UX is 90% Desirability | Hacker News Reader

UX is 90% Desirability

getfinch.com

40 pointsrevorad6 comments

I'm usually not a grinch -- and I'm currently in a good mood. But this article is just wrong, inside out.

How many times do we (Apple users who have no particular allegiances) have to say this: Apple products aren't winning because they're 'desirable'. I'm taking 'desirable' to mean socially hip, because otherwise this whole article amounts to saying someone likes something because it's likable. Duh.

Apple UX is dominating because they understand what users expect to happen when they interact with the device. The red herring that distracts most of the (good and bad) criticism of Apple is the 'look'. The aesthetic design is the icing on the cake, and quite frankly it intersects with the usability a lot, but it's not why the consumer is switching to Apple.

I'm not a fan boy. Every day I wish some other company would come out with a quality and usable laptop that fits my life so I don't have to advertise my allegiance to Apple (the exterior) to the pubic. I have an interest in NOT buying Apple. Similar to a lot of hipsters, I have weird neuroses about being judged in public for having something popular. Yet hipsters are still on their Macs. There's got to be something else at work besides the Apple brand, because believe me, these things are too popular to be hip at this point.

Does it piss me off that a 19-year-old girl has a MacBook Pro for Facebook and Word, while I make due with MacBook for much more demanding tasks? Yes. I agree with people who say that many users are paying too much for things they don't need. But I'd argue that a person who just doesn't want to be hassled is at least justified in paying the up-front markup price of an Apple machine.

Being good at design doesn't mean it looks pretty. It means you thought out your product enough to make users have an easy time. And the days of releasing crap stuff out to ignorant consumer and huge inefficient businesses is dwindling for a number of societal reasons including a younger workforce, open source, the success of web-based smaller business, and so on.

I have no problem with you using a home-built linux box or anything you feel comfortable with. In fact, if you can do that easily and enjoy it, that's a great situation and you probably saved money. But I can't recommend to anyone I know to buy a Windows machine: It's simply an inferior product with fewer advantages.

If that offends you, I'm sorry. But look at the stats: Do you really think the tremendous amount of consumer Apple growth is simply due to its hip appeal? If that's the case, every person I see outside an office building is hip at this point.

Phew. Sorry for the rant.

> It's simply an inferior product with fewer advantages.

As someone who splits their time fairly evenly between OS X, Windows, and Linux (and a little BSD for funsies), I cannot disagree with this statement more. They all suck. Every OS has crippling flaws that would drive me away if it weren't for the fact that they all have flaws, and they all have advantages, and none is inferior or superior overall.

Also: quit worrying about what people think of you for your choice of hardware/software. Worrying that people will think your purchases are trend-driven and so considering options that are less than optimal for you personally is every bit as bad as being a fanboy, it's the exact same fallacies at play.

1) I agree with what you're saying about them all having flaws. But I merely said Windows machines are inferior. I never said Mac machines are absolutely ideal.

2) The worrying about what people think part was said sort of tongue in cheek. Hyperbole to demonstrate a point ;) I'm not about to actually make decisions based off of this observation.

I understand what you say, but unfortunately it's not correct. We believe that our decisions are 100% analytical and conscious, the result of a thinking process, but reality is that our old and middle brains are almost always in charge and deeply influence our decisional process. For a primer I suggest "Neuro web design", you can find it on Amazon, it's pretty short and has a generic approach to the matter. Anyway, desirability and in general influencing a potential customer shouldn't be thought as some kind of cheating, it's completely natural and I dare say honest. Especially because a product that is badly designed is unlikely to influence us (and it's clearly written in the article). You're probably particularly interested in the concept of Personas and mental models.

Desirability amounts to only instant gratification at best. Once you commit to even getting on a path of development;

If your base is to only attract at first glance, you'll probably going to damage the clarity and depth of your user-experience.

"If I am correct, the use of a product based on modelessness and monotony would soon become so habitual as to be nearly addictive, leading to a user population devoted to and loyal to the product."

- Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface

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