty square in the middle. So many of the people I've worked with want it desperately to be both art and science. I'm sure we've all had conversations with a UX/UI designer who will ping-pong between space "feeling better" with different padding, and something like Millers Law, or perhaps a misapplied statistical inference from Optimizely. I'd love to see UI/UX split into a more art focused design field and a more science focused HCI field. This might stop the navel-gazing and impulse toward faux-science, and publications like this: https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/why-designers-should-be-shaping-business-strategy/ https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/why-designers-shou...

intrasight 8y ago

I've been involved in UX design for nuclear power plants, air traffic control systems, gambling machines, and more recently lots of web sites. None was "science" but all were very important for their intended audience. I the case of the nuclear power plants and air traffic control systems, there was much more thought and analysis put in by user interface specialists, but I doubt that any of those specialists would consider themselves scientists or their practice a "science".

arithma 8y ago
I would definitely call that engineering though.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

guelo 8y ago

Once after I had a bad experience with adding a "FAB" button to an app I got the chance to ask a Google Material Design designer if they had AB tested or user tested the design and they said no, obviously, because users don't know what they want. So. Much. Bullshit. in design.

snegu 8y ago
That's just a bad designer. The foundation of UX is doing actual user research.
- guelo 8y ago
  No, I'm talking about the Material Design guidelines that Google has been pushing for years. They publish their design system without testing.

alanaut24 8y ago

Someone needs to explain to me what is gender neutral typography: https://visme.co/blog/feminine-design-masculine-design/ https://visme.co/blog/feminine-design-masculine-design/

syockit 8y ago
Wow. That somehow explains why we end up having very dull monotonous icons in many things today. One of the GUI desktop applications in my company had a redesign for a new release, and they opt to go for the Material Design[1] icons. I remember that being a Google thing for their Android UX, so I thought it couldn't be that bad. When the icons are actually used in the application, they look so... bland. They also look mostly similar to each other, basically being rectangular outlines with rounded corners, that it takes slightly longer to recognise which one is which, compared to the more traditional, colourful icons. (I wonder if colour blind people have always felt this way) I should've prefaced that our application uses Qt5 Widgets as the UI, with hardly any styling. That may have contributed to the icons looking so out of place. If we had used a more metro-looking theme (like the ones used in Adobe PS) they would be a better fit. But our main users are engineers and scientists, who I assume would prefer more traditional-looking UI (see for example Paraview). Meanwhile, I have no problems with the same icons being used on my smartphone. I guess this is because on smartphones, icons are larger and more easily distinguished even if they're monochrome. And they can afford to be larger because they're mostly used in main menus or swipe menus. In contrast, in desktop applications they always appear on screen (in the toolbar), and monitors are usually further from your eyes compared to smartphones, and you can't afford to sacrifice precious screen estate just to accommodate distinguishable icons. [1] https://material.io/design/iconography/system-icons.html#design-principles https://material.io/design/iconography/system-icons.html#des...

rajekas 8y ago

Except that you don't need to publish journal articles anymore. Instead, combine 1 cup pseudo-psychology, 1 cup vague design principles and 1 cup quotes from Donald Norman and Massimo Vignelli. Sprinkle with Kahnemann on thinking fast and Pinker on evolutionary strategies. Publish it on Medium and watch it go viral - pop design science and Medium's business model being perfectly aligned right now.

sizzle 8y ago

"The veneer of mathematics and complexity science – a culturally-powerful yet poorly-understood science – allowed many people to believe a very improbable thing: that a simple model from fluid dynamics could explain the influence of love, hate, anger, sadness, grief, joy, culture, time, geography, war, famine, birth, etc. etc. on human behaviour. It also suggests a degree of gullibility in the academy: researchers were willing to accept the claims of the papers because they didn’t understand the maths. Worse, of course, is the implication that people simply don’t critically read the papers that they cite." Pretty much sums up the reproducibility problem of studies in the field of Psychology.

steakknife 8y ago
No, it doesn't at all. The reproducibility issue in psychology has mostly to do with p-hacking, which is a very specific abuse of legitimate statistical analysis in which statistical significance is brute-forced and cherry-picked (rendering it no longer significant), and is often applied to otherwise sound experiments and hypotheses. The paper in question is literally gibberish.

wozer 8y ago

I find it somewhat difficult to work at a company with a UX team. It is just another stakeholder you have to take care of. One more obstacle to get anything done as a developer.

m3kw9 8y ago

The problem with Android and UX is that they think human experience can be treated like a stat.

beenBoutIT 8y ago
The fact that there is no better mobile UX than that provided by Google's Android 9 (Pixel phones, not Samsung) suggests that whatever they're doing is working.
- thirdsun 8y ago
  Seems like an opinion rather than a fact.

byset 8y ago

It's noteworthy that Alan Sokal was involved in debunking the paper discussed in the article. He's the guy who caused an uproar in academic circles (in mainstream media too) with his notorious 1996 hoax in which he submitted a paper loaded with comically absurd assertions to a postmodern journal called Social Text and it got published. Google "Sokal hoax" for a good laugh.

byset 8y ago

While I have no problem with the linked article I think the headline is a bit unfair. How often is BS-ey pseudoscience like this really used and cited by UX designers in the field? It would seem to be mainly an issue among the most bloated, coddled, and self-important UX teams. And was the BS paper in question really used to design the Android UI rather than justify the design decisions? (The article's author basically makes this same point.)

Razengan 8y ago

“Design by committee” is always a bland, sterile and soulless experience.