6 ms·

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

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.
- killerdhmo 11y ago
  Right, but my point is that who designated these as "design leaders"? One good app in the past? Is a bad app sufficient to strip them of the title? What makes Medium or Path design led? Can I just state that my app is design led? >> "It’s now 2014, and I doubt seriously whether I’m alone in feeling a sense of anxiety about how “design” is using its seat at the table." Why? Look at all the other amazing work that others are doing. Slack is a great call out by RickS. Design has never been more relevant. I'm more optimistic about the role of design today than ever before.
  - wodenokoto 11y ago
    Partly, yes. You can just state that your app is design led. A large part of medium's selling point has been superior design. Paper sole existence is an original, better interface to Facebook. Design, as in usability has always been important. The question is, who is able to provide this? Are people who studied design at school good at providing usable designs or pretty designs? One of the major problems in this debate is that a designers role is sometimes the person who comes in at the end and paints everything to look pretty, and sometimes it's a person who designs the entire user experience. The danger is if too many desginers can only make it look pretty then management might start to rely on engineers ability to design instead of having an actual, dedicated focus on the design.
    - zatkin 11y ago
      UX designers would be the ones to deal with user experience. Engineers would be the ones to develop the product's functionality. What would be the kind of title for someone who "comes in at the end and paints everything to look pretty"?
      - jamesdelaneyie 11y ago
        UI Designer or Visual Designer.
jasonmp85 11y ago
> Design is intrinsically tied to function. Like how this designer chose to post on Quora, where the fixed-width header means when I hit page-down on my keyboard, I miss the first two lines of text on the next page?
- onli 11y ago
  Yeah. That article is really nice and is making good points. But it is really strange to read that on Quora of all places, the site that had to resort to hiding answers just to force people to sign up, whose purpose and business model seems completely unclear ("the startup that missed the chance to be bought"), and which is not really a leader in design as well (though I don't think its core is badly done), apart in using tricks to stimulate initial participation. That is not even off-topic, he mentions it in the article and links to an answer (https://www.quora.com/Why-should-or-shouldnt-you-migrate-your-blog-to-Quora/answer/Mills-Baker https://www.quora.com/Why-should-or-shouldnt-you-migrate-you...) on why people should move content from Blogs to Quora, as a counter example to Medium. But that answer is not convincing at all, there is not much in Quora that makes it more likely old content gets seen, nothing at least that beats Google's long tail for blog articles, notwithstanding that the linked article is not new. I have a blog, it is not popular, but I get so many visitors via Google on old articles that I could be quite happy about that, if it were anything to be happy about.
- manigandham 11y ago
  Sadly Quora has only gotten worse in design (in all forms) over the years.
- killwhitey 11y ago
  He also posted it on his tumblr and medium, if you'd prefer to read it there. http://metaismurder.com/post/84199748362/designer-duds-losing-our-seat-at-the-table http://metaismurder.com/post/84199748362/designer-duds-losin... https://medium.com/@millsbaker/designer-duds-f59c964513ef https://medium.com/@millsbaker/designer-duds-f59c964513ef
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  I'm pretty sure this isn't due to the header. I've experienced sites that have the same problem, and I've also experienced sites that have a fixed header but still manage to handle scrolling appropriately.
ryanSrich 11y ago
> Design is not how something looks You're right. But it certainly includes how it looks. You can't silo off certain aspects of interaction between products and users. The visual aesthetics of a product are subjectively at the front of the line when it comes to design. Design is a "why not both" profession. You can't have a pretty looking site that doesn't function properly and still have a great product. You also can't have a functioning site that looks like shit and still have a great product. You need all aspects of design; visual, experience, functionality, etc. to come together at the same time to deliver a great product to the end user.
- seanmcdirmid 11y ago
  Many companies with lots of designers will actually have designers that specialize in visual (or animation, or even sound) as well as interaction (who might not be trained in visuals at all). My wife, for instance, has a graphic design background, so is perfectly capable of visual design work, but focuses on interaction design (aka usability), and even here one can specialize in things like different kinds of input (touch, gesture, speech). Her old boss (and my former colleague) was a visual designer who specialized in...color...and was quite good at that. And then you have jack of all trade web designers that do a bit of visual, a bit of interaction, a bit of CSS/Javascript, and maybe even SEO. And then industrial, material, packaging, ..., designers, of course. Designers are really analogous programmers in the sense that there are tons of specializations and skills to consider from within. I personally self identify as a programming language designer...which is a completely different rabbit hole.
- phkahler 11y ago
  >> Design is not how something looks > You're right. But it certainly includes how it looks. I hate to use this example because it was so hyped at the time but... Pinch-zoom is awesome functionality and has NO look, only function and feel. There is no visible UI, you just grab the image/map with 2 fingers and resize it. It's one of the best UI concepts in ages. The only thing it may not be is discoverable. This is what IMO sets Apple apart - they want you to interact with your stuff, not their app. Microsoft basically builds an industrial control panel where you push buttons to get something to happen to your stuff. The difference can be stunning when done correctly and has little to do with looks, but rather how it works.
atarian 11y ago
TL;DR design != aesthetics and most "design-led" startups are actually "aesthetically-led"
amagumori 11y ago
imho, design is made or broken on the initial conditions. first, what is it you've chosen to concern yourself with? if you chose wrong, the design might just never be good.
michaelpinto 11y ago
Look-and-feel is very much a part of design, and that includes both industrial design and interface design (in addition to other related fields like fashion or graphic design). So Dieter Rams minimalism is very much a visual language and owes a great deal to art deco and the bauhaus. But design doesn't always have to be useful. For example the work that a game designer does is all about distraction and entertainment, and has little to do with making things understandable. In fact game design is about creating problems for people more than anything else at times. I'd also be wary of the fashion to bash fashion and the decorative arts: A good knowledge of the decorative arts and art history are critical if you want to be a good designer. And I would also add to that a good designer should be a well rounded person as well: You should know a little bit about theater, literature, music and many other things. The real failure I see is that many lesser engineers think that they can sprinkle some design on what they're doing. Another sin I see is that while hacker culture is a great thing, design isn't something that you can learn in 48 hours from courseware. In fact I've spent my entire career doing design and I'm still learning new things every day.
crdb 11y ago
Reading your comment, I immediately thought of: "Their campaigns find favour in cocktail parties in New York, San Francisco and London but are taken less seriously in Chicago. In the days when I specialized in posh campaigns for the New Yorker, I was the hero of this coterie, but when I graduated to advertising in mass media and wrote a book that extolled the value of research, I became its devil. I comfort myself with the idea that I've sold more merchandise than all of them put together." "A few years ago, Harry McMahan drew attention to the kind of commercials which were winning the famous Clio awards for creativity: [...] of 81 television classics picked by the Clio festival in the previous year, 36 of the agencies involved had either lost the account or gone out of business." - Ogilvy on Advertising, David Ogilvy
- jamesdelaneyie 11y ago
  Great points – Great book — Great man
eva1984 11y ago
>> Good Design Makes a Product Useful A product will be useful if it is needed, if it is poorly designed, like craiglist. I would say good design makes a product more pleasant and relatable, however, the usability of a product still defines by its core functionality.
- blumkvist 11y ago
  You simply don't get it. Read the post you replied to again and again and again. "Design is not how something looks". Think about that for a second. Or a week. If you are not convinced, paste that quote in google and add "Steve Jobs". Yeah, that's right. He said it.
collyw 11y ago
Ask on many sites about examples of good design (including here), and you get pointed to dribble. I do agree with you however. I (usually try to) "design" my software before I start writing it (unlike the "agile / schemaless/ latest-fad" developers). It works well for me. Usually saves a lot of work in the medium to long term. The problem is that design is an ambiguous word that can cover every aspect of building an application. We need to be able to differentiate between "pretty looking design" and a "well architected, thought through database / software design", and all of the "design" elements in between.
- joeyspn 11y ago
  Whoever points you to dribbble as a source of good design is not a designer, or is a designer with a narrow scope. A designer will point you to things like Red Dot [0], or many of the schools of Design Thinking that have shaped our modern world. I also design software. I sketch the UI and architect the software myself before passing the ideas and engaging software engineers. Maybe I'm lucky cos I had my hours of both Engineering and Design at college. And IMHO this is how designers in the software industry should be: driving the product from conception to build, like in the Industrial Design world. In other words: Industrial Designer = Arts + Engineering (Physics, Math, Materials, CAD/CAE) Software Designer = Arts + Engineering (Math, Programming, Design Tooling/IDE's) This approach to design is holistic. That's the big difference I see, Industrial Designers have strong engineering background and know "how it works" [1] internally, they pick the materials and do the math, and even have estimations of the production costs beforehand. Apple is driven by this kind of Designers. Designers in the software industry usually are not trained to understand how the software works internally, let alone making costs estimations. [0] http://en.red-dot.org/ http://en.red-dot.org/ [1] http://is.gd/3RPHhE http://is.gd/3RPHhE

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.

killerdhmo 11y ago
Right, but my point is that who designated these as "design leaders"? One good app in the past? Is a bad app sufficient to strip them of the title? What makes Medium or Path design led? Can I just state that my app is design led? >> "It’s now 2014, and I doubt seriously whether I’m alone in feeling a sense of anxiety about how “design” is using its seat at the table." Why? Look at all the other amazing work that others are doing. Slack is a great call out by RickS. Design has never been more relevant. I'm more optimistic about the role of design today than ever before.
- wodenokoto 11y ago
  Partly, yes. You can just state that your app is design led. A large part of medium's selling point has been superior design. Paper sole existence is an original, better interface to Facebook. Design, as in usability has always been important. The question is, who is able to provide this? Are people who studied design at school good at providing usable designs or pretty designs? One of the major problems in this debate is that a designers role is sometimes the person who comes in at the end and paints everything to look pretty, and sometimes it's a person who designs the entire user experience. The danger is if too many desginers can only make it look pretty then management might start to rely on engineers ability to design instead of having an actual, dedicated focus on the design.
  - zatkin 11y ago
    UX designers would be the ones to deal with user experience. Engineers would be the ones to develop the product's functionality. What would be the kind of title for someone who "comes in at the end and paints everything to look pretty"?
    - jamesdelaneyie 11y ago
      UI Designer or Visual Designer.

jasonmp85 11y ago

> Design is intrinsically tied to function. Like how this designer chose to post on Quora, where the fixed-width header means when I hit page-down on my keyboard, I miss the first two lines of text on the next page?

onli 11y ago
Yeah. That article is really nice and is making good points. But it is really strange to read that on Quora of all places, the site that had to resort to hiding answers just to force people to sign up, whose purpose and business model seems completely unclear ("the startup that missed the chance to be bought"), and which is not really a leader in design as well (though I don't think its core is badly done), apart in using tricks to stimulate initial participation. That is not even off-topic, he mentions it in the article and links to an answer (https://www.quora.com/Why-should-or-shouldnt-you-migrate-your-blog-to-Quora/answer/Mills-Baker https://www.quora.com/Why-should-or-shouldnt-you-migrate-you...) on why people should move content from Blogs to Quora, as a counter example to Medium. But that answer is not convincing at all, there is not much in Quora that makes it more likely old content gets seen, nothing at least that beats Google's long tail for blog articles, notwithstanding that the linked article is not new. I have a blog, it is not popular, but I get so many visitors via Google on old articles that I could be quite happy about that, if it were anything to be happy about.
manigandham 11y ago
Sadly Quora has only gotten worse in design (in all forms) over the years.
killwhitey 11y ago
He also posted it on his tumblr and medium, if you'd prefer to read it there. http://metaismurder.com/post/84199748362/designer-duds-losing-our-seat-at-the-table http://metaismurder.com/post/84199748362/designer-duds-losin... https://medium.com/@millsbaker/designer-duds-f59c964513ef https://medium.com/@millsbaker/designer-duds-f59c964513ef
thaumasiotes 11y ago
I'm pretty sure this isn't due to the header. I've experienced sites that have the same problem, and I've also experienced sites that have a fixed header but still manage to handle scrolling appropriately.

ryanSrich 11y ago

> Design is not how something looks You're right. But it certainly includes how it looks. You can't silo off certain aspects of interaction between products and users. The visual aesthetics of a product are subjectively at the front of the line when it comes to design. Design is a "why not both" profession. You can't have a pretty looking site that doesn't function properly and still have a great product. You also can't have a functioning site that looks like shit and still have a great product. You need all aspects of design; visual, experience, functionality, etc. to come together at the same time to deliver a great product to the end user.

seanmcdirmid 11y ago
Many companies with lots of designers will actually have designers that specialize in visual (or animation, or even sound) as well as interaction (who might not be trained in visuals at all). My wife, for instance, has a graphic design background, so is perfectly capable of visual design work, but focuses on interaction design (aka usability), and even here one can specialize in things like different kinds of input (touch, gesture, speech). Her old boss (and my former colleague) was a visual designer who specialized in...color...and was quite good at that. And then you have jack of all trade web designers that do a bit of visual, a bit of interaction, a bit of CSS/Javascript, and maybe even SEO. And then industrial, material, packaging, ..., designers, of course. Designers are really analogous programmers in the sense that there are tons of specializations and skills to consider from within. I personally self identify as a programming language designer...which is a completely different rabbit hole.
phkahler 11y ago
>> Design is not how something looks > You're right. But it certainly includes how it looks. I hate to use this example because it was so hyped at the time but... Pinch-zoom is awesome functionality and has NO look, only function and feel. There is no visible UI, you just grab the image/map with 2 fingers and resize it. It's one of the best UI concepts in ages. The only thing it may not be is discoverable. This is what IMO sets Apple apart - they want you to interact with your stuff, not their app. Microsoft basically builds an industrial control panel where you push buttons to get something to happen to your stuff. The difference can be stunning when done correctly and has little to do with looks, but rather how it works.

atarian 11y ago

TL;DR design != aesthetics and most "design-led" startups are actually "aesthetically-led"

amagumori 11y ago

imho, design is made or broken on the initial conditions. first, what is it you've chosen to concern yourself with? if you chose wrong, the design might just never be good.

michaelpinto 11y ago

Look-and-feel is very much a part of design, and that includes both industrial design and interface design (in addition to other related fields like fashion or graphic design). So Dieter Rams minimalism is very much a visual language and owes a great deal to art deco and the bauhaus. But design doesn't always have to be useful. For example the work that a game designer does is all about distraction and entertainment, and has little to do with making things understandable. In fact game design is about creating problems for people more than anything else at times. I'd also be wary of the fashion to bash fashion and the decorative arts: A good knowledge of the decorative arts and art history are critical if you want to be a good designer. And I would also add to that a good designer should be a well rounded person as well: You should know a little bit about theater, literature, music and many other things. The real failure I see is that many lesser engineers think that they can sprinkle some design on what they're doing. Another sin I see is that while hacker culture is a great thing, design isn't something that you can learn in 48 hours from courseware. In fact I've spent my entire career doing design and I'm still learning new things every day.

crdb 11y ago

Reading your comment, I immediately thought of: "Their campaigns find favour in cocktail parties in New York, San Francisco and London but are taken less seriously in Chicago. In the days when I specialized in posh campaigns for the New Yorker, I was the hero of this coterie, but when I graduated to advertising in mass media and wrote a book that extolled the value of research, I became its devil. I comfort myself with the idea that I've sold more merchandise than all of them put together." "A few years ago, Harry McMahan drew attention to the kind of commercials which were winning the famous Clio awards for creativity: [...] of 81 television classics picked by the Clio festival in the previous year, 36 of the agencies involved had either lost the account or gone out of business." - Ogilvy on Advertising, David Ogilvy

jamesdelaneyie 11y ago
Great points – Great book — Great man

eva1984 11y ago

>> Good Design Makes a Product Useful A product will be useful if it is needed, if it is poorly designed, like craiglist. I would say good design makes a product more pleasant and relatable, however, the usability of a product still defines by its core functionality.

blumkvist 11y ago
You simply don't get it. Read the post you replied to again and again and again. "Design is not how something looks". Think about that for a second. Or a week. If you are not convinced, paste that quote in google and add "Steve Jobs". Yeah, that's right. He said it.

collyw 11y ago

Ask on many sites about examples of good design (including here), and you get pointed to dribble. I do agree with you however. I (usually try to) "design" my software before I start writing it (unlike the "agile / schemaless/ latest-fad" developers). It works well for me. Usually saves a lot of work in the medium to long term. The problem is that design is an ambiguous word that can cover every aspect of building an application. We need to be able to differentiate between "pretty looking design" and a "well architected, thought through database / software design", and all of the "design" elements in between.

joeyspn 11y ago
Whoever points you to dribbble as a source of good design is not a designer, or is a designer with a narrow scope. A designer will point you to things like Red Dot [0], or many of the schools of Design Thinking that have shaped our modern world. I also design software. I sketch the UI and architect the software myself before passing the ideas and engaging software engineers. Maybe I'm lucky cos I had my hours of both Engineering and Design at college. And IMHO this is how designers in the software industry should be: driving the product from conception to build, like in the Industrial Design world. In other words: Industrial Designer = Arts + Engineering (Physics, Math, Materials, CAD/CAE) Software Designer = Arts + Engineering (Math, Programming, Design Tooling/IDE's) This approach to design is holistic. That's the big difference I see, Industrial Designers have strong engineering background and know "how it works" [1] internally, they pick the materials and do the math, and even have estimations of the production costs beforehand. Apple is driven by this kind of Designers. Designers in the software industry usually are not trained to understand how the software works internally, let alone making costs estimations. [0] http://en.red-dot.org/ http://en.red-dot.org/ [1] http://is.gd/3RPHhE http://is.gd/3RPHhE