11 ms·

The cult of design dictatorship (2012)

68 points by tapp 13y ago

wittysense 13y ago
I've been argued that some parts of the design have been tested against users, and other parts of the design come from the authority of the designer, in the midst of "agile-based" decision making that drops huge, unspec'd components on yr lap mid-day at 3PM. At the same time, no one is going to argue with yr Hypermedia hubris or API spec. =P Or namespacings. Or syntax preferences. Or hacks. Look, no One Person (or role) wins (or loses -- and none of this "dictatorship" sensationalism is really needful, methinks). It's all sausage factory at the end of the day. Just try to create enough black boxes before lunch so you have some dignity at dinner and can sleep after the midnight snack. A CEO gently reminded me one day, "No one lives or dies by this." It's frustrating, not a "dictatorship." In just the same way that no one "killed the coffee"; and no your computer did not just "die." This sensationalist writing makes it difficult for us chill developers who just want to make a simple critique without having to be pigeon-holed with all the hyperbolic-complaint-machine because all of our critiques have the same content (this modal or that button) but the hyperbolic-complaint-machine suggests what's beyond frustration.
EarthLaunch 13y ago
Love these titles. This one is only a sample. Here's a creation of my own: "Terrorists in the murder of design: Why you're wrong and failure is beneficial." It's sure to encourage a good discussion.
noir_lord 13y ago
Whilst I broadly agree with the thrust of the article I do wince when I see statements like "once-in-a-century genius." applied to Steve Jobs. I also cringe when I see "You are not Steve Jobs" etc. indeed I'm not nor would I want to be, I disliked many things about the man intensely when he was alive and that hasn't changed one iota since his death. It fascinates me how we continue to set the bar of leadership based on a man who judged by his actions was a borderline sociopath, I guess success by whatever measure truly does forgive all sins. http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10?op=1 The only thing that amazes me about his career is that he didn't get punched in the face more often.
- acabal 13y ago
  OP here, I agree totally. Steve Jobs was by all accounts a jerk and I think it's unfortunate so many people idolize him instead of people doing more human good like Bill Gates. But it's undeniable that he had a once-in-a-century eye for picking and tweaking good design, and he was a once-in-a-century businessman too. Was he a good human? All signs point to "not really". But his uncompromising vision and massive business success are stories that are hard to match in modern times.
  - k-mcgrady 13y ago
    >> "he was a once-in-a-century businessman" I would disagree with this. He was certainly an incredibly successful business man but there are plenty of others that have matched him: Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Henry Ford, Sam Walton, Jack Welch etc.
  - noir_lord 13y ago
    I'm sorry but I simply disagree with you on his "once-in-a-century" eye for good design. Take (for example one of my favorite) industrial designers - Raymond Loewy - This is a man who created the Shell and BP Logos, designed the Scenicruiser greyhound bus (iconic), coca cola vending machines, the GG1 (in my opinion one of the most beautiful trains of it's generation and they ran for just shy of 50 years) and the PRR S1 (which I think is the single most beautiful train I've ever seen) and just to finish it off he designed the livery for Air Force One.
    - coldtea 13y ago
      Yes, so Jobs only had "two-in-a-century". Or "twenty-in-a-century". That's kind of a pedantic distinction, isn't it?
- coldtea 13y ago
  >Whilst I broadly agree with the thrust of the article I do wince when I see statements like "once-in-a-century genius." applied to Steve Jobs. Well, in business issues he IS a "once-in-a-century-genius". He bootstrapped 4 companies. Apple (which he built from nothing), NeXT (which he build for a pittance and sold for 400 million), Pixar, and Apple v2 (which he built up from near bankruptcy to total dominance). Even just taking a company from near bankruptcy to the highest ever profits and cash held in the history of enterprise in a decade, would be enough. But he also changed (and owned) 3-4 market segments (mp3 player, music downloads, app stores and tablets. And having the profit of all other top 5 PC makers combined for it's computer lineup I'd count as "owning" that market too. >I also cringe when I see "You are not Steve Jobs" etc. indeed I'm not nor would I want to be Noticed how the statement was not targeted at you, but to people who DO believe they are like Steve Jobs and that mimic him? For that crowd, the reminder "you are not Steve Jobs" is totally appropriate. >It fascinates me how we continue to set the bar of leadership based on a man who judged by his actions was a borderline sociopath, I guess success by whatever measure truly does forgive all sins. And it fascinates me how you don't see that leadership is all about success. Would you have a cuddly, lovable by all, Army General in World War II that lost the war, or a cursing, bad-tempered sonofabitch that won it? Plus, what other "sins"? Shouting at some engineers? Closing favorable deals? Insisting he gets components in time? Losing his temper at meetings? Yes, because not 100% of us do the same things and worse at times... It's not like he had employees beheaded, tortured children in his basement or paid prostitutes to piss on him or something. He yelled at some people, fired others. IMHO, the worst thing he did was taking advantage of Woz. And that was like 35 years ago. (I also find the BI article you linked to extremely grasping at straws. He once left the hotel he had booked a room in because he didn't like the room"? Sure, borderline psychopath behavior. And for a while he didn't want to acknowledge his daughter and pay child support, but he later made up. Yeah, that's Jeffrey Dahmer material...).
georgespencer 13y ago
So wide of the mark that I almost feel faint. Selected highlights: > This cult is insidious. Its two main tenant are: 1. The designer is always right. 2. If you don’t like what the designer is doing, you’re wrong, and you should go somewhere else. Doesn’t sound very friendly, does it? 1. Couple of fallacies here: you've set up a scenario in which your conclusion is supported (gosh, that doesn't sound friendly! This guy's a genius!), but it's also ignoratio elenchi: it doesn't fucking matter whether it's friendly or not, because who gives a shit whether the philosophy by which you design a product is friendly or not? It's like asking whether the philosophy is crunchy or gooey. 2. I would argue that if the designer is doing their job properly and working with and for users, then they will be usually right, and if you don't like it, you're wrong, and you should go somewhere else (because you're probably a neckbearded engineer trying to design something with zero user empathy). > Steve Jobs made a zillion bucks cramming his design decisions down peoples’ throats. 1. In the same way as any designer, living or dead, who has shipped something to consumers, was "cramming [their] design decisions down peoples' throats." 2. In addition to the hugely biased language used, it's a gross oversimplification of design at Apple. A good example of Steve Jobs designing something is the iDVD anecdote. The iDVD team spend weeks working on a user interface that they think works. Jobs comes into the meeting, stops them halfway through, ignores their complicated workflows, and draws a simple rectangle which has a single "BURN" button on it. His great skill wasn't design, but editing and empathy. > and now one of its founders spends his days custom-building and racing F1 cars. Just another casual misrepresentation. DHH has not retired and is still working hard at 37signals. > They did all this by being design dictators. Yes. Forget the brilliant engineering, marketing, thought leadership, branding, etc. It was this cult thing you've conjured out of nowhere. > Steve Jobs had a vision, and if you didn’t like his vision, you could go home. Yes. But a vision is nothing to do with design. Example: Steve Jobs had the vision for MobileMe/iCloud. The vision was a cloud-based software product that allowed you to synchronise your devices and keep data across all of them. The design is terrible. Design being architecture and the implementation. Vision != design. And what do you mean by "go home"? Isn't the same true of any product? If you don't like Android you can "go home". If you don't like Ferrari you can "go home". With "go home" you're implying that the consumer loses out. In reality because there IS ONLY ONE WAY A PRODUCT CAN POSSIBLY WORK, you're criticising them for not disrupting the space time continuum in order to offer two different products so you can not like Steve Jobs' vision and still like Steve Jobs' vision. Fuck me. > 37 Signals made its products like it wanted to, and if you didn’t like it, you could suck it. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? I'm giving up on the rest.
nnq 13y ago
37signal's 2nd paragraph of that book chapter (http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch04_Make_Opinionated_Software.php http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch04_Make_Opinionated_Softw...) still says it the best: > The best software has a vision. ...now just make sure the vision is not too narrow and that it's a vision and not an edict (now about Linux DEs, the Gnome 3 and Unity teams OP is referring to just keep turning a narrow copy-cat vision into a bunch of edicts... while the KDE vision tends to be so freaking all-encompassing that you get lost in it and so full of corner use-cases for bugs to hide that no developers can keep up with the bug hunt... sigh, and thanks god for xfce)
hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
The author somehow manages to conflate Apple, 37signals and Gnome 3 all together, then makes a case about design being a bad thing, being the latter the only unremarkable one in this aspect? Let me tell the obvious: Gnome 3 doesn't suck because it focus on design, it sucks because it has horrible design process. If it's not fulfilling user requirements, that's bad design by definition. The problem with Gnome is management. Last time I tried improving the font selector (which I think still is utterly broken for selecting weights), nobody cared. They though the only weights people need are "bold" and "italic". Now compare to the font selector on Mac and say Apple is "design dictatorship" with no regards to user requirements...
cuillevel3 13y ago
Author probably never led any big project, and never experienced the amount of criticism one gets for doing anything. Furthermore the critics are the real dictators, having done nothing besides using (probably for free) your product they are the know-it-alls. Sure it's good to be humble, but you shouldn't listen to everybody. As for the designers, more often than not it isn't hybris, but miscommunication. Or maybe they're just lacking in public relations. And then there is this huge community of interface-conservatives, they are against change per se...
knowtheory 13y ago
This post is unfortunate. This post is so extremely unfortunate because first, it is wrong, and second, it highlights the wrong problem (and the post's author even admits it in the post). The problem is not the cult of design dictatorship, the problem is bad design and bad designers. Apple and 37signals are two examples of design oriented thinking (and I don't mean visual design), but there are many others, even from within the world of Free & Open Source Software. After all, why else would a term like "Benevolent Dictator For Life" exist if it weren't for design dictatorships in programming language development? The real claim that this post is making is that "You are not Steve Jobs and you are not 37 Signals". And... well that may be true, but it also may not. And if you can't have frank discussions about the utility of the things you make, and whether or not you have evidence to back up why/how you are doing the right thing, then yeah, you may be a bad designer. That doesn't mean that being a designer or a dictator is a bad thing inherently, and arguing against central organizing authority in creative works is highly problematic, especially in the absence of any concrete alternatives to suggest. As an aside, I wouldn't describe either Steve Jobs or the 37signals as "nice". Smart, pretty determined, resolutely sure of themselves, but nice is not the first adjective that springs to mind.
- ThomPete 13y ago
  Bad design and bad designers is never the problem. If you have bad designers you have bad management. There are great designers who have a fantastic intuition for aesthetics and horrible intuition for anything else. They are a problem because they seem to be solving problems (because they make things look good) but are really just making things pretty.
- prollyignored 13y ago
  The post is really about rock-star-developer-ninja ego, which is a non-problem really. Ego / Persona / Flair are all part and parcel of Hollywood / Music / Fashion / Chefs and now Software. The question is, are you going to be sadomasochist follower or an individual (which ironically is precisely what a person with a healthy ego is). Have good opinions. There is much to improvise in this world, nothing is final ... every class is open.
- acabal 13y ago
Sevores 13y ago
Steve Jobs was highly opinionated, but he also had a reputation for being able to change his opinion radically. “He would flip on something so fast that you would forget that he was the one taking the 180 degree polar [opposite] position the day before. I saw it daily. This is a gift, because things do change, and it takes courage to change. It takes courage to say, ‘I was wrong.’ I think he had that.” — http://allthingsd.com/20120529/steve-jobs-was-an-awesome-flip-flopper-says-tim-cook/ http://allthingsd.com/20120529/steve-jobs-was-an-awesome-fli... It seems odd to copy one without the other.
seivan 13y ago
I'm usually pro having the "implementor(s)" be the dictators. If you code it, you have a say.
- sambeau 13y ago
  "Having a say" is very different to being a dictator. A good designer understands that design is a discussion and that there will always be pragmatic compromises to be made. However, having the implementer make the important design decisions about a user interface is nearly always the wrong thing to do. The implementor knows too much about the implementation to see it the problem like a user would. It is this which causes UI's that look like database tables when they should resemble faces and buckets and controls that mould to engines rather than fingers. It is not the implementors' fault. They are just to close to the metal and too far from the users.
  - seivan 13y ago
    "They are just to close to the metal and too far from the users." That is bull. How far they are depends on company policies. Some sweatshops keep their developers away from their clients.
    - jamesdelaneyie 13y ago
      It's a sweeping statement, yes surely, but it has basis. Ellen Ullman's writing on early programming culture, while now dated, reveal there is a significant gap between the developers and the rest of the company - and that it works for development.
addlepate 13y ago
Who exactly are the members of this cult? Seems to me the members of the "A/B test everything" cult are much more prevalent. I wonder if the author just works with a designer who's a domineering jerk :) If that's the case, sorry to hear it, but that does not a "cult" make. Not a big fan of the "cult" phraseology either.
alan_cx 13y ago
The thing that amazed me in that piece, was the throw away fact about Apple at one point holding more cash that the US treasury. OK, Im no economist, but, well, wow. And after the nearly sensible point, my imagination wished Jobs had decided to become an Evil Super Villain, and set up a volcano base, with a moon based super weapon, preferably a "LASER"....
jeswin 13y ago
The post is mostly an opinion. And where it tries to bring analysis, it fails. According to the author, gnome3 and unity are flawed. Well, many people like unity now. It's not that different from the other operating systems. And sure, there'll be people who won't like it too. But if these are examples of design dictators screwing up things, what about the interfaces that existed before unity? They had a ton of issues too. And while I may not have had issues with them, unity is certainly easier for the non-technical crowd. And the rest of us know how it needs to be tweaked to our liking. Nothing's wrong really.
- PommeDeTerre 13y ago
  When it comes to things like GNOME 3 and Ubuntu (i.e., Unity), I think you're neglecting to look at the big picture. Yes, there are a small number of people who like the changes that have taken place. But their numbers are indeed quite small compared to the much larger number of people who have been driven away completely by these changes. I don't think that you appreciate how many GNOME 2 users (including former developers and other contributors) are either still using GNOME 2, or have moved on to KDE, Xfce, or other non-GNOME desktops. The same goes for Ubuntu. With Unity and their other recent changes, many users have instead moved to Linux Mint, Debian, and other distributions. These are the worst users to lose, especially the contributors, because they're the ones who did do things correctly, leading to the initial success of the project. Once they start to leave, we end up with GNOME 3-style debacles where it's one bad design or decision after another.
  - takluyver 13y ago
    Do you have any evidence to support either claim (that more people dislike it than like it, and that substantial proportions of users have been driven away)? Certainly there has been plenty of criticism, and some people leaving in a very public fashion, but whenever something changes, we know that the people who don't like the change are far more vocal about it than people who do. Witness the storm of outrage accompanying every Facebook UI change, after which everyone carries on using it. There's probably no good evidence available about how many people like Gnome 3 or Unity. For abandonment rates, have a look at the graph on popcon.ubuntu.com. Those numbers come with caveats, like the fact that not every installation sends data, but none of the lines have any discernible downturn.
dasil003 13y ago
The author is attacking the mythology of Jobs and 37s, not the reality. I'm fairly certain neither of them ever just sat around dictating from on high without ever accepting any criticism or user input. "Strong opinions held loosely." That's the key, not being a virtuosic genius; no one has infallible vision.
mrxd 13y ago
If you've ever been in the position of a "design dictator", you know that it's no picnic. You live and die on every piece of qualitative user feedback, every usability test and every A-B test result. Sure, you get to make decisions, but if you fail, you fail publicly. Great designers are accountable, but design-by-committee is a much more popular model because it diffuses responsibility. You can always find the bad designers hiding behind the committee. A lot of people think they have good ideas and want to moonlight as designers. But when the data comes in evaluating their ideas, too often those people have moved on to other things. That's because they're idea guys - when their idea fails, they lose interest in the problem. Real designers stick with it, learn, iterate and find better solutions.

68 points by tapp 13y ago

I've been argued that some parts of the design have been tested against users, and other parts of the design come from the authority of the designer, in the midst of "agile-based" decision making that drops huge, unspec'd components on yr lap mid-day at 3PM. At the same time, no one is going to argue with yr Hypermedia hubris or API spec. =P Or namespacings. Or syntax preferences. Or hacks. Look, no One Person (or role) wins (or loses -- and none of this "dictatorship" sensationalism is really needful, methinks). It's all sausage factory at the end of the day. Just try to create enough black boxes before lunch so you have some dignity at dinner and can sleep after the midnight snack. A CEO gently reminded me one day, "No one lives or dies by this." It's frustrating, not a "dictatorship." In just the same way that no one "killed the coffee"; and no your computer did not just "die." This sensationalist writing makes it difficult for us chill developers who just want to make a simple critique without having to be pigeon-holed with all the hyperbolic-complaint-machine because all of our critiques have the same content (this modal or that button) but the hyperbolic-complaint-machine suggests what's beyond frustration.

EarthLaunch 13y ago

Love these titles. This one is only a sample. Here's a creation of my own: "Terrorists in the murder of design: Why you're wrong and failure is beneficial." It's sure to encourage a good discussion.

noir_lord 13y ago

Whilst I broadly agree with the thrust of the article I do wince when I see statements like "once-in-a-century genius." applied to Steve Jobs. I also cringe when I see "You are not Steve Jobs" etc. indeed I'm not nor would I want to be, I disliked many things about the man intensely when he was alive and that hasn't changed one iota since his death. It fascinates me how we continue to set the bar of leadership based on a man who judged by his actions was a borderline sociopath, I guess success by whatever measure truly does forgive all sins. http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10?op=1 The only thing that amazes me about his career is that he didn't get punched in the face more often.

acabal 13y ago
OP here, I agree totally. Steve Jobs was by all accounts a jerk and I think it's unfortunate so many people idolize him instead of people doing more human good like Bill Gates. But it's undeniable that he had a once-in-a-century eye for picking and tweaking good design, and he was a once-in-a-century businessman too. Was he a good human? All signs point to "not really". But his uncompromising vision and massive business success are stories that are hard to match in modern times.
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  >> "he was a once-in-a-century businessman" I would disagree with this. He was certainly an incredibly successful business man but there are plenty of others that have matched him: Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Henry Ford, Sam Walton, Jack Welch etc.
- noir_lord 13y ago
  I'm sorry but I simply disagree with you on his "once-in-a-century" eye for good design. Take (for example one of my favorite) industrial designers - Raymond Loewy - This is a man who created the Shell and BP Logos, designed the Scenicruiser greyhound bus (iconic), coca cola vending machines, the GG1 (in my opinion one of the most beautiful trains of it's generation and they ran for just shy of 50 years) and the PRR S1 (which I think is the single most beautiful train I've ever seen) and just to finish it off he designed the livery for Air Force One.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    Yes, so Jobs only had "two-in-a-century". Or "twenty-in-a-century". That's kind of a pedantic distinction, isn't it?
coldtea 13y ago
>Whilst I broadly agree with the thrust of the article I do wince when I see statements like "once-in-a-century genius." applied to Steve Jobs. Well, in business issues he IS a "once-in-a-century-genius". He bootstrapped 4 companies. Apple (which he built from nothing), NeXT (which he build for a pittance and sold for 400 million), Pixar, and Apple v2 (which he built up from near bankruptcy to total dominance). Even just taking a company from near bankruptcy to the highest ever profits and cash held in the history of enterprise in a decade, would be enough. But he also changed (and owned) 3-4 market segments (mp3 player, music downloads, app stores and tablets. And having the profit of all other top 5 PC makers combined for it's computer lineup I'd count as "owning" that market too. >I also cringe when I see "You are not Steve Jobs" etc. indeed I'm not nor would I want to be Noticed how the statement was not targeted at you, but to people who DO believe they are like Steve Jobs and that mimic him? For that crowd, the reminder "you are not Steve Jobs" is totally appropriate. >It fascinates me how we continue to set the bar of leadership based on a man who judged by his actions was a borderline sociopath, I guess success by whatever measure truly does forgive all sins. And it fascinates me how you don't see that leadership is all about success. Would you have a cuddly, lovable by all, Army General in World War II that lost the war, or a cursing, bad-tempered sonofabitch that won it? Plus, what other "sins"? Shouting at some engineers? Closing favorable deals? Insisting he gets components in time? Losing his temper at meetings? Yes, because not 100% of us do the same things and worse at times... It's not like he had employees beheaded, tortured children in his basement or paid prostitutes to piss on him or something. He yelled at some people, fired others. IMHO, the worst thing he did was taking advantage of Woz. And that was like 35 years ago. (I also find the BI article you linked to extremely grasping at straws. He once left the hotel he had booked a room in because he didn't like the room"? Sure, borderline psychopath behavior. And for a while he didn't want to acknowledge his daughter and pay child support, but he later made up. Yeah, that's Jeffrey Dahmer material...).

georgespencer 13y ago

So wide of the mark that I almost feel faint. Selected highlights: > This cult is insidious. Its two main tenant are: 1. The designer is always right. 2. If you don’t like what the designer is doing, you’re wrong, and you should go somewhere else. Doesn’t sound very friendly, does it? 1. Couple of fallacies here: you've set up a scenario in which your conclusion is supported (gosh, that doesn't sound friendly! This guy's a genius!), but it's also ignoratio elenchi: it doesn't fucking matter whether it's friendly or not, because who gives a shit whether the philosophy by which you design a product is friendly or not? It's like asking whether the philosophy is crunchy or gooey. 2. I would argue that if the designer is doing their job properly and working with and for users, then they will be usually right, and if you don't like it, you're wrong, and you should go somewhere else (because you're probably a neckbearded engineer trying to design something with zero user empathy). > Steve Jobs made a zillion bucks cramming his design decisions down peoples’ throats. 1. In the same way as any designer, living or dead, who has shipped something to consumers, was "cramming [their] design decisions down peoples' throats." 2. In addition to the hugely biased language used, it's a gross oversimplification of design at Apple. A good example of Steve Jobs designing something is the iDVD anecdote. The iDVD team spend weeks working on a user interface that they think works. Jobs comes into the meeting, stops them halfway through, ignores their complicated workflows, and draws a simple rectangle which has a single "BURN" button on it. His great skill wasn't design, but editing and empathy. > and now one of its founders spends his days custom-building and racing F1 cars. Just another casual misrepresentation. DHH has not retired and is still working hard at 37signals. > They did all this by being design dictators. Yes. Forget the brilliant engineering, marketing, thought leadership, branding, etc. It was this cult thing you've conjured out of nowhere. > Steve Jobs had a vision, and if you didn’t like his vision, you could go home. Yes. But a vision is nothing to do with design. Example: Steve Jobs had the vision for MobileMe/iCloud. The vision was a cloud-based software product that allowed you to synchronise your devices and keep data across all of them. The design is terrible. Design being architecture and the implementation. Vision != design. And what do you mean by "go home"? Isn't the same true of any product? If you don't like Android you can "go home". If you don't like Ferrari you can "go home". With "go home" you're implying that the consumer loses out. In reality because there IS ONLY ONE WAY A PRODUCT CAN POSSIBLY WORK, you're criticising them for not disrupting the space time continuum in order to offer two different products so you can not like Steve Jobs' vision and still like Steve Jobs' vision. Fuck me. > 37 Signals made its products like it wanted to, and if you didn’t like it, you could suck it. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? I'm giving up on the rest.

nnq 13y ago

37signal's 2nd paragraph of that book chapter (http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch04_Make_Opinionated_Software.php http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch04_Make_Opinionated_Softw...) still says it the best: > The best software has a vision. ...now just make sure the vision is not too narrow and that it's a vision and not an edict (now about Linux DEs, the Gnome 3 and Unity teams OP is referring to just keep turning a narrow copy-cat vision into a bunch of edicts... while the KDE vision tends to be so freaking all-encompassing that you get lost in it and so full of corner use-cases for bugs to hide that no developers can keep up with the bug hunt... sigh, and thanks god for xfce)

hcarvalhoalves 13y ago

The author somehow manages to conflate Apple, 37signals and Gnome 3 all together, then makes a case about design being a bad thing, being the latter the only unremarkable one in this aspect? Let me tell the obvious: Gnome 3 doesn't suck because it focus on design, it sucks because it has horrible design process. If it's not fulfilling user requirements, that's bad design by definition. The problem with Gnome is management. Last time I tried improving the font selector (which I think still is utterly broken for selecting weights), nobody cared. They though the only weights people need are "bold" and "italic". Now compare to the font selector on Mac and say Apple is "design dictatorship" with no regards to user requirements...

cuillevel3 13y ago

Author probably never led any big project, and never experienced the amount of criticism one gets for doing anything. Furthermore the critics are the real dictators, having done nothing besides using (probably for free) your product they are the know-it-alls. Sure it's good to be humble, but you shouldn't listen to everybody. As for the designers, more often than not it isn't hybris, but miscommunication. Or maybe they're just lacking in public relations. And then there is this huge community of interface-conservatives, they are against change per se...

knowtheory 13y ago

This post is unfortunate. This post is so extremely unfortunate because first, it is wrong, and second, it highlights the wrong problem (and the post's author even admits it in the post). The problem is not the cult of design dictatorship, the problem is bad design and bad designers. Apple and 37signals are two examples of design oriented thinking (and I don't mean visual design), but there are many others, even from within the world of Free & Open Source Software. After all, why else would a term like "Benevolent Dictator For Life" exist if it weren't for design dictatorships in programming language development? The real claim that this post is making is that "You are not Steve Jobs and you are not 37 Signals". And... well that may be true, but it also may not. And if you can't have frank discussions about the utility of the things you make, and whether or not you have evidence to back up why/how you are doing the right thing, then yeah, you may be a bad designer. That doesn't mean that being a designer or a dictator is a bad thing inherently, and arguing against central organizing authority in creative works is highly problematic, especially in the absence of any concrete alternatives to suggest. As an aside, I wouldn't describe either Steve Jobs or the 37signals as "nice". Smart, pretty determined, resolutely sure of themselves, but nice is not the first adjective that springs to mind.

ThomPete 13y ago
Bad design and bad designers is never the problem. If you have bad designers you have bad management. There are great designers who have a fantastic intuition for aesthetics and horrible intuition for anything else. They are a problem because they seem to be solving problems (because they make things look good) but are really just making things pretty.
prollyignored 13y ago
The post is really about rock-star-developer-ninja ego, which is a non-problem really. Ego / Persona / Flair are all part and parcel of Hollywood / Music / Fashion / Chefs and now Software. The question is, are you going to be sadomasochist follower or an individual (which ironically is precisely what a person with a healthy ego is). Have good opinions. There is much to improvise in this world, nothing is final ... every class is open.
acabal 13y ago

Sevores 13y ago

Steve Jobs was highly opinionated, but he also had a reputation for being able to change his opinion radically. “He would flip on something so fast that you would forget that he was the one taking the 180 degree polar [opposite] position the day before. I saw it daily. This is a gift, because things do change, and it takes courage to change. It takes courage to say, ‘I was wrong.’ I think he had that.” — http://allthingsd.com/20120529/steve-jobs-was-an-awesome-flip-flopper-says-tim-cook/ http://allthingsd.com/20120529/steve-jobs-was-an-awesome-fli... It seems odd to copy one without the other.

seivan 13y ago

I'm usually pro having the "implementor(s)" be the dictators. If you code it, you have a say.

sambeau 13y ago
"Having a say" is very different to being a dictator. A good designer understands that design is a discussion and that there will always be pragmatic compromises to be made. However, having the implementer make the important design decisions about a user interface is nearly always the wrong thing to do. The implementor knows too much about the implementation to see it the problem like a user would. It is this which causes UI's that look like database tables when they should resemble faces and buckets and controls that mould to engines rather than fingers. It is not the implementors' fault. They are just to close to the metal and too far from the users.
- seivan 13y ago
  "They are just to close to the metal and too far from the users." That is bull. How far they are depends on company policies. Some sweatshops keep their developers away from their clients.
  - jamesdelaneyie 13y ago
    It's a sweeping statement, yes surely, but it has basis. Ellen Ullman's writing on early programming culture, while now dated, reveal there is a significant gap between the developers and the rest of the company - and that it works for development.

addlepate 13y ago

Who exactly are the members of this cult? Seems to me the members of the "A/B test everything" cult are much more prevalent. I wonder if the author just works with a designer who's a domineering jerk :) If that's the case, sorry to hear it, but that does not a "cult" make. Not a big fan of the "cult" phraseology either.

alan_cx 13y ago

The thing that amazed me in that piece, was the throw away fact about Apple at one point holding more cash that the US treasury. OK, Im no economist, but, well, wow. And after the nearly sensible point, my imagination wished Jobs had decided to become an Evil Super Villain, and set up a volcano base, with a moon based super weapon, preferably a "LASER"....

jeswin 13y ago

The post is mostly an opinion. And where it tries to bring analysis, it fails. According to the author, gnome3 and unity are flawed. Well, many people like unity now. It's not that different from the other operating systems. And sure, there'll be people who won't like it too. But if these are examples of design dictators screwing up things, what about the interfaces that existed before unity? They had a ton of issues too. And while I may not have had issues with them, unity is certainly easier for the non-technical crowd. And the rest of us know how it needs to be tweaked to our liking. Nothing's wrong really.

PommeDeTerre 13y ago
When it comes to things like GNOME 3 and Ubuntu (i.e., Unity), I think you're neglecting to look at the big picture. Yes, there are a small number of people who like the changes that have taken place. But their numbers are indeed quite small compared to the much larger number of people who have been driven away completely by these changes. I don't think that you appreciate how many GNOME 2 users (including former developers and other contributors) are either still using GNOME 2, or have moved on to KDE, Xfce, or other non-GNOME desktops. The same goes for Ubuntu. With Unity and their other recent changes, many users have instead moved to Linux Mint, Debian, and other distributions. These are the worst users to lose, especially the contributors, because they're the ones who did do things correctly, leading to the initial success of the project. Once they start to leave, we end up with GNOME 3-style debacles where it's one bad design or decision after another.
- takluyver 13y ago
  Do you have any evidence to support either claim (that more people dislike it than like it, and that substantial proportions of users have been driven away)? Certainly there has been plenty of criticism, and some people leaving in a very public fashion, but whenever something changes, we know that the people who don't like the change are far more vocal about it than people who do. Witness the storm of outrage accompanying every Facebook UI change, after which everyone carries on using it. There's probably no good evidence available about how many people like Gnome 3 or Unity. For abandonment rates, have a look at the graph on popcon.ubuntu.com. Those numbers come with caveats, like the fact that not every installation sends data, but none of the lines have any discernible downturn.

dasil003 13y ago

The author is attacking the mythology of Jobs and 37s, not the reality. I'm fairly certain neither of them ever just sat around dictating from on high without ever accepting any criticism or user input. "Strong opinions held loosely." That's the key, not being a virtuosic genius; no one has infallible vision.

mrxd 13y ago

If you've ever been in the position of a "design dictator", you know that it's no picnic. You live and die on every piece of qualitative user feedback, every usability test and every A-B test result. Sure, you get to make decisions, but if you fail, you fail publicly. Great designers are accountable, but design-by-committee is a much more popular model because it diffuses responsibility. You can always find the bad designers hiding behind the committee. A lot of people think they have good ideas and want to moonlight as designers. But when the data comes in evaluating their ideas, too often those people have moved on to other things. That's because they're idea guys - when their idea fails, they lose interest in the problem. Real designers stick with it, learn, iterate and find better solutions.