Comment by davidkatz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidkatz | Hacker News Reader

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The whole argument here seems broken. The OPs main point seems to be:

"So what's wrong with [good design]? The problem is we judge books by their covers. We're more likely to pick the prettiest object up first."

Why would you value a shortcut for assessing quality more than an actual improvement in quality? The fact that design is better is a huge all around win for everyone. Does it make every product good? Of course not, but so what?

Not too long ago, you could perhaps have measured the quality of a house by the question: 'does it have running water?'. If the answer was yes, you could assume someone put a lot of effort into the house, and that everything else about it was likely to be better too. Today, all houses have running water. Is that a bad thing? That would be an absurd claim to make. The fact that all houses (even the relatively bad ones) have running water is a huge win.

The point is that running water makes any house better, and good design makes any product better. Claiming that better design is a problem is not something I can make any sense of.

>Why would you value a shortcut for assessing quality more than an actual improvement in quality? The fact that design is better is a huge all around win for everyone.

I don't think that's the interesting point. The problem is that the focus on design means that developers spend too much effort on design and not enough on quality. We build tools to make design easier rather than making quality easier for developers, result in a market full of worse software that only appears better on first impression.

In some sense it's an evolutionary necessity: When people make choices based on eye candy, suppliers who provide better eye candy make more sales, and the rational supplier then spends more effort making better eye candy and some of that effort comes out of what could have made a better product in other ways.

But in theory, if there was a way to throw a wrench into that dynamic -- a better, faster, easier way for users to evaluate overall quality rather than relying on superficial aspects of design quality -- then we should welcome it (or work to create it, if you're so inclined).

The article clearly laments the fact that you can't use design anymore as a quick quality shortcut, and that's the point I attacked.

Your point seems to be:

"The problem is that the focus on design means that developers spend too much effort on design and not enough on quality. We build tools to make design easier rather than making quality easier for developers..."

To that I would say, design is one aspect of quality, and spending effort on it is spending effort on quality. What would it mean to make quality easier for developers, beyond making better tools for design, development, testing, market validation, support, and so forth? All of these tools exist and new tools are consistently released.

In fact, I think the surge in attention to design can largely be seen as a 'catching up effect'. For many years, all the other kids in the party got a lot of attention, now design is getting attention as well, but I'm not at all sure it's getting disproportionate attention.

Finally, new shortcuts for assessing quality always exist, and they're almost by definition at the cutting edge of their field. Maybe that's not 'pretty looks' anymore, and that's ok. Other areas of rare craftsmanship are still alive and kicking - communication quality is a good example. Lousy copy on pretty pixels abound.

>design is one aspect of quality, and spending effort on it is spending effort on quality.

I don't mean to say that making something beautiful is not worth doing, but rather that other things are important too.

>What would it mean to make quality easier for developers, beyond making better tools for design, development, testing, market validation, support, and so forth? All of these tools exist and new tools are consistently released.

That's pretty much what I mean. And sure, they exist, but it's a trade off. If we spend more effort on improving UX tools, we spend less time improving other tools, because there are finite resources. The key is to find the right balance, and the argument can be made that the pendulum is now swinging too far toward superficial design considerations as a result of that being (over-)used by users in choosing between products. But certainly reasonable people can disagree.

I understand. Generally, we should aim to build tools that address the greatest gaps in quality. You might say that design is currently not the most important gap to address, and that may be, although it hasn't been my experience. Although design has been getting a lot of attention in recent years, the tools for design are still very much in their infancy.

If you contrast the availability of design tools to say, development tools, I'm pretty sure you'll agree there's a huge gap there. I grant that there has been a recent surge in UX/sketching tools, but so many areas of design are still left untouched. Recently, for example, I was very excited by discovering http://macrabbit.com/slicy/ and http://iconfactory.com/software/xscope - both solve problems many designers have, and they both make my designer life so much easier.

Perhaps to return to your original point - the world is full of people who follow trends blindly. I run an app development company, and if I had a nickel for every time someone asked me to build an app that no one needs, well, you know the end of that saying. Still, if you're going to follow trends without good thinking, 'invest in design' is by far not the worst you could follow.

I think it turns on the distinction a lot of people have been pointing out between design as the superficial appearance of the app in the first fifteen minutes of use, and design as something that goes deep into the stack and brings everything together into something beautiful.

What you're talking about is more like the second kind, and I agree that the tools to do that are sorely lacking.

The problem as I see it is that the world has been building tools that allow a college freshman to build a superficially professional-looking app in a month (which often turns out to be unusable crap upon close inspection), rather than tools that allow a team of seasoned professionals to build something awe-inspiring in six months instead of two years. Because the current market allows you to get your dollar from millions of suckers selling the superficially pretty junk before they realize what they paid for.

To extend the development tools analogy, it's the UX equivalent of having loosed Visual Basic onto the world and thousands of noobs are happily churning out Visual Basic software, when what we really need is the C family and its toolchain. So the hope is that the incentives can be to produce that rather than just iterating onto the next version of UX VB.

Perhaps you're right, but I haven't come across much superficially pretty junk. Any high profile examples come to mind?

Most of Zynga's products come to mind. Mindless crap designed to be attractive and psychologically addictive without teaching the user anything or providing any intellectual stimulation.

I wouldn't expect many high profile examples though. By its nature junk tends to have a short shelf-life, last years junk just gets replaced with this year's junk.

I'm still not sure there's a real pattern here, beyond the always present 'make a quick buck' style of business, which has probably been around since business was discovered. Good discussion though. Thanks. You on twitter?

> We build tools to make design easier rather than making quality easier for developers, result in a market full of worse software that only appears better on first impression.

This is especially noticeable when you distinguish visual design from functional design. Developers seem to be focusing increasingly on the former at the expense of the latter, and it's giving us a lot of software that looks wonderful as a static image, but is really frustrating to use and nearly impossible to customize.

The problem is that good design actually increases the desirability of a lousy product proportionately more.

Suppose when you went to the supermarket every, say, can-opener looked perfect, like it was cast out of solid stainless steel. If some were actually much better quality than others - if some would last a week and some ten years - then you'd be in problematic situation. Our judgement depends on, as the article says, to an extent judging a book by its cover. If all covers are amazing, the world is indeed nicer looking but we are in a bit of a quandary.

I understand the point, but I'm not convinced. Looks factor into quality, and are not merely an indicator of it. If I can have a market trend which increases quality across the board, I fail to see that that can be a bad thing because it took away a shortcut for assessing quality. It just means we need new shortcuts.

If you're interested in the durability of a can opener, the weight of the material sounds like a good candidate.

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