10 ms·

Design is losing its seat at the table

145 points by hakkasan 11y ago

tosh 11y ago
""" Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. """ — Steve Jobs
- cbd1984 11y ago
  Ironic, coming from a company with such a terrible approach to design. "You're holding it wrong."
  - nextos 11y ago
    Or aluminium plus glass, such a brittle combination just for the sake of aesthetics.
    - raphael_l 11y ago
      The quote from Jobs gets thrown around pretty heavily, but I also think it is interpreted very narrow sometimes. For me, "(...) how it works" isn't just about functionality, but about "how it works on the user". Yeah, aluminium plus glass may be a brittle combination, but if people like it, it just works. And this isn't on the same level as the "how it looks", because that can be quite different. Facebook Paper for example. It looks good, it "works" well (in functionality and purpose of the app), but it just doesn't work well on the user, because the concept is all wrong.
      - pluma 11y ago
        It only "works" in the sense that users buy it because it's shiny. Unless you're saying the only point of the iPhone is that people buy it, that isn't sufficient.
        raphael_l 11y ago
        It works for Apple and how they want it to work. That's why it is designed well. Design is very much depending on the intended outcome. Apple wants to sell devices -> design them so that they get bought (make them "shiny", as you put it ;)). Of course this is not the only point of what Apple wants, but it certainly is the biggest one.
RickS 11y ago
When your product is a solution without a real problem (which all the listed companies are, IMO), no amount of "design" will get you there. There isn't enough problem surface area to eliminate, which is where the value gets created. Design is still killing it in a lot of places. Slack and snapchat come to mind. People want to do those things really badly, and the entire value-add of their services can be described as "get the software out of the way". That's design.
killerdhmo 11y ago
Design is not how something looks. It's not pastel colors, and slick animations and cutesy UI. Design is intrinsically tied to function. Design is how you think about and solve a problem. I go back to Dieter Rams' 10 Principles of Good Design often. [0] I've highlighted a few key ones here: Good Design Makes a Product Useful : A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product while disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it. Good Design Makes A Product Understandable : It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product clearly express its function by making use of the user’s intuition. At best, it is self-explanatory. The post mentions this: 'For those of us who believe in the power of design thinking to solve human problems, and to a lesser extent in the power of markets to reward solutions when the interests of consumers and businesses are correctly aligned, this was invigorating news. " What problems are Carousel, Paper, or Jelly solving? He mentions theses question but I think he conflates pretty UI with good design when choosing these products as examples. Maybe that's a failure of the community who heralded these three as "design led apps"... but for me, these are not "well designed apps", they're pretty apps. How about Inbox, Dropbox (prime?), Periscope, Slack, IFTTT, the plethora of calendar replacements like Fantastical or Sunrise? There are so many apps that are functional as well as beautiful, why choose three objective failures? I think design is just as important today as it has been for the past few years. We just need to be more sensitive to what counts as good design and not be distracted by rounded rectangles, lightboxes, and animations. [0] http://www.archdaily.com/198583/dieter-rams-10-principles-of-%E2%80%9Cgood-design%E2%80%9D/ http://www.archdaily.com/198583/dieter-rams-10-principles-of...
- resu_nimda 11y ago
  Maybe that's a failure of the community who heralded these three as "design led apps"... but for me, these are not "well designed apps", they're pretty apps. That's exactly the point he's making. He chose these apps because they are high-profile products made by people who are ostensibly industry leaders in design, yet they are not well-designed. He's saying those apps don't solve any problems, they are mostly just "pretty," and he believes that is indicative of a worrying trend in the designer community.
anigbrowl 11y ago
The original title 'Designer Duds: Losing Our Seat at the Table' was more insightful and less clickbaity.
- no_flags 11y ago
  To me the original title is confusing. I wouldn't have known what was meant by "Designer Duds." Duds can be used to mean clothes, so it almost sounds like an article about designer clothing... haha.
mbesto 11y ago
Interesting note is how pedantic the author is about the marketing speak of the companies he's analyzing. I find this situation all too common in early stage products -- the copy associated with the product should be very concrete and not abstract. In later stages when your users do the "concrete talking" for you, then you can start using abstract.
pbreit 11y ago
I'm increasingly of the impression that the most important aspect of product conception is figuring out how it is going to obtain users. Without a distribution strategy you don't really have a product.
- JacobJans 11y ago
  Oddly, you can have absolutely no product at all, and still acheive wide 'distribution.' Think about that for a minute!
fungi 11y ago
In all my time building websites the over emphasis on design has had a negative impact on the majority of projects i have encountered. Non-design stake holders will obsess over design to the detriment of other less interesting issues, vendors are selected on the quality of mock up not their ability to deliver or technical expertise. Designer will go for gold and disregard best practice, what the user/product actually needs and what can be delivered on time and budget. But I (like most people) do not work for apple/dropbox/megacorp... so my anecdotes are not exactly relevant to the article.
ilaksh 11y ago
Popularity or usage isn't the same as merit. Redesigns of apps may be absolutely amazing and objectively better but that doesn't mean they will see a lot of adoption. People don't automatically adopt things that are better. People flock to apps or interfaces like birds. That behavior doesn't tell you which things are better. Of course, you can do a good UX design and good graphic design (both together, but they are two different aspects) and then use psychology and network effects to your advantage. Or just switch interfaces on a certain part of the users and then the rest may be jealous. Or other tricks. Marketers want you to believe something fancy and trendy and expensive is better and so people want that status. That isn't the same as being actually better.
killwhitey 11y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7677031 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7677031
joemaller1 11y ago
Regarding Carousel: it was only in the past few weeks that they finally got around to letting users exempt content. I really wanted to like Carousel. I've tried several times, but somewhere in my Dropbox are a mess of backed up websites, most of which aren't even mine. Scrolling through the very lovely Carousel views wasn't quite as rewarding as the demos when the photos I cared about were mixed up with stock photo thumbnails, web graphics and other junk. Dropbox bought cloud photo services SnapJoy and Loom, they've got good people. But the letting the ability to filter content fall by the wayside for years was a terrible failure of design and likely contributed to Carousel's foundering.
vinceguidry 11y ago
Design never had a seat at the table to begin with. The very idea of having design goals is largely anathema to most companies, they could never imagine actually letting a product dictate organizational proceedings. The goal is to make money, not make a product. To make money, you figure out where to jam a lever in, then pry as much cash flow as you can from it. This is why people are worried about SEO rather than UX. Design does not work as a competing voice in a cacaphony. It has to be the only voice, the main voice. Design is the table. That was what Jobs understood, that's what he built into his company, that's why Apple is still killing it.
- capex 11y ago
  The goal is to make a great product that makes money. Its not one or the other. Design by definition sits in the middle of business requirements and user needs. Otherwise its just art.
  - vinceguidry 11y ago
    A great product will make money. Otherwise it wasn't a great product. You can make money without a great product, but you can't have a great product that doesn't make money. Therefore design comes first, business requirements comes second, otherwise your offerings are mediocre to bad. Like my Nexus 5. There's this trend amongst big companies these days, particularly Google and Amazon, to come up with products that don't solve any of their customer's problems. The way these products happen is business requirements gain priority over design ideals. Someone looking at a spreadsheet looking for places to jam a lever in is choosing product direction.
    - danenania 11y ago
      This seems like a narrow definition. A product can be great in the sense of solving an important problem brilliantly but be ahead of its time or not well marketed or not economical to produce. To me, solving a problem really well is what makes a product great. Making money is certainly related, but it's a distinct challenge.
    - 11y ago
danenania 11y ago
I don't know. Aren't there are also plenty of recent successes that owe a lot of their success to good design? This feels like an attempt to slap on a grand narrative when it's really nothing more than "most new products fail". More relevant would be a study of the exceptional cases--successes--to see if there's a correlation with an improving standard of design.
gfodor 11y ago
I don't think it's fair to judge Paper too harshly based upon download metrics -- if I had to guess, Paper was an experiment designed to produce two things: a working prototype of a modernized Facebook UX as "something to point at" for further thinking, and tooling/processes that would allow the wider company to iterate towards that vision in their main app. The idea that Paper was intended to be a popular app, potentially outstripping the downloads, etc of the primary branded Facebook app seems far-fetched.
rohunati 11y ago
The service Magic is an instance of excellent design imo. It's scrappy, clever, simple, and most importantly, there is a very clear reason to use. I can't say the same about the many of the products he listed.
sbov 11y ago
Success is complicated. Expecting to do well because you champion design because that's what Steve Jobs did is like expecting to do well because you yell at your workers like Steve Jobs did.
LiweiZ 11y ago
Design is always among one of dimensions. Like others, commoditization and its limit in certain context could make it looks powerless. Even if so, when context changes, things will be on the other side of cycle again.
nubizus 11y ago
Design never loses. Write it down. Remember it. Simple truth is that in digital age, some computer operators with a little bit more of a visual culture are perceived as a designers. Nope. I am learning visual artistry from 6 years old. First started at school, then from old masters by serving them like a dog, then when digital era started i learned more about the medium, then learned about the business by risking it all, than learned about the psychology of perception, culture impact, age differentiation, then learned to think from user perspective, to measure reaction and get critical design data from it.... Now when i am almost 40 years old i can say that i can make a good design. Not only because of a talent, intuition or experience. Mostly because my life is a direct result of my design. And when i am designing i am a servant of people's needs. And i always learn. Write it down. Design always wins. Vanity always loses.
lotsofmangos 11y ago
"If you gathered some of the world’s best designers and gave them significant organizational support and all the resources they need, is an app which at best matches the functionality of bundled OS features from a few years ago what you’d expect?" If I read an article by a professional writer, I expect sentences I can parse.
peterarmstrong 11y ago
I don't think design is losing its seat at the table: most new apps are nothing but design. But it would be nice if pretentiousness lost its seat at the table.
Stratoscope 11y ago
Design should lose its seat at the table if it keeps chasing fads without thinking. Here's my latest pet peeve... Remember when the Android Gmail client first got the feature where you would drag the inbox or any list view down as if you were trying to scroll past the top of the page, and it would put a little colorful horizontal animation bar at the top of the screen while it checked for new messages, and then the messages would show up there? This was brilliant. After all, when a list of messages is sorted with the newest on top, if you want to see an even newer message you'll naturally try to look at what's above the topmost message. There's no real difference between scrolling somewhere in the midst of the list and scrolling when you're already at the top: if you drag the list down, you want to see something newer than what is currently displayed. Then Material Design came along and turned that unobtrusive animated bar at the top into a circle thing that follows you and spins as you drag down and then spins back when you let go. Unlike the animation bar which was displayed exactly where any new messages would appear, the circle jumps up and down saying "Look at me! Look at me!" In fact, the spinning circle obstructs your view of the messages in the list: "Don't look at those messages! I, the spinning circle, am much more important!" A far cry from the previous unobtrusive animated bar. But even though the visual appearance became annoying, at least the gesture still did the right thing. Part of what made this gesture work is the fact that it's non-destructive: Checking for new messages has no effect on the messages already in the list on your screen. But then things went very wrong. The Chrome team for Android saw this and said, "Wow! Dragging down is the new way to refresh. And it has such a cool animation. We'll make that gesture refresh in Chrome too!" So try to scroll to the top of a page and you'll get the spinning circle unless you stop just in time. If you're a very fast thinker, you may see the circle and realize you can cancel that pending reload by dragging back up a bit. (Don't let go!) This is pure stupidity. Reloading a web page is a destructive operation. You may end up with a whole new version of a dynamically generated page. It may blank out the entire page if it can't connect. This doesn't in any way resemble the nondestructive act of checking for new messages at the top of a Gmail list. It's something you're very likely to do by mistake - I've done it hundreds of times since this change rolled out. Refreshing a web page should be something you explicitly request, not something that happens to you when you were just trying to scroll to the top of the page and accidentally dragged a little too far. This chasing of fads is why I am fed up with Design.
NTDF9 11y ago
IMHO, what this article boils down to is that "Design" cannot be your product's key differentiator. Design doesn't really solve a "real problem" for the user. Design ONLY solves an important problem FOR THE COMPANY. It enables users to navigate the product the way the company wants them to. So does it deserve a seat at the table? Yes Does it deserve to be the king? Nope. Sorry. No really big problem solved.
Animats 11y ago
User interaction and industrial design are two different things. Here are some of the icons of industrial design: - The Electrolux Model 30 vacuum, 1937, by Lurelle Guild.[1] This is the iconic vacuum cleaner of the 1930s-1950s. The streamlining dates it. It was a good vacuum cleaner; many survive and parts and bags are available. The computer equivalent is Pac-Man in console form. - The Honeywell Round thermostat, 1953, by Henry Dreyfuss.[2] Still for sale, and the world's largest selling thermostat. The Nest is a clear derivative of the classic Round. - The Olivetti Lettera typewriter, 1963, by Marcello Nizzoli. This is a classic in portable typewriters. Olivetti in the 1960s produced some beautiful typewriters, calculators, and computers. They didn't keep up on the electronics side, but their machines looked great. The computer equivalent is the original Macintosh. Now, all of those were good, working products. There are other design icons that didn't. - The S1 locomotive, 1938, by Raymond Loewy.[4] This was a case mod for a steam locomotive, apparently based on spaceship designs from Buck Rogers comics. The link shows locomotives with and without the decorative sheet metal. As an add-on, it was a huge maintenance headache, making access to the working parts harder. It ushered in a whole era of "streamlined" steam locomotives, many of which lost their non-functional sheet metal during WWII. The software equivalent might be console video game user interfaces with lots of pretty but marginally functional shiny things. Loewy did better with the GG-1 electric locomotive. His main contribution was to insist on welded seams rather than rivets, providing a smooth exterior. This worked better on an electric locomotive, where all the important parts are inside, not outside. The software equivalent might be the Windows Aero theme. As it turned out, though, the future of locomotive design was to ignore aesthetics entirely. - The GP7 locomotive, 1952, by Richard Dilworth and John Markestein.[5] This is a classic for a completely different reason. It's an ugly locomotive. It was designed to be ugly. Dilworth: "I wanted to make a locomotive so ugly in appearance that no railroad would want it on its main line or anywhere near their headquarters. But they would want it out as far as possible in the back country, where it could really do useful work." The GP7 is a long narrow box with walkways on both sides and a bigger box for the cab. Everything important is easily accessible from doors all along those walkways. No need for ladders, no need for lifts, easy access for maintenance. The GP7 looked like no locomotive before it. Every Diesel freight locomotive since looks a lot like a GP7. Like Craigslist, it's brutally functional and works. [1] http://www.theelectroluxman.com/ http://www.theelectroluxman.com/ [2] http://yourhome.honeywell.com/home/Products/Thermostats/Manual-Non-Programmable/T87+Round.htm http://yourhome.honeywell.com/home/Products/Thermostats/Manu... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti_Lettera_32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti_Lettera_32 [4] http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2013/nov/05/raymond-loewy-timeless-designs-in-pictures http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2013/nov/05/... [5] http://www.american-rails.com/gp7.html http://www.american-rails.com/gp7.html
megablast 11y ago
Programming has been an important part of the world over the last 40 years, creating value in almost all aspects of life. But is programming losing a seat the table? I will look at 3 apps that were programmed by programmers, and have failed. This should be enough to prove to anyone that programming is on the way out, and the future is bleak for us all. This paragraph contains some more waffle that has nothing to do with anything. Thx for listening.
- Nemcue 11y ago
  Surely the programs a good programmer creates should be immediate successes? These are thought leader programmers!
chvid 11y ago
"Design is how it works". Maybe. But engineering and software development is also about "how it works". That Steve Jobs quote seems to have propelled a lot of people doing graphics into a broader field; if it is entirely fair and on whose expense I am not sure. Secondly. Graphical design today is much more a commidity than it used to be. Libraries such as Twitter Bootstrap puts professional high quality (albeit generic) graphical design into any boring old webapp. And for 90% it is good enough. Mind you the reason d'etre for most software developed today is a set of specific tasks not aestethics, not branding or marketing. Good aesthetics may be a nice touch to add and I found that it often helps boring internal IT-projects that they look good and conway an immediate sense of quality. Luckily today it is in within the reach of the average programmer.
- qznc 11y ago
  > "Design is how it works". Maybe. But engineering and software development is also about "how it works". Yes, engineering and software development include design. For example the Waterfall process explicitly has a "design phase". That phase is not only about the GUI, but about the internal architecture aka "how it works".

145 points by hakkasan 11y ago

tosh 11y ago

""" Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. """ — Steve Jobs

cbd1984 11y ago
Ironic, coming from a company with such a terrible approach to design. "You're holding it wrong."
- nextos 11y ago
  Or aluminium plus glass, such a brittle combination just for the sake of aesthetics.
  - raphael_l 11y ago
    The quote from Jobs gets thrown around pretty heavily, but I also think it is interpreted very narrow sometimes. For me, "(...) how it works" isn't just about functionality, but about "how it works on the user". Yeah, aluminium plus glass may be a brittle combination, but if people like it, it just works. And this isn't on the same level as the "how it looks", because that can be quite different. Facebook Paper for example. It looks good, it "works" well (in functionality and purpose of the app), but it just doesn't work well on the user, because the concept is all wrong.
    - pluma 11y ago
      It only "works" in the sense that users buy it because it's shiny. Unless you're saying the only point of the iPhone is that people buy it, that isn't sufficient.
      - raphael_l 11y ago
        It works for Apple and how they want it to work. That's why it is designed well. Design is very much depending on the intended outcome. Apple wants to sell devices -> design them so that they get bought (make them "shiny", as you put it ;)). Of course this is not the only point of what Apple wants, but it certainly is the biggest one.

RickS 11y ago

When your product is a solution without a real problem (which all the listed companies are, IMO), no amount of "design" will get you there. There isn't enough problem surface area to eliminate, which is where the value gets created. Design is still killing it in a lot of places. Slack and snapchat come to mind. People want to do those things really badly, and the entire value-add of their services can be described as "get the software out of the way". That's design.

killerdhmo 11y ago

Design is not how something looks. It's not pastel colors, and slick animations and cutesy UI. Design is intrinsically tied to function. Design is how you think about and solve a problem. I go back to Dieter Rams' 10 Principles of Good Design often. [0] I've highlighted a few key ones here: Good Design Makes a Product Useful : A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product while disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it. Good Design Makes A Product Understandable : It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product clearly express its function by making use of the user’s intuition. At best, it is self-explanatory. The post mentions this: 'For those of us who believe in the power of design thinking to solve human problems, and to a lesser extent in the power of markets to reward solutions when the interests of consumers and businesses are correctly aligned, this was invigorating news. " What problems are Carousel, Paper, or Jelly solving? He mentions theses question but I think he conflates pretty UI with good design when choosing these products as examples. Maybe that's a failure of the community who heralded these three as "design led apps"... but for me, these are not "well designed apps", they're pretty apps. How about Inbox, Dropbox (prime?), Periscope, Slack, IFTTT, the plethora of calendar replacements like Fantastical or Sunrise? There are so many apps that are functional as well as beautiful, why choose three objective failures? I think design is just as important today as it has been for the past few years. We just need to be more sensitive to what counts as good design and not be distracted by rounded rectangles, lightboxes, and animations. [0] http://www.archdaily.com/198583/dieter-rams-10-principles-of-%E2%80%9Cgood-design%E2%80%9D/ http://www.archdaily.com/198583/dieter-rams-10-principles-of...

resu_nimda 11y ago
Maybe that's a failure of the community who heralded these three as "design led apps"... but for me, these are not "well designed apps", they're pretty apps. That's exactly the point he's making. He chose these apps because they are high-profile products made by people who are ostensibly industry leaders in design, yet they are not well-designed. He's saying those apps don't solve any problems, they are mostly just "pretty," and he believes that is indicative of a worrying trend in the designer community.

anigbrowl 11y ago

The original title 'Designer Duds: Losing Our Seat at the Table' was more insightful and less clickbaity.

no_flags 11y ago
To me the original title is confusing. I wouldn't have known what was meant by "Designer Duds." Duds can be used to mean clothes, so it almost sounds like an article about designer clothing... haha.

mbesto 11y ago

Interesting note is how pedantic the author is about the marketing speak of the companies he's analyzing. I find this situation all too common in early stage products -- the copy associated with the product should be very concrete and not abstract. In later stages when your users do the "concrete talking" for you, then you can start using abstract.

pbreit 11y ago

I'm increasingly of the impression that the most important aspect of product conception is figuring out how it is going to obtain users. Without a distribution strategy you don't really have a product.

JacobJans 11y ago
Oddly, you can have absolutely no product at all, and still acheive wide 'distribution.' Think about that for a minute!

fungi 11y ago

In all my time building websites the over emphasis on design has had a negative impact on the majority of projects i have encountered. Non-design stake holders will obsess over design to the detriment of other less interesting issues, vendors are selected on the quality of mock up not their ability to deliver or technical expertise. Designer will go for gold and disregard best practice, what the user/product actually needs and what can be delivered on time and budget. But I (like most people) do not work for apple/dropbox/megacorp... so my anecdotes are not exactly relevant to the article.

ilaksh 11y ago

Popularity or usage isn't the same as merit. Redesigns of apps may be absolutely amazing and objectively better but that doesn't mean they will see a lot of adoption. People don't automatically adopt things that are better. People flock to apps or interfaces like birds. That behavior doesn't tell you which things are better. Of course, you can do a good UX design and good graphic design (both together, but they are two different aspects) and then use psychology and network effects to your advantage. Or just switch interfaces on a certain part of the users and then the rest may be jealous. Or other tricks. Marketers want you to believe something fancy and trendy and expensive is better and so people want that status. That isn't the same as being actually better.

killwhitey 11y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7677031 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7677031

joemaller1 11y ago

Regarding Carousel: it was only in the past few weeks that they finally got around to letting users exempt content. I really wanted to like Carousel. I've tried several times, but somewhere in my Dropbox are a mess of backed up websites, most of which aren't even mine. Scrolling through the very lovely Carousel views wasn't quite as rewarding as the demos when the photos I cared about were mixed up with stock photo thumbnails, web graphics and other junk. Dropbox bought cloud photo services SnapJoy and Loom, they've got good people. But the letting the ability to filter content fall by the wayside for years was a terrible failure of design and likely contributed to Carousel's foundering.

vinceguidry 11y ago

Design never had a seat at the table to begin with. The very idea of having design goals is largely anathema to most companies, they could never imagine actually letting a product dictate organizational proceedings. The goal is to make money, not make a product. To make money, you figure out where to jam a lever in, then pry as much cash flow as you can from it. This is why people are worried about SEO rather than UX. Design does not work as a competing voice in a cacaphony. It has to be the only voice, the main voice. Design is the table. That was what Jobs understood, that's what he built into his company, that's why Apple is still killing it.

capex 11y ago
The goal is to make a great product that makes money. Its not one or the other. Design by definition sits in the middle of business requirements and user needs. Otherwise its just art.
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  A great product will make money. Otherwise it wasn't a great product. You can make money without a great product, but you can't have a great product that doesn't make money. Therefore design comes first, business requirements comes second, otherwise your offerings are mediocre to bad. Like my Nexus 5. There's this trend amongst big companies these days, particularly Google and Amazon, to come up with products that don't solve any of their customer's problems. The way these products happen is business requirements gain priority over design ideals. Someone looking at a spreadsheet looking for places to jam a lever in is choosing product direction.
  - danenania 11y ago
    This seems like a narrow definition. A product can be great in the sense of solving an important problem brilliantly but be ahead of its time or not well marketed or not economical to produce. To me, solving a problem really well is what makes a product great. Making money is certainly related, but it's a distinct challenge.
  - 11y ago

danenania 11y ago

I don't know. Aren't there are also plenty of recent successes that owe a lot of their success to good design? This feels like an attempt to slap on a grand narrative when it's really nothing more than "most new products fail". More relevant would be a study of the exceptional cases--successes--to see if there's a correlation with an improving standard of design.

gfodor 11y ago

I don't think it's fair to judge Paper too harshly based upon download metrics -- if I had to guess, Paper was an experiment designed to produce two things: a working prototype of a modernized Facebook UX as "something to point at" for further thinking, and tooling/processes that would allow the wider company to iterate towards that vision in their main app. The idea that Paper was intended to be a popular app, potentially outstripping the downloads, etc of the primary branded Facebook app seems far-fetched.

rohunati 11y ago

The service Magic is an instance of excellent design imo. It's scrappy, clever, simple, and most importantly, there is a very clear reason to use. I can't say the same about the many of the products he listed.

sbov 11y ago

Success is complicated. Expecting to do well because you champion design because that's what Steve Jobs did is like expecting to do well because you yell at your workers like Steve Jobs did.

LiweiZ 11y ago

Design is always among one of dimensions. Like others, commoditization and its limit in certain context could make it looks powerless. Even if so, when context changes, things will be on the other side of cycle again.

nubizus 11y ago

Design never loses. Write it down. Remember it. Simple truth is that in digital age, some computer operators with a little bit more of a visual culture are perceived as a designers. Nope. I am learning visual artistry from 6 years old. First started at school, then from old masters by serving them like a dog, then when digital era started i learned more about the medium, then learned about the business by risking it all, than learned about the psychology of perception, culture impact, age differentiation, then learned to think from user perspective, to measure reaction and get critical design data from it.... Now when i am almost 40 years old i can say that i can make a good design. Not only because of a talent, intuition or experience. Mostly because my life is a direct result of my design. And when i am designing i am a servant of people's needs. And i always learn. Write it down. Design always wins. Vanity always loses.

lotsofmangos 11y ago

"If you gathered some of the world’s best designers and gave them significant organizational support and all the resources they need, is an app which at best matches the functionality of bundled OS features from a few years ago what you’d expect?" If I read an article by a professional writer, I expect sentences I can parse.

peterarmstrong 11y ago

I don't think design is losing its seat at the table: most new apps are nothing but design. But it would be nice if pretentiousness lost its seat at the table.

Stratoscope 11y ago

Design should lose its seat at the table if it keeps chasing fads without thinking. Here's my latest pet peeve... Remember when the Android Gmail client first got the feature where you would drag the inbox or any list view down as if you were trying to scroll past the top of the page, and it would put a little colorful horizontal animation bar at the top of the screen while it checked for new messages, and then the messages would show up there? This was brilliant. After all, when a list of messages is sorted with the newest on top, if you want to see an even newer message you'll naturally try to look at what's above the topmost message. There's no real difference between scrolling somewhere in the midst of the list and scrolling when you're already at the top: if you drag the list down, you want to see something newer than what is currently displayed. Then Material Design came along and turned that unobtrusive animated bar at the top into a circle thing that follows you and spins as you drag down and then spins back when you let go. Unlike the animation bar which was displayed exactly where any new messages would appear, the circle jumps up and down saying "Look at me! Look at me!" In fact, the spinning circle obstructs your view of the messages in the list: "Don't look at those messages! I, the spinning circle, am much more important!" A far cry from the previous unobtrusive animated bar. But even though the visual appearance became annoying, at least the gesture still did the right thing. Part of what made this gesture work is the fact that it's non-destructive: Checking for new messages has no effect on the messages already in the list on your screen. But then things went very wrong. The Chrome team for Android saw this and said, "Wow! Dragging down is the new way to refresh. And it has such a cool animation. We'll make that gesture refresh in Chrome too!" So try to scroll to the top of a page and you'll get the spinning circle unless you stop just in time. If you're a very fast thinker, you may see the circle and realize you can cancel that pending reload by dragging back up a bit. (Don't let go!) This is pure stupidity. Reloading a web page is a destructive operation. You may end up with a whole new version of a dynamically generated page. It may blank out the entire page if it can't connect. This doesn't in any way resemble the nondestructive act of checking for new messages at the top of a Gmail list. It's something you're very likely to do by mistake - I've done it hundreds of times since this change rolled out. Refreshing a web page should be something you explicitly request, not something that happens to you when you were just trying to scroll to the top of the page and accidentally dragged a little too far. This chasing of fads is why I am fed up with Design.

NTDF9 11y ago

IMHO, what this article boils down to is that "Design" cannot be your product's key differentiator. Design doesn't really solve a "real problem" for the user. Design ONLY solves an important problem FOR THE COMPANY. It enables users to navigate the product the way the company wants them to. So does it deserve a seat at the table? Yes Does it deserve to be the king? Nope. Sorry. No really big problem solved.

Animats 11y ago

User interaction and industrial design are two different things. Here are some of the icons of industrial design: - The Electrolux Model 30 vacuum, 1937, by Lurelle Guild.[1] This is the iconic vacuum cleaner of the 1930s-1950s. The streamlining dates it. It was a good vacuum cleaner; many survive and parts and bags are available. The computer equivalent is Pac-Man in console form. - The Honeywell Round thermostat, 1953, by Henry Dreyfuss.[2] Still for sale, and the world's largest selling thermostat. The Nest is a clear derivative of the classic Round. - The Olivetti Lettera typewriter, 1963, by Marcello Nizzoli. This is a classic in portable typewriters. Olivetti in the 1960s produced some beautiful typewriters, calculators, and computers. They didn't keep up on the electronics side, but their machines looked great. The computer equivalent is the original Macintosh. Now, all of those were good, working products. There are other design icons that didn't. - The S1 locomotive, 1938, by Raymond Loewy.[4] This was a case mod for a steam locomotive, apparently based on spaceship designs from Buck Rogers comics. The link shows locomotives with and without the decorative sheet metal. As an add-on, it was a huge maintenance headache, making access to the working parts harder. It ushered in a whole era of "streamlined" steam locomotives, many of which lost their non-functional sheet metal during WWII. The software equivalent might be console video game user interfaces with lots of pretty but marginally functional shiny things. Loewy did better with the GG-1 electric locomotive. His main contribution was to insist on welded seams rather than rivets, providing a smooth exterior. This worked better on an electric locomotive, where all the important parts are inside, not outside. The software equivalent might be the Windows Aero theme. As it turned out, though, the future of locomotive design was to ignore aesthetics entirely. - The GP7 locomotive, 1952, by Richard Dilworth and John Markestein.[5] This is a classic for a completely different reason. It's an ugly locomotive. It was designed to be ugly. Dilworth: "I wanted to make a locomotive so ugly in appearance that no railroad would want it on its main line or anywhere near their headquarters. But they would want it out as far as possible in the back country, where it could really do useful work." The GP7 is a long narrow box with walkways on both sides and a bigger box for the cab. Everything important is easily accessible from doors all along those walkways. No need for ladders, no need for lifts, easy access for maintenance. The GP7 looked like no locomotive before it. Every Diesel freight locomotive since looks a lot like a GP7. Like Craigslist, it's brutally functional and works. [1] http://www.theelectroluxman.com/ http://www.theelectroluxman.com/ [2] http://yourhome.honeywell.com/home/Products/Thermostats/Manual-Non-Programmable/T87+Round.htm http://yourhome.honeywell.com/home/Products/Thermostats/Manu... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti_Lettera_32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti_Lettera_32 [4] http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2013/nov/05/raymond-loewy-timeless-designs-in-pictures http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2013/nov/05/... [5] http://www.american-rails.com/gp7.html http://www.american-rails.com/gp7.html

megablast 11y ago

Programming has been an important part of the world over the last 40 years, creating value in almost all aspects of life. But is programming losing a seat the table? I will look at 3 apps that were programmed by programmers, and have failed. This should be enough to prove to anyone that programming is on the way out, and the future is bleak for us all. This paragraph contains some more waffle that has nothing to do with anything. Thx for listening.

Nemcue 11y ago
Surely the programs a good programmer creates should be immediate successes? These are thought leader programmers!

chvid 11y ago

"Design is how it works". Maybe. But engineering and software development is also about "how it works". That Steve Jobs quote seems to have propelled a lot of people doing graphics into a broader field; if it is entirely fair and on whose expense I am not sure. Secondly. Graphical design today is much more a commidity than it used to be. Libraries such as Twitter Bootstrap puts professional high quality (albeit generic) graphical design into any boring old webapp. And for 90% it is good enough. Mind you the reason d'etre for most software developed today is a set of specific tasks not aestethics, not branding or marketing. Good aesthetics may be a nice touch to add and I found that it often helps boring internal IT-projects that they look good and conway an immediate sense of quality. Luckily today it is in within the reach of the average programmer.

qznc 11y ago
> "Design is how it works". Maybe. But engineering and software development is also about "how it works". Yes, engineering and software development include design. For example the Waterfall process explicitly has a "design phase". That phase is not only about the GUI, but about the internal architecture aka "how it works".