Don’t listen to Le Corbusier or Jakob Nielsen

I can appreciate the author's plea against data being used as prescriptive recommendations for interface design, but I feel like her analogy to Le Corbusier is strained.

I'll admit to having gone through a "Bauhaus" phase many years ago (a single Le Corbusier lounge is all that remains from it), but I don't think that her criticisms of Le Corbusier's architecture are particularly well-suited to her thesis. I can buy that there has been a growing consensus since his death that his ideas for "new urbanism" are cold and uncomfortable, but they are not the result of "prescriptive data"; they are the result of his worldview and what he believed the purpose of architecture was.

I don't necessarily agree with his view in that regard, but it doesn't strike me as any different than a user interface designer arbitrarily deciding where buttons go based on what they think is correct.

"Fuck usability testing, all your software needs is love."

Pointless yammering about how humans are irrational and therefore, things that humans use and/or make should be irrational too.

Only someone of the software ilk could read Le Corbusier as a literal and relevant how-to guide. Le Corbusier is simply part of architecture culture. An architect who does not read Le Corbusier is illiterate. An engineer who does not read Thomas Edison just saved themselves a lot of time.

By read, I do not mean follow blindly.

Architecture is a cultural practice like music or poetry, or writing. Software design is different. Perhaps there is some mass of historically relevant cultural knowledge in interface design. In engineering, however, old ideas can be discarded.

All this cross disciplinary thinking will lead us to a new Dark Ages of spectacular confusion.

Thoughtful piece, although it could have been delivered without calling out folks in the title. I assume the author, Le Corbusier and Neilsen all want the best for themselves and users.

Maybe I'm a sap.