4 ms·
When form doesn't follow function, usability suffers.
by rbanffy 1mo ago
When form doesn't follow function, usability suffers.
- AlexandrB 1mo agoOr you can do like modern UI designers and throw both form and usability in the trash and optimize for novelty and "brand" instead.
- bigbuppo 1mo agoOr just following the bandwagon. Here's looking at you hamburger menu... the thing that 83% of people don't even realize is a thing that can be clicked on.
- rightnutwingjob 1mo agoI’ve recently come across a number of websites where the hamburger menu has been eschewed and what is obviously a drop down menu placed at the centre of the page immediately below the page title graphic. I’m not sure if it’s a particular framework or whatever, I’m just a computer user. The sites where I’ve seen it have predominantly been for business whose primary activities are not-online. It’s refreshing.
- giancarlostoro 1mo agoMy kingdom to have RAD developer tools be the norm again. I don't want yet another website as an app, or website bundled in a Chrome fork as an app. You could have built the same thing in VB6 or Delphi with less effort and used less of my resources in the 2000s...
- adrianN 1mo agoFear not, soon everything will have the style that the major LLMs find most aesthetic.
- kelseyfrog 1mo agoLook at the buildings. We're already suffering.
- Nursie 1mo agoHot-take - what if beauty (or to tone it down, mere 'pleasantness') is function?
- rightnutwingjob 1mo agoWords? What are words? We just don’t know. If beauty is function we might as well do away with words and go back to using grunts, or whatever it was that preceded the very idea of this thing here is not that thing over there. I guess that’s why design school graduates had to invent the concept of User Experience in an effort to regress the pursuit of functionality and basic design-consistency to the undifferentiated mess of Un-usability minima we seem to be stuck in.
- Nursie 1mo ago> If beauty is function we might as well do away with words and go back to using grunts I'm not sure my comment was meant to be that deep, I was suggesting that beauty or at least pleasantness be added to the list of things which come under the category of "function" when buildings are being designed. Maximising utility without considering that people will be conducting their lives there, or the effects design choices can have on the feel of a place beyond pure utilitarianism, seems inadequate.
- SAI_Peregrinus 1mo agoBeauty has a function in improving the emotional state of people observing it. Ignoring this function in favor of all other functions can result in getting trapped in a suboptimal local maximum, where a more beautiful design could sacrifice only slightly in other domains and have a greater overall utility.
- afiori 29d agoIMO one of the main insight in the maxim is the importance to have the form communicate the function to the user.
- alberto-m 1mo ago“Form follows function” is attributed to Louis Sullivan, author of very beautiful buildings. Whatever excuse modernist architects have for inflicting misery upon us laymen, this principle is not one of them.
- kelseyfrog 1mo agoThere are countless cases of a leader/authority summarizing their thought into an aphorism and followers/practitioners completely misinterpreting it with disasterous results. We find this pattern across time and domains from religion to Agile development. If anything, we're biased toward this social anti-pattern and should deeply consider it likely before makeing a conclusion.
- SAI_Peregrinus 1mo agoAesthetics have a function though, so ignoring them and focusing on all other functions when creating the form can decrease the total functionality.